Protesters and text messages

From ZDnet, the New York Times and TechDirt comes this story: New York City has sub­poe­naed a TXTmob server that was used to coor­di­nate street protests dur­ing the 2004 Repub­li­can national Convention.

The city’s lawyers are lit­i­gat­ing civil suits brought by hun­dreds of pro­test­ers who were arrested dur­ing the con­ven­tion. All the city’s lawyers want are the records of every user and mes­sage sent on the sys­tem.

TXTmob can be used to resend text mes­sages to hun­dreds of mobile phones in real time. The soft­ware is avail­able on the Insti­tute for Applied Autonomy’s web site. Wikipedia has a good arti­cle about the service.

Tad Hirsch, the cre­ator of the TXTmob soft­ware, does not want to release the infor­ma­tion on his server:

“There’s a prin­ci­ple at stake here,” he said recently by tele­phone. “I think I have a moral respon­si­bil­ity to the peo­ple who use my ser­vice to pro­tect their privacy.”

Hirsch has appealed for dona­tions on his web site. Hirsch says some of that data no longer exists. He’s been busy writ­ing his dis­ser­ta­tion at MIT.

Who’s got the data?

There are many web and mobile ser­vices like Face­book and Twit­ter that could be used to coor­di­nate protests, accord­ing to this Wired arti­cle. Groups need to con­sider who oper­ates their mes­sag­ing servers and who con­trols the data for their web ser­vices. Host­ing an appli­ca­tion like TXTmob on one’s own server is one way to avoid a Web por­tal or ser­vice provider’s restrictions.

Even so, the server has to be con­nected to the Inter­net, and the text mes­sages are resent to sub­scribers through the mobile phone car­ri­ers servers. The tele­com car­ri­ers rou­tinely archive text mes­sages sent through their sys­tems, as I men­tioned on 3 Feb­ru­ary 2008, and the car­ri­ers will pro­vide mes­sages and logs if subpoenaed.

I may have to revisit the arti­cle I wrote last year for the Ency­clo­pe­dia of Busi­ness Ethics & Soci­ety. Jim Dempsey of the Cen­ter for Democ­racy and Tech­nol­ogy had the fol­low­ing response regard­ing the TXTmob sub­poena in Wired’s arti­cle, and I agree with him:

“In civil cases, the law seems to pro­hibit the dis­clo­sure of stored com­mu­ni­ca­tions in response to a civil dis­cov­ery sub­poena because the Elec­tronic Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Pri­vacy Act of 1986 pro­hibits dis­clo­sure of stored mes­sages of any kind,” he argues. “The sub­poena clearly is not enforceable.”

But he adds that the case is a reminder that fed­eral pri­vacy law is in dire need of an update to reflect the new era of mas­sive stored com­mu­ni­ca­tions and web services.

“The notion that any lit­i­gant can get any infor­ma­tion about any per­son is an 18th cen­tury rule that now can now encom­pass ter­abytes of infor­ma­tion, and I think it also has an impact on ser­vice providers who don’t want to become one-stop shops for every lit­i­gant in the coun­try,” he says.

A local example

On Mon­day, Two hun­dred pro­test­ers used email and phone calls to orga­nize their event at Fort Street Mall in sup­port of Aloha Air­lines. The US Bank­ruptcy Court is in 1132 Bishop, above the MSIS class­rooms in the Frear Cen­ter. My office is a few steps away. This Hon­olulu Adver­tiser arti­cle has details and a few pictures.

I didn’t see any­thing about the march at Dont­FlyGo. Their web site is dif­fi­cult to nav­i­gate, and the domain name is miss­ing an apos­tro­phe on the ban­ner. Based on this Hon­olulu Adver­tiser arti­cle, there’s lit­tle indi­ca­tion that local groups might try to use mobile mes­sag­ing to boy­cott go! flights.

Tagged as: backup, government, ISP, legal, mobile, new-york, politics, privacy, reliability, SMS, storage, telecom