Twitter asked a state court on Tuesday to reject a motion by prosecutors to hand over the personal information of one its users.
New York City prosecutors had served Twitter with a subpoena for its data on Malcolm Harris, who was arrested for disorderly conduct during an Occupy Wall Street protest. The prosecutors asked Twitter for Harris's email address and all of his tweets in a three-month period. But Twitter argued that police would need a search warrant to access the communications.
The social media company pointed to the Supreme Court's recent decision in U.S. v. Jones, which found that using a GPS device to track a person's car qualifies as a search under the Fourth Amendment.
"If the Fourth Amendment’s warrant requirement applies merely to surveillance of one’s location in public areas for 28 days, it also applies to the District Attorney’s effort to force Twitter to produce over three months worth of a citizen’s substantive communications, regardless of whether the government alleges those communications are public or private," Twitter wrote.
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