In a candid ruling, a New York judge said a protester can’t stop prosecutors from searching his Twitter account because he doesn’t own the tweets in the first place.
Judge Matthew Sciarrino Jr. cited a “widely-believed” but “mistaken” notion about online privacy rights and said that search and seizure protections don’t apply because we “do not have a ‘physical’ home on the Internet.”
The ruling, which grows out of the Occupy Wall Street protests, reinforces a troubling legal trend that declares people have no privacy right in their online communications — even though they spend more and more of their time on services like Twitter and Facebook. Ironically, the judge acknowledged as much:
The reality of today’s world is that social media, whether it be Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Google+ or any other site, is the way people communicate..
The communications in this case were the tweets of Malcolm Harris, who was charged with disorderly conduct after marching on the roadway of the Brooklyn Bridge. Tweets, by their nature, are public communications, but a search of his Twitter account would also reveal more private information. As the court explained, “Twitter collects many types of  user information, including IP address, physical location, browser type, mobile carrier among other types.”
In his ruling, Judge Sciarrino Jr. compared Twitter and email accounts to bank records. He cited a 1976 case in which a divided Supreme Court said a defendant had no right to stop searches of his bank statements because the records were the property of the bank.
In blunt language, the judge explained:
Here, the defendant has no proprietary interests in the @destructuremal account’s user information and Tweets … Twitter’s license to use the defendant’s Tweets means that the Tweets the defendant posted were not his.
Twitter itself has a history of aggressively standing up for the rights of its users by notifying them when law enforcement wants to search their accounts (other sites like Facebook routinely pass on user profiles without notifying them).
The notification process allows users an opportunity to challenge the searches in court and ensure they are not overly broad. Rulings like that of Judge Sciarrino Jr., however, undermine that ability by saying that users don’t have a right to get involved in the first place — even though it is their data at stake:
The widely believed (though mistaken) notion that   any   disclosure   of   a   user’s   information   would   first   be   requested   from   the   user   and   require   approval   by   the   user   is   understandable, but wrong. While the Fourth Amendment provides protection for our physical homes, we do not have a physical  “home”  on  the  Internet.     [..]    As  a  user,  we  may  think  that  storage  space  to  be  like  a  “virtual  home,”   and  with  that  strong  privacy  protection  similar  to  our  physical  homes.     However,  that  “home”  is  a  block  of  ones  and  zeroes   stored  somewhere  on  someone’s  computer.   As a consequence, some of our most private information is sent to third parties and  held  far  away  on  remote  network  servers.
The judge also used the ruling to show off his fluency with Twitter itself. Referring to the microblog’s convention of using hashtags as keywords, he noted that Harris’s motion to “#quash” the subpoena was “#denied.”
The judge’s social media prowess was also on display in 2009 when he was disciplined for friending lawyers on Facebook.

via paidcontent.org

for the entire article visit

http://paidcontent.org/2012/04/24/ows-protestor-doesnt-own-his-tweets-judge-rules/

This is a guest post written by Mark Dykeman. Mark broadcasts from his brain about communications, social media, and technology several times per week at Broadcasting Brain. He enjoys participating in several social media sites, including Twitter, FriendFeed, and StumbleUpon.

Oil and broadband Internet access are the twin fuels of both brick and mortar businesses and Internet based businesses. When oil prices are low, economies can zoom at light speed. When prices are high, many businesses can barely put one foot in front of another. A look at the history of oil might serve to help us understand the importance of ubiquitous, low cost Internet access, which is currently growing at a snail’s pace in North America.

Cheap oil was one of the drivers of recent global economic booms. Cheap oil helps keep transportation, electricity generation, and manufacturing costs low – all three types of work normally require huge quantities of refined petroleum products. When the price of oil rises, ballooning as it has since the 9/11 tragedy in New York City, it tends to cause the global economy to slow down because of the compounding effects of widespread oil usage.

Cheap oil was a hallmark of recent economic boom periods, permitting stable, continued economic development. Today, more expensive oil (not withstanding any recent price fluctuations) is leading to price increases in many sectors of the global economy, slowing growth by making it more expensive to travel, manufacture goods, heat our homes, and so on. While businesses that specialize in extracting, refining, and distributing petroleum products are reaping record revenues and profits, increasing demand coupled with supply challenges has resulted in increased costs for virtually all other sectors of the global economy.

