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Comment by driverdan | Hacker News Reader

Here's a PDF of the June ruling which discusses the legal issues: http://www.aclu.org/files/assets/owsharristwitterdec63012.pd...

It's a fairly easy read and is interesting. There are a number of issues at stake, primarily who has standing to quash the subpoena and should a warrant be required.

Looking at this solely as a geek and not taking into account the legal issues, any information that has been publicly available on the net at any point should be considered permanently public. If you don't want something to be public don't post it publicly.

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The ruling is very interesting, thanks for posting.

It seems the main issue is whether the defendant has the right to sue to intervene when Twitter is subpoenaed to turn his information over to third party (the People). That is a bit different than the way most of the media coverage is framing the issue.

That seems utterly logical and practical. Thanks for your take and the link.

What I find frightening though is that the notion of public isn't black and white. I can totally see a judge considering something posted online only to your friends to be public. How public does something have to be to be considered public? Visible to a few friends? All your friends? Friends and co-workers? I imagine that the nuance of privacy controls would be lost and anything visible by parties besides those the posting was intended for could be considered public. For example, if I post a message to my timeline for all my Facebook contacts to see, but I really only intended to be for my family, then is that to be considered public since I didn't go through the trouble of shielding that post from anyone but my family?

Yes, but if something was briefly posted by mistake, not archived, and retracted, I think people have a right to keep it private.

"Looking at this solely as a geek and not taking into account the legal issues, any information that has been publicly available on the net at any point should be considered permanently public."

I believe this to be true, although without regard for the details of this case, because I look at it from the point of view of censorship. When taken to the extreme, in a world where there is no censorship of any kind, a person cannot even censor themselves, given that nothing ever made public could be permanently deleted.

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