United Liberty
Can Your Twitter Account Get You Arrested?
Wed, 11/25/2009 - 12:30pm | posted by Brett Bittner
Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that my use of 140 or fewer characters could result in seeing the inside of a jail cell. For most users, use of Twitter will not result in a blemished criminal record. For those who would not know a “tweet” from a “twestival,” Twitter is a micro-blogging service that has been the subject of a lot of attention in the last 2 years, from tech-addicted geeks (like me) to the politically obsessed (again, like me) to popular culture (and, so long as it has nothing to do with reality TV, I’m into it). For some, however, relaying police location information publicly available via scanning equipment to fellow anarchists protesting the G-20 economic summit or refusing to “tweet” upon commanded has led, in my opinion, to some questionable arrests for two men in New York.
With regard to the former, police allege that Elliot Madison, a Manhattan-based social worker and self-described anarchist, and his “partner in crime,” Michael Wallschlaeger, used Twitter to communicate to some of the 5000 protesters during the September 2009 summit. The Pittsburgh police further allege that the Twitter communication shared the movements and actions of law enforcement officials after receiving transmissions on an emergency frequency scanners. Since the information was publicly available, their relay of it would seem to be protected by the First Amendment, but this occurred in an era where “serve and protect” is obscured to mean “lock ‘em all up & sort it out later, if we feel like it.” In addition to their arrest by the FBI, officials raided Madison’s home in Queens, seizing gas masks, goggles, beakers, books with an anarchism theme, and pictures of Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin, in addition to the computer and scanning equipment taken at the time of their arrest. While this year’s G-20 summit is not the focus here, I do encourage you to search YouTube for “G20” to witness some frightening paramilitary activity undertaken by the police as they encounter protesters.
The second story I linked above is actually what prompted me to write on the subject of Twitter and some of the possible implications for its users. Canadian pop singer, Justin Bieber, arranged an autograph session with his throngs of screaming pre-teen female fans at a mall in Long Island on Friday. His popularity proved to be far more than mall management and security planned for or could handle, resulting in local police responding to this scene:
I mentioned an arrest in the opening, and that occurred when Island Def Jam senior vice president, James Roppo, allegedly refused to “tweet” on behalf of Bieber’s Twitter account telling the gathered crowd to disperse. He was charged with a series of misdemeanors, including “endangering the welfare of a minor and obstructing government administration.” If you watched the video, you saw the effect that an authority figure with a bullhorn communicating “Justin is not coming, and he is not in the building” had on the crowd, so I doubt that a direct text message sent to everyone in the area could have dispersed the crowd of squealing pre-teen girls, let alone a status update posted to Justin Bieber’s Twitter Account.
Apparently, the police have a misconception about Twitter. They seem to think that through the magic of the internet, people are robots controlled by the tweets in their streams, and that the mere suggestion that a crowd of almost BeatleMania proportions will disperse at the behest of some teenage pop singer (while actually maintained by his record label). Beyond their unreasonable expectations, I find it interesting that the local police, as part of the response to the crowd at the Roosevelt Fields Mall, demanded that tweets be sent. Upon Roppo’s refusal, it seems they arrested him. I hope that this case progresses beyond the arrest, and that the record label backs Roppo’s actions. When viewing the account as I write this, someone from Bieber’s entourage updates fans of his cancelled appearance and the arrest of “one person from [his] camp” around 4:30 PM Eastern on Friday, but the timeline of the arrest within this story is unclear.
Considering the unrealistic expectations of the police with regard to Twitter’s power, I think that it was entirely unreasonable to assume that Roppo, or anyone from the Bieber camp, would assist in any way to break up the crowd, especially since involvement is viewed as “interference” as we saw with the precedent set by the FBI in the aforementioned Eliot Madison story.
With both of these stories in mind, one with messages being tweeted, and one with a lack of messages tweeted, I think that the police have the ability to turn whatever you do with Twitter into something illegal. That said, it will take a case like Madison’s or Roppo’s to set a precedent for “acceptable use” as the law attempts to catch up with technology. Of course, by the time that either of these cases set precedents, Twitter will be a distant memory in the minds of social media participants.
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