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NYC Lawyers Subpoena Code
RonMcMahon writes "Lawyers for the city of New York have subpoenaed the text message records of thousands of people involved in demonstrations at the 2004 Republican National Convention. Tad Hirsch, creator of the TXTmob code that enabled convention demonstrators to transmit messages to thousands of telephones, has been instructed to release the content of messages exchanged on the service and to identify people who sent and received messages. Hirsch argues that release of such information would be a violation of users' First Amendment and privacy rights. 'I think I have a moral responsibility to the people who use my service to protect their privacy,' said Hirsch."
It's GPLed! Just download the code at http://sourceforge.net/projects/txtmob/
They cannot subpoena logs that you don't keep.
If this was a corporation (which has no soul or moral code), the content of the messages would already be in NYC's lawyers' hands.
Fortunately in this case, it's a man who believes in human rights.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
Like this one.
You don't know me.
You don't know whether it is really me writing this or someone pretending to be me.
You don't know how many "me"s there are behind this nickname.
You don't know how many other accounts I have that pretend to be someone besides me.
Which me is the real me?
Which you is the real you?
Which way to Kathmandu?
Would you, could you in a car?
Eat them, eat them! Here they are.
Anonymous political speech has a long tradition in the US. Many of our founding fathers hid behind pseudonyms while writing many of what are termed 'The Federalist Papers' which laid much of the groundwork for the US Constitution.
If the messages were inciting people to break the law I could possibly understand, but on the face of what few facts I have on the subject right now my knee wants to jerk right into the Government's jaw a few times.
Next april 1st I shall boycott this site.
/me looks back on zomg ponies full of nostalgia for times past.......
P.S.
I don't understand why New York thinks it has a legitimate reason to read everybody's private text messages from 4 years ago. What possible relevance do those messages have to anything?
Reminds me of my grandmother (reading other people's mail just to be nosy).
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
Don't click this link, it is malicious.
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
Every time you surrender your rights to the state in return for assurances that a) people who might be breaking some minor law like jaywalking have nothing to worry about and b) the new powers will be used only against the really, really bad people, should sit up and take notice. This is exactly the kind of thing you can expect.
How many people who want to exercise their legal right to protest will sit home next time because their career ambitions include jobs where even being on the same street as a protest could knock them off the hiring list?
It's always best to assume governments and police forces are led by lying, treacherous fascists. You will occasionally be pleasantly surprised to find that it's not the case. More often, you'll find out that power-tripping assholes are attracted to those jobs the same way child molesters are attracted to schoolgrounds and bank robbers are attracted to banks.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
The headline is bad.
To quote the summary (which surprisingly fits TFA):
"release the content of messages exchanged on the service"
This is not about the code used to send the text messages, but the messages themselves.
Riiiight. That's why it's taken how many years to get the code released on the breathalyzer? A corporation would stall, stutter, fight just as much as a private individual. In fact most private individuals would cave whereas a corporation would provide lawyer after lawyer while saying it's a trade secret, etc.
I'm surprised that you'd consider a corporation capable of just rolling over and playing dead. Yes the airlines did that for the TSA...
Being incorporated doesn't make you evil.
An April Fool's post, or sh!thead attorneys?
For your security, this post has been encrypted with ROT-13, twice.
They subpoena'd the coder, not the code.
Why keep records at all? If I was organising something that could be used for civil disobedience then I'd make sure it was all anonymous with no records kept for precisely this reason.
If he was interested in human rights we would release the text since knowing the information would help free the people being charged in the lawsuits or it would prove that something wrong was done and make sure those people had no chance of doing the same thing in the future.
Instead he stored the messages for some personnal or business reason.
I feel obliged to point out that this article concerns New York City Lawyers, not NewYorkCountryLawyer. ;)
Why did he keep identified copies of all the messages if there was never an intent to release or use them?
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
The data cannot be subpoena'd if it does not exist. Why does his system keep records of who said what to whom? And if it needs the records, why doesn't it delete them after a short period? And if the system does keep an archive, why didn't he delete it manually before now, if people's privacy is so important?
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Lawyers representing the city in lawsuits filed by hundreds of people arrested during the convention asked Mr. Hirsch to hand over voluminous records revealing the content of messages exchanged on his service and identifying people who sent and received messages.
Want to bet at least part of NYC's defense is that at least some of those arrested actually set out to be arrested?
And that the text messages will prove that?
I think GP's point is that it's easier to be evil when you aren't signing your own name to the order.
(IANAL)
Do phone companies record phone calls? Of course not? So why should text companies record content? Even recording traffic should only be where that is required for billing purposes. IE, not for unlimited plans or perhaps where the subsriber has waived detailed billing.
The FCC has been trying to impose logging and retention rules for the convenience of law enforcement, but I don't know how many of these have come into force.
...have the missing White House e-mails been located yet?
I don't understand why he kept the information, but if he really wants to take a stand on this, he should delete it immediately, before they come in with a warrant.
