Police Do Not Need a Warrant to Subpoena Tweets

[HardOCP News]

Thinking about tweeting something personal, private or criminal (where you buried the body)? You might want to rethink that now the courts have ruled that no warrant is needed to subpoena your tweets.

The widely believed (though mistaken) notion that any disclosure of a user's information would first be requested from the user and require approval by the user is understandable, but wrong. While the Fourth Amendment provides protection for our physical homes, we do not have a physical "home" on the Internet. What an Internet user simply has is a network account consisting of a block of computer storage that is owned by a network service provider. As a user, we may think that storage space to be like a "virtual home," and with that strong privacy protection similar to our physical homes. However, that "home" is a block of ones and zeroes stored somewhere on someone's computer. As a consequence, some of our most private information is sent to third parties and held far away on remote network servers. A Twitter user may think that the same "home" principle may be applied to their Twitter account. When in reality the user is sending information to the third party, Twitter.

 

[FragMagnet]

Interesting, so that would include any and all "Cloud" storage schemes !

 

[Dreknaught]

Maybe people will finally realize that putting their whole lives online is a bad idea. Drives me nuts to see all these people post every last detail of their daily lives without a care in the world.... until it inconveniences them, then it's all about how they want privacy.

I spent my formative years hearing people worry about Big Brother spying on everything we do. Now most people I know provide private enterprises with up to the minute briefs of their activities.

Funny ole world.

 

[ballistic90]

Well, isn't the idea of using Twitter is to broadcast yourself to the internet? How can you expect them to be private.

So everyone, stop with the "Got secret at 12th and main st don't tell any1 #WhereIBuriedTheBody"

 

[sfsuphysics]

Yeah, I don't understand twitter at all, it's not like facebook where you can have private accounts is it? So allowing the police to get them is more like "hey look here's all this information out for everyone to see, lets just grab a copy"

 

[dr.stevil]

Yeah, I don't understand twitter at all, it's not like facebook where you can have private accounts is it? So allowing the police to get them is more like "hey look here's all this information out for everyone to see, lets just grab a copy"

Exactly. ANYONE can view someones tweets.... account or not.

This ruling seems more like a 'duh' than anything. Although, it seems to me that they'd still have to prove that the person in question actually tweeted it.

 

[Monkey God]

I don't see a problem with this. This is like speaking in public, and getting pissed off if someone hands a recording to the cops. Seriously?

 

[Ur_Mom]

I don't get the whole "Home" thing they are talking about. The Internet, by definition is a group of networks, networked together. The owners can be anonymous or public or private, but they are NOT yours. Not your home, unless you have an internal network (which may or may not be attached or available on the Internet). So, unless you live out of hotels, motels, brothels, B&B's, the "Home" analogy doesn't even come close.

You can store something online, but there is no assumption that it is yours or private. You are renting storage space on a public network. Once you have it there, you have some privacy, but like a hotel - it isn't yours. It is available for inspection or revocation if there is anything questionable. If you own the servers and attached network - it's closer to the home analogy. It is yours. But, it's also yours to secure and manage.

Twitter is open to anyone, really. I can read other peoples tweets if I choose to. Nothing special about it.

 

[GaryJohnson]

Police Do Not Need a Warrant to Subpoena Tweets

Police Do Not Need a Warrant to Subpoena Anything Because Having a Warrant and a Subpoena Would Be Redundant

 

[rhouck]

Yeah, I don't understand twitter at all, it's not like facebook where you can have private accounts is it? So allowing the police to get them is more like "hey look here's all this information out for everyone to see, lets just grab a copy"

Exactly. ANYONE can view someones tweets.... account or not.

This is not true. That only applies to public accounts/tweets. You can have private accounts (and like Facebook, have to individually approve each and every person who can see your tweets).

http://support.twitter.com/articles/14016-about-public-and-protected-accounts

There is also the issue of direct messages which are also not public.

 

[Wumpus]

This is not true. That only applies to public accounts/tweets. You can have private accounts (and like Facebook, have to individually approve each and every person who can see your tweets).

http://support.twitter.com/articles/14016-about-public-and-protected-accounts

There is also the issue of direct messages which are also not public.

Very funny. If it is on facebook, facebook can do anything they want with that information, and you already gave them a licence to do so (try checking the ads sometime after posting "private" information). Public means your information is free. Private means they have to pay facebook for it.

In general, if you want to have any say over information, you better own the server and control all access to it (hint, to a large degree this means "don't run microsoft software on it" as well). It doesn't matter what a judge says about what the police need to obtain tweets if twitter wants to stay on the law's good side and hand over anything at the drop of a hat (most ISPs are like this).

 

[NKDietrich]

Almost any time you hand information over to a third party you are greatly diminishing your expectation of privacy with regards to that information, in the view of the courts. This is called the third party doctrine. It basically forfeits your Fourth Amendment protections when you hand it over to a third party. Some stuff has protections regardless of third party doctrine though. The Stored Communications Act gives some extra protection to email and voicemail, but I don't know that it would apply to Tweets and Facebook stuff.

 

[Chunder]

This does make perfect sense, your messages online are no different then you talking to someone on the street. If someone just happens to come by and hear it, you can't sue them for not having a "warrant" to hear it!

 

[poee]

Almost any time you hand information over to a third party you are greatly diminishing your expectation of privacy with regards to that information, in the view of the courts. This is called the third party doctrine. It basically forfeits your Fourth Amendment protections when you hand it over to a third party. Some stuff has protections regardless of third party doctrine though. The Stored Communications Act gives some extra protection to email and voicemail, but I don't know that it would apply to Tweets and Facebook stuff.

Thanks for bring that up, NKDietrich. It seems to me the whole point of the Stored Communications Act was to carve out a specific expectation of privacy regardless of where the information is stored (doesn't have to be in your home, you don't have to own any of the equipment used to convey and store email in order to be protected.) Since you can make a private Twitter account that does not broadcast but only sends messages to approved recipients, how is this fundamentally different from email?

 

[NKDietrich]

Thanks for bring that up, NKDietrich. It seems to me the whole point of the Stored Communications Act was to carve out a specific expectation of privacy regardless of where the information is stored (doesn't have to be in your home, you don't have to own any of the equipment used to convey and store email in order to be protected.) Since you can make a private Twitter account that does not broadcast but only sends messages to approved recipients, how is this fundamentally different from email?

I imagine private Tweets would require an actual warrant. But they only subpoena'd his public Tweets, and basic user information. Basic user information is the least protected information in the Stored Communications Act. It only requires a subpoena, not a warrant, under the SCA. It includes:

"(A) name; (B) address; (C) local and long distance telephone connection records, or records of session times and durations; (D) length of service (including start date) and types of service utilized; (E) telephone or instrument number or other subscriber number or identity, including any temporarily assigned network address; and (F) means and source of payment for such service (including any credit card or bank account number)[.]"

And it goes without saying his public Tweets are entirely unprotected.

 

[evilsofa]

Nothing on the Internet is private. It's that simple, and it's delusional to think otherwise.

 

[Shorehn]

Interesting, so that would include any and all "Cloud" storage schemes !

Which is why I abandoned the conventional cloud storage fad a long time ago. I've been happy enough with Tonido. Got a huge hard drive hooked up to my TonidoPlug that I can access as much as I want, and I don't pay any monthly fee

 

[Oomps]

Everyone is missing the point of this. There were several articles back in February that showed the underlying motives.

They don't care about the actual tweets, they are looking for the information related to the account including the ip addresses logged when the tweets were submitted. From that information they are going to go to the isps and find out who/where these ip addresses were active at those times in order to track the guys movement.