One of the 700 or so criminal cases from Occupy Wall Street’s day on the Brooklyn Bridge back in October is against the writer Malcolm Harris, the same guy who takes credit for starting the rumor that Radiohead was performing at Zuccotti Park. Harris, who was charged with disorderly conduct in the march, is now fighting in Manhattan court against a subpoena that demands Twitter provide “any and all user information” related to his account @destructuremal. “This is the legal equivalent of busting a party with loud noise and demanding my phone records for 3.5 months to see if I helped plan it,” Harris wrote dismissively.
The New York Times reports:
The lawyer, Martin J. Stolar, filed a Notice of Motion to Quash in Manhattan Criminal Court saying that the subpoena did not comply with federal laws governing requests for information from electronic communications services and remote computing services, and that it failed to comply with procedural requirements for delivering a subpoena to a witness outside of New York State.
In addition, Mr. Stolar wrote, the subpoena was overbroad, issued for an improper purpose and constituted an abuse of the court process.
In his motion, Mr. Stolar wrote that the request for “any and all information” could be interpreted as asking for private messages between Mr. Harris and others, as well as a host of data collected by Twitter, including e-mail addresses and phone numbers used by Mr. Harris, Web pages he has visited and information about his physical location at different times.
In the meantime, Harris appears confident in his case and unconcerned with his public face. “Until an officer actually gets lit on fire, I don’t want to hear any nonsense about anarchist violence toward the police,” he wrote today from the account. His bio reads, “ALL TWEETS PROPERTY OF TWITTER, INC.”