Perhaps these anti-GOP demonstrators should in fact be embracing GOP leader. By that I mean if the GOP can 'accidentally' electronic records (and backups!) that they were specifically legally bound to keep, couldn't these demonstrators also 'accidentally' lose those records as well? (I'm not actually advocating that they do this, I'm just pointing out that it's kind of ridiculous that even anti-GOP demonstrators keep copies of data while the GOP all too conveniently lose their data that may well be even more incriminating).
I am not a lawyer, nor do I use the accompanying initialism, but can the "city" issue a subpoena? I guess a lawyer could as an agent of the court or whatever, and a lawyer could work for the city, but I thought they were issued by some clerk who had to get sign off by some judge? In which case (unless I am wrong, of course), I'd be more concerned about the judge than the city. I'd expect a city to do whatever possible to defend itself, etc, etc. But I think with some thought, a judge might agree with the guy's laywer that the subpoena was/is "'vague' and 'overbroad,' and wrote that seeking information about TXTmob users who have nothing to do with lawsuits against the city would violate their First Amendment and privacy rights." Chime in lawyers and law students.
Unfortunately, I just can't bring myself to get particularly riled up about this because I don't have enough info; the Times piece could just as easily have been written by a college sophomore for a campus newspaper.
Please don't use "umm" or "err" or "erm".
I think my head is going to explode. I thought that our mantra here was "information wants to be free". Shouldn't he free the information so anybody can have it? Or is it only "stuff I want should be free, but stuff about me should not?" Boom! (sorry, that was my head exploding).
For those who have forgotten (or never heard about) the whole unconstitutional ordeal.
http://www.2600.com/rnc2004/index.html
Down with Amurkan fascists! And their plastic orange fences.
We have all gone to look for America.
Rabble, formerly of Odeo, who worked on Twitter, and previously contributed development skills to various Indymedia tools and apparently got to "poke" at txtmob as well, has some informative insight on txtmob on his blog.
For convenience, a link to the NYTimes article that doesn't seem to require a login. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/30/nyregion/30text.html?ex=1364529600&en=44d5d0248460c0e7&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink
"John has a long moustache."
The important difference is that a corporation has a lot more to lose from making enemies in the government. Maybe New York doesn't have much arm-twisting power, but the federal government can easily destroy a company with a terrorism-related investigation. Not only are companies more vulnerable, but they also have more to gain from a government alliance. They won't win a slice of that fat military budget by suing over something silly like their customers' personal data.
The threat of legal action is NOT the same as legal action.
It takes about 20 minutes, $0.50 in postage and one sheet of fancy high-bond paper to threaten. It's trivial. And probably rather successful.
And let's be real.. this kid isn't involved in an RIAA lawsuit, he's not being sued by SCO for some linux code that NOBODY cares about outside the people reading this website.
This is politics, a guy who made it easy to protest against BushCo.
I guarantee that he can raise $50,000 for legal defense in about 3 days if he publicizes it. This is the power of the NetRoots.
These were/are SMS. If the TXTMob data doesn't exist anymore (and why would you keep the content anyway unless he had some type of "digest" that he sent out later), I bet they'll get the data from the mobile phone providers. There's only a handful of providers, and since we know all of the messages originated or were destined for the TXTMob server, piece of cake. A well placed regex and game over. Maybe not 100% of the messages, but enough for the lawyers to prove their points.
There's a difference:
- You said the corporation is fighting to protect its breathalyzer code. It wants to maintain its own property & future profits. Makes perfect sense.
- But what if the State sued the corporation to obtain the *emails* sent across the machines? Does the corporation have a vested interest to protect them? Nope. The corporation will not fight. It will just hand them over to the government, as if they were best friends.
In this particular case, we have a man who has no vested interest
But he does have a morals. He's fighting purely upon the principle of protecting others.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
If he stored the messages from 2004 (which may or may not be true),
then he likely did it for the same reason why my company stores messages. Because the government forces them to store the messages. It's not a matter of "choice" if the government is holding a gun to your held ("save all emails, else serve time in jail").
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
>>>"Being incorporated doesn't make you evil."
I didn't say it did. I said corporations are soulless/lacking morals. A corporation makes decisions based upon their own desire to increase profit. They will not fight a "hand over all emails" court order if there's no profit to gain from that fight. They follow a very simple conditional statement:
IF PROFIT INCREASES THEN FIGHTLAWSUIT == 1
ELSE HANDOVER_EMAILS = 1
Cold. Calculating. Corporation.
The government is not your daddy. Its purpose is not to raid middle-class neighbors' wallets and give it to you.
*sigh*. information wants to be free is just a more pithy (and to some confusing) way of saying secrets are hard to keep or information is hard to control. Information tends to escape, to find a way out, and once it does you cannot put the genie back in the bottle, ever. It does not mean that there are no secrets that are worth keeping or at least trying to keep. There may also be something in there about the futility of even trying to control or hoard information. Something about it being a waste of time and so forth.
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2007-06-24-cheney_N.htm
Something like this that happened nearly 4 years ago can't be that important to still be wasting lawyers on.
