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Penn. AG Corbett Subpoenas Twitter For Bloggers' Names
Dthief writes with this from Pennsylvania's ABC27 News: "The state attorney general's office has issued a subpoena threatening officials of the social networking service Twitter with arrest unless they reveal the names of two bloggers who have been critical of Attorney General Tom Corbett and his public corruption investigation. Vic Walczak of the American Civil Liberties Union told Pittsburgh's WTAE-TV that the court action 'raises grave concerns about abuse of the grand jury process to retaliate against political critics and opponents.' He said Americans 'have a right to criticize government officials and to do so anonymously.'"
In the words of George Carlin "You have no rights"
Twitter doesn't store personal details. Even putting a name in your profile name is optional. How can they provide information they don't even collect?
my other sig is also a porsche
Wow. Way to go authoritarian police state. Let's not even try to hide it anymore.
There is a war going on for your mind.
I doubt this is going to work. There's no way a lawyer could write a subpoena in under 140 characters.
My webcomic
Let me be the first say that Tom Corbett is an asshat. He is also the Republican nominee for Governor of Pennsylvania. One has to wonder how much of this is motivated by his candidacy.
Some mornings it's hardly worth chewing through the restraints to get out of bed.
Here's the two people he's requesting subpoenas for:
http://twitter.com/bfbarbie
http://twitter.com/CasablancaPA
Let's see if we can make them go from 300-500 followers to 3,000-5,000.
I can't believe he's making such a huge stink over someone with a few hundred followers.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
Seems like they need a great big kick in the democratic ass.
Isn't free speech allowed unless you're directly threating someone? From the stories I've read this person might be corrupted. Why is he threating with arrests instead of responding to those claims? Unless of course, he is corrupted person.
...two twitter users frantically edit their profiles and strip out their personal information.
According to Wikipedia, Twitter is based in California. Why is the attorney general of Pennsylvania threatening Twitter's higher-ups with arrest? There must be something here I don't know.
That Anonymous Coward guy is pretty annoying. Can we have the government censor him or something?
Hey, Mr. Corbett? Let me teach you about a little something called the Streisand Effect.
Something tells me you're going to be very well acquainted with it in a day or so.
That's kind of old, according do ACLU helping keep Twitter users' IDs secret in Pa. a judge will decide whether the subpoena is thrown out.
Falcon
Should there be a Law?
He is looking for the names of people who have criticized him? Really? Because I am pretty sure that by doing this, half the Internet will be speaking poorly of him. And I for one, am drinking the cool-aid.
Fuck Attorney General Tom Corbett and his public corruption investigation. Fuck him in his stupid ass. He is fucking clown shoes.
Come get me Tom. I dare you.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
And, given the other story on Slashdot today, he'll soon be able to have his office look up the DNA records of the people once he identifies them.
"Hello, Somebusiness Inc? Hi, this is the Attorney General's office. We're very interested in one of your employees, Mr. X. No sorry can't tell you - it's an active investigation. But you know what's interesting... he's pretty likely to get heart disease, his insurance payments and absences are going to go way up. Oh, and his son has ALS, did you know that? He's probably going to take lots of time off soon to take care of him. Yeah, it's tough to have an employee like him, even without a criminal investigation. Oh, did we say criminal investigation? We weren't supposed to mention it. Oh well, bye"
If there is reasonable suspicion to believe that grand jury proceedings are being UNLAWFULLY disclosed to the public via the twitterers, then the Attorney General is merely doing his duty. Secrecy of grand jury proceedings is absolutely vital to provide fairness to the targets and to the witnesses. Reputations can be destroyed by a leak of grand jury information. The movie 'Absence of Malice' is a good illustration of how the grand jury process can be abused by illegal leakages and result in damage to innocent people.
On the other hand, the secrecy of the grand jury process gives the prosecuting attorney ENORMOUS power that can be abused by bad men or women.
Before I jump on the "enemy of freedom" bandwagon, I'd need to see the tweets. If it looks like they have an 'inside man' in the grand jury room, then I am totally on the side of the Attorney General. On the other hand, if they're just complaining about his behavior based upon what witnesses have reported about their own testimony (that's legal), then you can count me in among the haters.
There's just not enough information available yet.