Cheap broadband Internet access has worked the same as cheap oil, powering the expansion of e-commerce, Web 1.0 and Web 2.0. At one time people were limited to dial up access for either Internet or other private online services (e.g. the original America Online, CompuServe, the Well, etc.) As telecos and other technology companies gradually built a high speed communications infrastructure –- first in major centers across the world and then expanding to wider areas of coverage -– applications gradually began appearing that could take advantage of increasing communications bandwidth. Images, audio, and video applications grew tremendously as broadband Internet access became available.
These days, can you imagine using services like Amazon.com, eBay, YouTube, Facebook, or Flickr at speeds of 14,400 baud? Can you imagine podcasting or videoblogging ever happening without some form of high speed Internet connection? Would digital photography have ever become as popular as it did if you had to wait 5 – 10 minutes to upload or download a single photo?

Fortunately for many of us, broadband Internet access is affordable, giving us access to these kinds of services. Likewise, many newer e-business models would not be feasible without affordable broadband Internet access.

Unfortunately, that high speed Internet is still not universally available across the world, nor do we have 100% coverage in developed countries like Canada and the US. Even New York City, one of the largest developed cities in the world, has less than 50% broadband Internet access in its homes, according the city’s Broadband Advisory Committee report of July 30, 2008. According to a New York Times article on the report, “the use of broadband in New York lagged behind Boston, San Francisco and Atlanta, but was more common than in Miami, Chicago and Los Angeles. Broadband connections were also notably more expensive in New York than in Paris, Tokyo, Hong Kong and London.”

A July 2008 Pew Research Center study on home broadband adoption in the United States provided some interesting insights. Although broadband Internet connections are continuing to increase across the US, broadband adoption is stalling amongst lower income Americans. Moreover, while 54% of Americans have broadband Internet access, that number isn’t growing much – cost (and availability) is definitely a factor.

Average broadband Internet costs are decreasing slightly across North America, but not enough to make some users switch from dial-up Internet connections. Worse still, the Pew study reveals that dial up Internet costs are increasing, making an inferior service even less desirable. Considering the growing advantages, if not needs, for E-Mail, search engines, online databases like Wikipedia.org, financial services, and government information/services that are available via the Web, lack of affordable Internet access widens the divide between the “haves” and the “have nots.”

Mashable’s Steven Hodson recently wrote about US Internet access being marginalized through caps on broadband usage and potential tiered usage pricing. If these initiatives go through, they will have the same effect as rising oil prices. Many Web 2.0 services and e-commerce services are like the vacations, air travel, gas guzzling cars, and other luxury items of the “bricks and mortar” economy. As oil prices have risen, the global economy has responded through slowing economic growth. Lack of affordable access to services will constrain revenue and profit growth for companies both online and offline.

We are currently seeing the economic impact of rising oil prices. While there are multiple factors in play with oil prices, including finite oil supplies and environmental concerns, many would agree that current prices provide hardships to many people. Unless broadband capability increases over time, it may become a scarce resource subject to the laws of supply and demand. If demand comes to outstrip supply like we see with oil, broadband Internet access could become more expensive. Furthermore, the compounding effects of broadband cost increases from producer to consumer might lead to sluggish growth.

Despite the costs involved, the advantages of inexpensive broadband Internet access are potentially much greater. Suppliers should work to ensure that this increasingly important service, the oil of the online economy, increases its penetration into the global economy at affordable prices. Broadband Internet access is becoming an important driver of economic welfare, just like cheap oil.

VIA@MASH

Brandon Mendelson is the coordinator for A Million High Fives. Follow@BJMendelson for project updates or search #AMHF on Twitter.

Evan White and Jason Sadler wear t-shirts. But not only to do they wear shirts, they wear shirts for a living. This year, working by himself, Jason made $70,000 selling ad space on the t-shirts he wears, and if you think the current economy has slowed him down, you’d be mistaken. Jason has joined forces with Evan for next year and the pair have already sold 164 days.

