Money Rail: Twitter Submits and Hands Over Occupier Tweets to Judge

While Twitter spent many months resisting attempts to hand over tweets to a criminal judge that belong to a member of the Occupy Wall Street movement, it could only hold on for so long. Reuters reports

Twitter handed over tweets from an Occupy Wall Street protester to a New York criminal judge on Friday after months of fighting a subpoena from prosecutors.

The company surrendered the micro-blogging posts to Manhattan Criminal Court Judge Matthew Sciarrino but they will remain under seal until another appeal by the protestor, Malcolm Harris, is argued next week.

Twitter held on as long as they could but Malcolm Harris’ luck with keeping that data private may have just run out.

Twitter had faced a Friday deadline to comply with the subpoena or face contempt and a substantial fine. In court on Friday, the company’s lawyers asked one last time for the judge to stay his order but he refused and they turned over the documents to him.

The interesting thing about this is that the only real reason this is even an issue is that you can’t look very far back at tweets using Twitter search. If the company were competent in that area Mr. Harris’ tweets would have been easy to get and all of this would have been avoided.

Based on this kind of thing maybe Twitter doesn’t want to be searched by anybody and everybody?

What do you think?

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