That could be a more reasonable solution than a 17-year sentence in a penitentiary paid for by US taxpayers...

Who owns your tweets?

[Excerpt] For all the clamor about Twitter’s revolutionary potential in the Middle East, we have a reminder right here in New York of its revolutionary limitations.

On Monday, a Manhattan judge ruled that writer, Occupy Wall Street participant and prankster (and, for the purpose of full disclosure, my good friend) Malcolm Harris will not be able to block a subpoena on his Twitter account, including “any and all user information including email addresses” tied to it because, according to the judge, our tweets are not ours at all.

Harris, like me and more than 700 others, was arrested on the Brooklyn Bridge roadway last October in one of Occupy Wall Street’s most headline-grabbing days of action. He, like most of the bridge arrestees, was charged with disorderly conduct (a violation equivalent in legal terms to a traffic ticket) but, refusing to plea out, is taking the charge to trial. In January, the Manhattan D.A.’s office sent Twitter a subpoena. Twitter promptly informed Harris, who decided to fight the subpoena with his lawyer, Martin Stolar of the National Lawyers Guild. 

In his decision Monday to deny the motion to quash the subpoena, Criminal Court judge Matthew Sciarrino Jr. revealed some potentially worrisome issues about how the law views our relationship with our tweets, which raise further questions about speech, privacy and self-representation. As Stolar explained to me, the judge decided that Harris has “no standing” to fight the subpoena in the first place — because his tweets (including direct messages, which are not publicly published) are not his, but belong to Twitter. The judge also rejected Stolar’s claim that Harris has a privacy interest in quashing the subpoena. ...

... just like if I make a phone call, I don't fully own my calls and the record of them. The phone company has a record in its database of when and where I called, and the state can subpoena it, for instance, if a crime is committed. 

But not of what you said, which is the case of tweets. Unless we have to do with Murdoch's News International phone hacking scandal...

Besides, in Poland, for example

Polish Authorities Abuse Access to Users' Data

At the same time as I like the notion of data privacy, we should also mention the other side: 

In the 1990s, Northwest Airlines tried to set up a database to track potential terrorists. The Clinton administration Justice Department killed the proposal, saying it would "ethnically profile" young Arab men. 

Read: data privacy can also get people killed. 

I doubt that's the privacy. While Polish authorities requested users’ traffic data retained by telcos and ISPs over 1.85 million times last year (statistically, that means one in every 20 Poles could have been their target), the NSA that monitors all electronic traffic 24/7 not only in the US, does not need to request anything from anyone. In fact, despite the restrictions you mentioned, data was there before 9/11. What they failed to do was connecting the dots.

Well, that is true. 

America’s press freedom threat

Since Occupy Wall Street began last September, more than 75 journalists have been arrested.  My colleague Josh Stearns has chronicled these arrests since the movement’s earliest days. Stearns expects to see an uptick in arrests as thousands of protesters and reporters converge on Chicago.

* * *

Drone filmmaker denied visa

By Glenn Greenwald

A Pakistani student is unable to accept his film festival award because he is denied the right to enter the U.S.

Sad to see that America has become another brutal police state.

Toutes proportions gardées, of course. But certain things about the beacon of freedom are saddening...