That Evan and Jason are having such tremendous success selling ad space on their backs via their startup, aptly named IWearYourShirt.com, is awesome news for you because they are succeeding in the worst American economy since the Great Depression. Their secret? “Be genuine, be yourself and believe in what you are selling.”

“Sell To Survive” author Grant Cardone says, “While the economy may be problematic it is never the reason a person fails.” Evan and Jason are proof that you can sell in any economy, as long as your approach is sound. Here are six more tips you must master in order to sell successfully online in a down economy. What else is working for you? Please leave any other tips in the comments

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Yesterday, Robert Scoble asked the tech blogosphere’s ’thought leaders’ to weigh in on this issue of the economy (and included Mashable amongst those he invoked), and today all but declared defeat in his search for expert opinion. The problem, I think, is that he’s searching for information in all the wrong places. I too went through the substance withdrawal he’s going through now a while back, and documented it here at Mashable.

Lookin’ for Expert Love in All The Wrong Places…
The grand take-a-way here is that the philosophical model for Wisdom of the Crowds breaks down very easily when it’s subjected to, as James Surowiecki put it, a crowd that is too homogeneous, too centralized, too divided, too imitative, or too emotional.  In the case of FriendFeed and Twitter (where Scoble is primarily searching), the crowd fits three of those failure criteria: homogeneous, imitative and emotional.

The tech blogosphere is just that: a homogeneous group of thinkers, coders, executives and writers who on microformat social media platforms imitate each other in a state of emotional pandemonium. This isn’t a slam – it’s hard not to be emotional when faced with the prospect of economic obliteration (and I for one enjoy the many daily imitative memes started by various members of the community).

Steven Hodson said earlier today that “the idea that a Nobel Laureate of Economics or a discoverer of the Human Genome are going to be found sitting around there computers chumming it up on FriendFeed or Twitter is ridiculous.” While it’s a true statement, it misses the point a little on the crowd wisdom theory. The limited space requires the reduction of complex ideas to a succinct short form, that in turn encourages rapid back and forth discussion. Compile the factor of hundreds and thousands of users in close quarters communicating on the same topic, and you’ve got an environment at which truth can be distilled quite rapidly under optimal circumstances.

The problem is that we’re all very clearly divorced from normal circumstances, and the vast majority are all trying to get a handle on topics and lingo that we’d have a hard time understanding in the best of circumstances. I’ve probably been researching the whole economic fiasco more than most, and while I pride myself on understanding macroeconomics better than the average bear, my head is swimming as badly as those who just get the cable news drive-by explanation.

So How do We Make Sense of This?
This is a situation where the standard Internet research techniques don’t really apply. Wikipedia doesn’t really cover breaking news that well, and most of the experts in this game have a chip in this game. Thus, it’s hard to find an idea or interpretation of the situation that’s balanced and reasonable, let alone completely unbiased.

To try and circumvent the punditry and get to a set of opinions I could easily decipher, I started reading the opinions from the various think tanks, including the Heritage Institute, the CATO Institute and the Club for Growth. They all had varying ideas about the passage of the bailout bill (and whether it was the best thing for the country), which in and of itself is no different than asking the various financial publications, politicians and Wall Street pundits.

The difference here from what you might get from most mainstream, microblogging or even many standard blogging sources is that the think tanks are organizations that I’m familiar with in terms of their guiding principals, and thus I can know and surmise the underlying reasons they make the recommendations they make. I can’t say the same about every politician or Wall Street pundit. They all have biases tied to their jobs, their staffers and all sorts of unknowns that to track down turns into a rabbit hunt. This makes an already complicated task of finding out what’s going on nigh-impossible.

Here’s What I Found Out
That’s why today I decided to go ahead and consult some folks whose job it is to follow these sorts of things. Back in March, I served on a panel on online privacy with a resident scholar for the CATO Institute by the name of Jim Harper. I gave him a ring and invited him on the program to help put this all in laymens terms.

We’ll be posting the video of that tomorrow morning, but the parameters of the conversation are what’s most germane to this particular piece.  We tried to stay away from worst case scenarios as show openers, and talked about what’s actually going on right now in his and his fellow scholars’ experience. We tried to connect the dots in terms of what the various potential scenarios mean for our industry and the general economic health of the nation.

