The New York Civil Liberties Union and the American Civil Liberties Union, together with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Public Citizen Litigation Group, have filed a legal brief supporting Twitter’s appeal of a court order that it turn over three-and-a-half months of information from an Occupy Wall Street demonstrator’s Twitter account to the Manhattan District Attorney’s office.

On October 1, 2011, Occupy Wall Street protestor Malcolm Harris was among hundreds of demonstrators arrested for disorderly conduct after marching onto the Brooklyn Bridge. In January, the district attorney’s office subpoenaed Twitter for a broad swath of information related to

Harris’s online account and activities on Twitter, including the content of his tweets, his subscriber information, and the Internet Protocol (IP) addresses that correspond to each time he used Twitter over a three-and-a-half month period – information that could reveal Harris’s location whenever he was using Twitter.

Both Harris and Twitter filed motions in New York City criminal court to quash the district attorney’s demand for this information. The criminal court denied both of the motions, and ordered Twitter to comply with the subpoena. Harris and Twitter have filed separate appeals.

“Under the First and Fourth Amendments, we have the right to speak freely on the Internet, safe in the knowledge that the government can’t get information about our speech without a warrant and without satisfying First Amendment scrutiny,” said Aden Fine, senior staff attorney with the ACLU. “We’re hopeful that Twitter’s appeal will overturn the criminal court’s dangerous decision, and reaffirm that we retain our constitutional rights to speech and privacy online, as well as offline.”

The NYCLU and ACLU brief argues that Harris has standing to challenge the subpoena because his First Amendment right to free speech is implicated—and that whether he has such standing or not is a separate question from the merits. The brief also argues that lower court’s denial of the motion to quash the subpoena fails to recognize both his First Amendment right to free speech and his Fourth Amendment right to privacy.

“The criminal court held that Harris has no privacy interest in information held by third parties,” said NYCLU Staff Attorney Mariko Hirose. “This ruling is a problem for the right to privacy in this digital age where an increasing amount of our information is stored by third-party providers.”