I do hope Twitter moves to quash the subpoena. That way the Judge overseeing the grand jury proceedings will have to examine the prosecuting attorney's actions. If twitter caves in, then nothing is private on that website.
Isn't free speech allowed unless you're directly threating someone?
Apparently you haven't RTFA or done any other checking.
The particular Twitter ID's in question are linked to an ongoing corruption case against a number of Democrat politicians/operatives, and it's suspected that a defendant in that ongoing case has been tweeting & blogging anonymously about the prosecutor & AG and the investigation itself.
In many courts/proceedings, revealing proceeding-related information or attempting to poison the proceedings outside the courtroom is cause for prosecution and/or contempt-of-court charges.
If this is true and the AG has probable cause to legitimately suspect criminal actions have taken/are taking place, would he not be remiss if he did nothing?
This submission appears to be quite partisan and one-sided, as well as sparse on the facts and context.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
I live in PA. Corbett is a corrupt asshole who should spend the rest of his life in jail, and he wants to be Governor. I agree with all of your facts, but guy is still a chicken-fucker.
But what if the twitterer ISN'T at all connected to the investigation?
What if they are just a person who reads the papers and is pissed off, or who hears rumors from others or whatever?
Does a person lose their right to anonymous speech merely because someone SUSPECTS that they might someone else?
This space available.
He's a Republican. Draw your own conclusions. I'm kidding of course, as a Republican he wouldn't dream of being in an association that has anything to do with the letter "N".
The other bit of information that doesn't appear in this summary is that he just won his parties nomination as candidate for Governor of Pennsylvania. About this, I am not kidding.
It's a very interesting story, and worth examining. His office just released a statement that he has reason to believe one of the twitter accounts that he's trying to subpoena belongs to the defendant in a case he is prosecuting. He doesn't mention anything about the other account. But since there aren't any threats alleged in these tweets, just a lot of the usual political criticisms and slams, it would seem that his cause of action, if any, would be regarding libel, which would be civil court. Instead, he uses the criminal law enforcement powers of his office to subpoena two twitter accounts, which seems to pretty much violate the First Amendment. His case would seem to question the right of anyone to make an anonymous comment on the Internet, which might be of interest to readers of Slashdot.
He's been accused of using the powers of his office to advance his political career before, and also of corruption and overreaching his constitutional powers in prosecuting a lot of Democrats and a very few Republicans. This incident is some pretty dangerous stuff, though, if you care about free speech.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Dear trum4n,
Please contact us with an address at which you can be reached during business hours.
Thank you.
But what if the twitterer ISN'T at all connected to the investigation?
What if they are just a person who reads the papers and is pissed off, or who hears rumors from others or whatever?
Does a person lose their right to anonymous speech merely because someone SUSPECTS that they might someone else?
If he can get a subpoena, that means he will have had to have had a judge look at the evidence and decide the facts do, indeed, merit his request.
Does a person have to be tried & convicted before evidence of his crime can be subpoenaed?
That seems a bit backwards, but some people will justify an amazing amount of hypocrisy to defend their ideology & leaders. And, yes, I'd say the same things if the (R) & (D) tags were reversed, as it isn't about the party, just the crime(s). Just as I say that GWB screwed up a lot of stuff and I disagreed with many of his administration's actions and policies.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
Anonymity is extremely important. On more occasions than I can count, I've espoused the virtues of (pseudo)anonymous communications techniques, coupled with strong encryption. Note that this shouldn't be construed to say I believe people should be absolved of being held accountable for their actions if they do something wrong. I do, however, acknowledge that under certain circumstances (repressive regimes for example) local law may not be in line with what the rest of the planet finds remotely reasonable. Like everything else that involves people, these things require careful consideration and deliberation amongst the citizens affected by them.
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You are thinking of a warrant which requires a signature from a judge. It is quite common for lawyers as "officers of the court" to have the power to issue subpeonas on their own. It is also common for prosecutors and Attorneys General especially, to have such power. I'm not familiar with the situation in Pennsylvania but if a court is involved it is probably just a clerical matter that a clerk rubber-stamps.
Americans 'have a right to criticize government officials and to do so anonymously.'
Do they? We have a right to free speech. Where are we given a right to anonymity?
