After being served the warrant, however, the company took several days to respond. Twitter then filed a motion to vacate the nondisclosure order on February 2, arguing the order violated the First Amendment, and refused to comply. The company demanded that U.S. District Court Judge Beryl Howell, who was overseeing the case at the time, block enforcement of the search warrant until the matter was resolved.
Instead, Howell found Twitter in contempt and fined the platform $50,000 a day, doubling for each day of noncompliance. Twitter still did not comply with the warrant until February 9, resulting in a total of $350,000 in fines.
Twitter appealed the ruling, but in July, an appeals court upheld Howell’s decision, the documents released Wednesday show.
Tech companies have fought against gag orders many times before and been supported online for doing so. Strange to see a different reaction now just because this case involves unpopular people.
unpopular is an understatement. one is a criminal and should be in jail. the other is an exploiter of human rights. i’ll leave it up to you to decide which description fits who…
The American Deep State qualifies as both.
is the Deep State™ in the room with you right now?
Provide evidence of this “American Deep State” or go take your meds.
Trump and friends trying to steal an election is the evidence of the nazi “deep state”
You can’t steal a stolen election.
Go home, Russian propaganda.
They write op-eds for the New York Times. Evidence enough for you?
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/10/26/opinion/sunday/trump-civil-service-deep-state.html
Are you ok? Do you need help?
https://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/open_letter_2x.png
Previous concerns about search warrants with gag orders attached were in the context of the FISA courts, where the warrant was served as “We are serving you this search warrant, which you must comply with, and you can’t inform anyone that such a warrant even exists, ever, including your lawyers. We’re not going to tell you why this warrant has been issued, we’re not going to tell you who the target of our search is, we’re not really even going to tell you exactly what data we want. We just kind of want all of it, hand it over. There is zero recourse for you, comply or suffer consequences.” The problem with those kinds of warrants is because there’s this secret FISA court, which is essentially a rubber stamp for overzealous secret data collection which could be used against anyone. It’s a real privacy concern.
This is not a FISA warrant. This is a regular old criminal investigation warrant. These kinds of search warrants always have a gag order, to prevent the target of the investigation from finding out there’s an investigation going on. But the warrant itself will identify that target, will identify specific data, the company can involve their lawyers, they can talk to the court about it. This is all completely normal.
do you have any sources/evidence that show twitter doing this?
2011: https://techland.time.com/2011/01/14/twitter-wikileaks-and-the-broken-market-for-consumer-privacy/
2016: https://www.computerworld.com/article/3116327/google-apple-twitter-and-others-back-microsoft-on-gag-orders-fight.html
Facebook, Google, and Microsoft have also done this, but I can’t recall if Apple has done so.