Can it?
I smell shades of McCarthy'ism... What is going on with this country when there is so much divide that people are resorting to out an out violations of constitutional law. And; if memory serves me correct, this has shades of Watergate on it too.... Hmmm... The only thing they haven't done is break into some building housing said logs with which to look at them...
All content in this message is copyright (c) 2008. All rights reserved. RIAA is prohibited here.
Quite an interesting topic, especially when you look at it in the light that those in The White House are seemingly able to get away
with simply claiming that about 2 years of their own emails got erased from their server backups and cannot be retrieved, (...pffft!!...)
and no one appears too bothered by it enough to sue for what may well have been a motherlode of information on how the war in
Iraq was handled, and other crucial tidbits which clearly were supposed to have been a matter of public record, and could have
been used in a variety of ways to document this current administration's policies....
Z.
That which does not kill me only postpones the inevitable.
The lawyers filing the subpoena are representing the city who is being sued by the protesters. The city believes the text messages will provide the city with a defense to why the protesters were arrested. It's not about the first amendment.
Would your opinion on this subpoena change if it was from defense lawyers?
Are officers of the court allowed to write subpoenas which effectively ask you to break privacy laws? Or are there any sanctions on them for doing so?
Up there it has been suggested they could go after the telcoms and that if this had been a corporation they would have been buckled, but IMO with them this subpoena would have been quashed in a flash. The telcoms in particular aren't too happy to just allow government go on fishing expeditions at the moment.
Provided you are not a federal agency, deal with financial & tax information or health information there is no US law, until you get a suspenia to produce the info then you are required to safeguard the info, that requires that you to store mail or most of the information that companies keep. There have been some pushes to require companies to store some information but even then they are talking about 3 years.
Looking at the company, it is more an organization, they would have no legal reason to keep the information and even less of a reason for the program to be written to store the information.
It stands to reason then that people who believe in human rights, should believe in the video and audio recording of every moment of every day of everyone's life, as such recordings would indict the guilty and vindicate the innocent and what reasonable person could possibly be against that?
For covering Bush's ass on every single act of treachery and instead, enabling the persecution of a man who used technology to campaign for freedom. Down with Hillary Clintush!
Freedom is free.
People actively and purposely violated a law in new york. This cost the city money and created semi-unsafe situations. The organizers of this lawbreaking can be charged in much the same way organized crime is charged.
Currently, people are suing the city because they where arrested back in 2004 in connections to illegal protests surrounding the RNC convention. The city wants this information to be able to prove or disprove their connections to willfully violating the laws which would make the suits meaningless or point to an avenue of settlement.
Similar to this;
http://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/2007-10-18/news/breathtaking-abuse-of-the-constitution/
The local prosecutors office ordered and conducted the arrest of the newspaper editors for disclosing the fact that they had been requested, through the act of a horrifically crooked grand jury subpoena (which neither the judge nor jury had approved or even seen), to turn over a list of their entire readership and website visitors over a period of years.
I hope for a similar, if not stronger, reaction.
you make a lot of assertions without any evidence. civil disobedience and common protests usually involves breaking some minor laws (think jaywalking or loitering), but this does not make the entire protest "illegal" as you assert. your right to protest the government will usually be found to trump the city ordinances that are commonly used to arrest people at protests. since as TFA says, most were not ever charged with a crime, their actions (and the protests) have never been ruled illegal by a jury or judge. the fact that a law MAY have been broken somewhere does not overrule the rights to privacy and free speech held by all users of this text messaging service, and that is why this action should be fought. letting your partisan politics show today?
Umm.. You obviously don't understand your right to protest. You have the right of free speech but you don't have a right to a platform or an audience. Some restrictions are completely legitimate and in compliance with the constitution. That being said, this has nothing to do with the situation at hand and is only clouding the issue.
There are certain facts about this particular situation. Some people were planning to or did break the law. A law that has stood against challenges on the grounds of it's constitutionality. The city arrested people it though was in connection with this but didn't charge all of the people detained. That part is a fact.
There is a lawsuit filed by people who weren't charged for whatever reason but were arrested at some point in connection to the situation. The city needs the records to show an intent which means the arrest wasn't without cause which would negate the claims against them. Illegal things happened or where in the process of happening and going to watch them or participate in them make you an accomplice even if you didn't get charged. This is different from you being somewhere when illegal activity starts happening around you. It isn't that complicated and doesn't need to be.
If this was about an illegal or unconstitutional law, it would have been filed that way. All it is as of now, is people claiming wrongful imprisonment because charges weren't filed against them. The evidence chain is pretty shaky, the city thinks these records will show their intent which would validate their detention and pretty much ruin the cases against them for the people who did intend to break the law.
Um. No it's not.
The Federalist Papers were written by just three (= not that many) Founding Fathers. Just 2 guys wrote most of them, Madison and Hamilton, although John Jay wrote a few.
Ah, those were the days.
$META_SIG_JOKE