I'm not sure that this is about free speech. If the blagger, once identified, has nothing to do with the proceedings, nothing will happen to him. If he has then there will be legal consequences. Nothing here that impinges on free speech.
Control is an illusion, order our comforting lie. From chaos, through chaos, into chaos we fly
It won't impinge free speech, but eventually it all gets unsealed, and their identities go public for anyone who can fill out a FOIA request to find--and being that the Library of Congress is now archiving tweets, there's no way to guarantee that something that was said previously (even if the accounts never get used again) won't someday come back to bite them in the ass. Thus, this whole thing creates a bit of a sticky situation.
I don't post AC. I like my -1, Flamebaits. Trump/Sheen 2012 on the Batshit Insane ticket!
If you then make it a condition that no AG or politician that may be under some kind of investigation can perform essential functions of their office (and for AG, investigations & prosecutions are a major part),...
This isn't a case of may be under investigation--this guy is under investigation, and this is a critical difference. If it were limited to, say, wrongdoing by someone in the AG's office, not the AG himself, it would be a wholly different matter.
then you've effectively shut down nearly all oversight and curbs on corruption.
Thus why Special (or Independent) Prosecutors exist; and in this instance, this manner of party could be selected by the PA Legislature to remove all doubt that s/he is tainted by the AGs office. There are safeguards for this sort of thing, it's fairly difficult to think that a large number of persons, even if the Legislature is heavily in favour of his party, would blithely ignore ethics to ensure it all goes smoothly for the party.
Why does it seem like every time a conservative, with no clear and/or credible evidence of any wrongdoing on his part regarding the investigation in question,
Party affiliation aside, the fact is if the evidence were either clear OR credible, the need for an extensive investigation is obviated; that's the point of an investigation is to obtain clear and/or credible evidence to move to the courts. And in any case, once the spotlight turns significantly, for an official in any position of trust or authority on a matter--whether an Attorney General, a judge, or a Chief Executive--recusal is proper even if only to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest. When it looks like you might be hiding something, the fact is, that's what the court of public opinion is going to arrive at. Take the case of Rod Blagojevich, for example; to be technical, he was impeached by the Illinois House twice (a technicality of the Senate not being able to try after the first, due to the end of the term; this required the articles be re-presented by the new House)--the votes to impeach, and the vote to remove, were overwhelming in their majority, with few people even in his own party, whether elected officials or common folk being on his side. It's not always about party lines, as you indicate, particularly when you're using your position to cover things up.
I don't post AC. I like my -1, Flamebaits. Trump/Sheen 2012 on the Batshit Insane ticket!
Corbett isn't just the Attorney General who filed suit against the President trying to get a federal law (that hasn't even gone into effect yet) declared unconstitutional. Corbett is also the Republican candidate for Governor. If his skin is this thin, he's going to have a rough patch coming on. Corbett is also a Goober.
I wasn't aware that the definition of "free speech" included "the right to remain anonymous".
It is, in certain cases. Here are several examples.
If you want to say something, just fucking say it. If you're in a position where saying something is illegal (e.g. criminal libel), why should you expect to be protected by the law?
That's essentially the rule. Free speech can have a reasonable expectation of privacy. However libel, slander, violating gag orders, revealing sensitive information, and other actions are not free speech, and thus don't have any of these protections.
In cases like this, where the illegality of the speech is determined by the identity of the author (if they are a juror speaking of a case, it is illegal, but not if they are a random dude) it should be up to a judge to weight the burden of prosecution if they are acting illegaly, with the reasonable protection of someone who wasn't involved's privacy. That's why the users have the chance to file a counter-motion.
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It's an established principle because limiting anonymous speech would, indeed, have the effect of limiting speech. To not protect anonymous speech but to claim to be still supportive of "Freedom of speech" would be a little like banning printing presses but arguing that you still support Freedom of Speech because, well, people can always talk to one another.
It's always been the case, in any regime, no matter how liberal, that intimidation and discrimination that follows the expression of certain viewpoints will result in those viewpoints not being expressed unless the protection of anonymity is provided. Long after the US became free, anonymous and pseudonymous journalism remained a bastion of debate, and nothing has changed to suggest that the same principles do not apply today.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.