

Court Prompts Twitter to Give Data to Police in Threat Case  - danso
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/08/nyregion/after-court-order-twitter-sends-data-on-user-issuing-threats.html?_r=1&smid=tw-share

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sehrope
FTA: “Social media is of increasing importance to law enforcement and criminal
prosecutions,” said Mr. Cunningham, a former criminal prosecutor. “In general,
social media outlets do a very good job of cooperating with authorities, but
in this case, however, Twitter should have given the information without a
court order under their emergency procedures policy. The threats were clear
enough.”

I call shenanigans on this. The reason we have a system of laws, judges, and
subpoenas is to a uniform application of the law. If someone is making a
serious threat through any outlet then I'm all for having the appropriate
authorities apprehend them but having private enterprises defer to their
better judgement on when information should be released is a slippery road
with a steep incline.

If they really want to solve this problem then the requests for information
with valid subpoenas should be standardized* as should the rejection of those
without valid subpoenas.

* Imagine each judge cryptographically signed subpoenas and that company websites had an uploader for authorities to upload them (or a unique id linking to them). The latter would go into a queue at the company and get efficiently processed either automatically (if the info requested is standardized, for example give me all tweets and the IP addresses for user XYZ) or by manually by employees of the company. Efficient, transparent, and auditable.