One thing in particular that he said which puts these thoughts in perspective is that a lot of the media is centered in New York City, so the spin we see is heavily colored by the investment bank failure – which is very real, and not by Main Street banks, which as of now seem to be dealing with the crisis in stride. Because the New York City news desks only see what is around them, the calm and unemotional perspective is considerably lacking from most of the coverage.

In our discussion, though, we tried to stay away from casting blame. It’s not important which party or individuals created this mess. The circumstances that created it are important, because they need to be addressed to prevent a repeat performance. More important for our collective future is how we weather the storm and what immediate steps are needed to prevent a widespread disaster of catastrophic proportions.

If you want the audio track to our discussion, feel free to subscribe to our audio podcast feed, or come back tomorrow morning and watch the video. In the mean time, I encourage you to not take the pundits words at face value (not even my own).

Instead, for those completely lost in all this, try to use my process as a starting point to drilling down to the effects these events might have on your job, your life, and your locality. If you’re further along than I am, I strongly encourage you to share your guideposts here with the rest of us. Finding the hard facts in all of this is important, but just as important is learning how to navigate the turbulent and largely unfamiliar waters of the financial sector in ways we in the tech sector can understand.

VIA@MASH

The U.S. economy has been on shaky ground for several years. Whether it’s news from Greece or Capitol Hill, it doesn’t take much to send serious shock waves throughout Wall Street, and ultimately down to Main Street. People are nervous, and for the American worker, that means staying with a stable job until the economy turns around.

According to the Bureau of National Affairs, only 0.5% of the American workforce voluntarily left their jobs in 2009. In 2010 and Q1 2011 it rose to 0.7% (for context, the reported voluntary turnover rate was 1.1% each year from 2005 to 2007). When approximately 14 million Americans are looking for work, many consider themselves lucky to be bringing home a paycheck at all. In a world full of uncertainty and delicate economies, it’s easy to see why people want to play it safe.

But just how many brilliant entrepreneurs are waiting on the sidelines for the market to come around? After all, how logical is it to jump ship when the economic picture remains precarious? According to a recent study by business consultancy MBO Partners, approximately 14% of employees hope to go independent in the next two years by starting their own business or freelancing.

Many employers have been coping with the economic downturn by cutting salaries and bonuses and reducing the number of new hires. This leads to anxious, demoralized and overworked employees on the lookout for something better. Some employees will remedy this by starting their own business.

Do you have dreams to start your own business, but aren’t quite sure if this is the right time? If so, here are a few things to think about.

Funding in This Economy

What this means is that many aspiring business owners will need to start small and self-finance. After all, it’s more than possible to start a successful business with just a small investment. Keep in mind, however, that only you and your family can truly assess how much risk is appropriate, and for how long you can forgo a salary.

Market Opportunities in This Economy

The Advantage of Starting When the Economy Is Down

Right now real estate prices and low interest rates are attractive. You have an opportunity to get the wheels in motion now, so that your product or service/business are ready to take advantage of a return in consumer confidence.

Be Honest About Your Motivation

VIA@MASH

In a memo obtained by Gannett Blog, Bob Dickey, Gannett US community publishing unit president, blamed an economic recovery that “is not happening as quickly or favorably as we had hoped and continues to impact our U.S. community media organizations.” Dickey highlighted weakness in the real estate sector, slow job creation and less demand for autos as challenges to the organization. “National advertising remains soft and with many of our local advertisers reducing their overall budgets, we need to take further steps to align our costs with the current revenue trends,” Dickey wrote in the memo.

Despite Dickey’s assertion, not everyone is faring poorly. Kantar Media this month reported that the overall advertising market grew 4.4% in the first quarter compared to 5.1% in Q1 2010. But ad revenues for local newspapers fell 1.1% in the quarter, and the segment had declined for 22 consecutive quarters. Revenues for national newspapers fell 7.5%, Kantar reported. Meanwhile, Internet display advertising revenues rose 14.6% for the quarter, buoyed by — among other factors — strong demand by automakers.

Though Gannett’s digital business is growing, the increase isn’t happening fast enough to offset print declines. In the first quarter, Gannett’s revenues from traditional publishing fell 6.2%, to $929.8 million. Digital revenues rose 12.4% to $251.3 million, representing about 20% of the company’s operating revenues.

The move comes after Gannett CEO Craig Dubow received $9.4 million, including a $1.75 million cash bonus in 2010, and Chief Operating Officer Gracia Martore got $8.2 million with a cash bonus of $1.25 million. Those bonuses were awarded partially for cost cutting, which included layoffs, according to a shareholders proxy report filed in March.

VIA@MASH

Similar to the dashboards news outlets like Al Jazeera and independent projects like IAmJan25 and HyperCities created to track social media surrounding the Arab Spring, Occupy Wall Street maps now show where relevant geotaged tweets, YouTube videos and Flickr images are being posted, in real time.

“I don’t really have a strong political opinion,” says Humphrey Flowerdew, who started mapping Occupy Wall Street tweets on Cravify.com. “I’m just interested in technology and what practical things you can do with it.”

He and his partner Trung Huynh, who are both based in London, originally built Cravify to aggregate and map real estate listings. When the London Riots started in August, however, they realized that they could use the same technology to track Tweets. The duo created a feature that would alert users when someone tweeted from their neighborhood. Once the feature launched, Huynh and Flowerdew started spreading word of the new service through their personal twitter accounts. Flowerdew says the page had 25,000 unique visitors within 24 hours.

The Cravify riot site’s quickly accelerating userbase convinced Huynh and Flowerdew that there was a demand for this kind of mapping, and it was one factor in their decision to shift into tracking Occupy Wall Street tweets. In addition to seeing where the protests are gaining the most chatter, users can read individual tweets to see how the protests are being perceived in different areas.

“It’s just a different way to get a quick snapshot of what is happening around the world,” Flowerdew says.

The Cravify Occupy Wall Street map shows tweets from throughout the world with the hashtags such as #occupywallst, #occupylsx, #occupyrome, #occupytokyo that are frequently updated.

A similar map, being maintained by geographic system software firm Esri, is more than just a hack, it’s the company’s business. Esri makes software that has been used by organizations such as the State of Texasand FEMA to map disasters in real time.

Its Occupy Wall Street map includes information from Flickr and YouTube, in addition to tweets. Their maps can be tweaked to search for specific terms in a given area. There’s also an embed option that allows anyone to post a map with their specifications on their own website.

While its true neither of these maps show where actions in the physical world take place (Mother Jones andABC have both taken on this task), they do give an interesting look at where in the world the protests are being most discussed online and how those discussions differ.

“If you zoom out to the whole world and see the tweets coming out of American and the Western world and compare those to the tweets coming out of Asia,” Flowerdew says. “It’s interesting to see the perspective people take. And those are different than [the tweets coming] from South America and Africa … It conveys the world-wide nature of it”

VIA@MASH

Since 1999, a version of the newspaper favored by New York financial titans has become a quiet hit in dozens of smaller papers across the land, including the Jackson Citizen Patriot and the Kalamazoo Gazette. The local papers publish two to four pages every weekend of original customized content from Wall Street Journal writers that cover business and personal finance issues.

WSJ Sunday editor, David Crook, says the content carries the same sophistication as the Journal’s regular fare but targets a different demographic.

“We ask the writers to take out a zero. The readers may not have $50,000 but they do have $5,000.”

The partnership program, which the Journal says reaches more than 7 million readers through 62 newspapers, provides the publishers with easy-to-load content.

Many local papers also partner with the Journal in a program to share money from national advertisers. Crook says revenue from Wall Street Journal Sunday is growing even though circulation has peaked, and that the program is a way to introduce the brand to millions of new readers.

The weekend pairing of Wall Street and Main Street appears to be a perfect marriage save for one hitch — the Journal has cold feet when it comes to digital. For now, the Journal will not provide its partners with digital copy for their websites. “We need to grow our digital base as much as they need it,” explained Crook.

The decision is a disappointment to people like Todd Benoit, Director of News and New Media at the Bangor Daily News. He says that the Journal’s weekend pages offer hard-to-get content at a “very fair price” to the newspaper’s aging readers, but that there is digital demand too.

“Tell them we would love to get the online version,” said Benoit.

VIA@PC