Danah Boyd, Adrian Chen, Zeynep Tufekci, Jesse Daniels (Photo: Aaron Thompson/Picasa)

National Day of Unplugging lasted from sunset on Friday, March 1 to sunset on Saturday, March 2. But judging from the smartphones, Macbooks, and tablets at the third annual Theorizing the Web conference, no attendees took them up on the challenge.

This past weekend was the first time the conference has been held in New York City, at the CUNY Graduate Center near Herald Square.

Gatherings of this sort are typically insular, academic affairs, but organizers Nathan Jurgenson and PJ Rey, both sociology grad students at the University of Maryland-College Park, have attempted to broaden the tent to include bloggers, writers, and journalists of all stripes. “We wanted to create the sort of conference we would want to attend,” said Mr. Rey.

In the opening remarks on Saturday, Mr. Jurgenson elaborated, “We would go to theory conferences, and nobody wanted to talk about the Internet." What ties the two worlds together, he added, is a concern with social justice—public intellectualism rather than institutional prestige.

(Photo: Aaron Thompson/Picasa)

Friday’s panel, “Free Speech For Whom?” was a good example of that hybrid approach.

Panelists included social media scholar Danah Boyd, a senior researcher at Microsoft Research better known as @zephoria; Gawker staff writer Adrian Chen, an editor at The New Inquiry; and University of North Carolina professor Zeynep Tufekci, a fellow at Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy. CUNY Professor Jessie Daniels, author of Cyber Racism, moderated.

Compared to the rest of the world, the panelists concurred, web companies founded in the U.S. and protected by the First Amendment are far more permissive regarding free speech. “The idea that what you do online should not affect your real life is outdated,” argued Mr. Chen.

Ms. Tufekci recalled being in Egypt and witnessing how Twitter quite literally changed what was acceptable language for people to use when discussing Hosni Mubarak. People who used Twitter and other social media were far more comfortable speaking critically of the former president even after he was overthrown than those who did not use the service.

Ms. Tufekci nonetheless qualified her enthusiasm with an awareness that the “constant affirmation of each other” in digital spaces and the “shifting of norms of what it is permissible to say” might take a darker turn. “When are we going to have a Twitter-enabled ethnic cleansing?” she wondered.

When asked what he would change about the Internet, Mr. Chen replied without hesitation, “Ban Reddit.” The crowd burst into laughter. “I’m only half joking. It’s built on bad values that I don’t respect. Hive-mindedness and misogyny are built into its infrastructure.”

Malcolm Harris, a fellow editor of Chen’s at The New Inquiry and perhaps more infamously known as that guy who pranked Occupy Wall Street, spoke Saturday on the kinds of political violence enabled by new media.

“We can tolerate structural violence but organized cadres with guns freak people out,” Mr. Harris observed. In the 21st century, character assassination is the most efficacious method of bringing down powerful people or organizations—spreading rumors and misinformation via the Internet.

Mr. Harris proposed the establishment of a “People’s Kill List,” a list of names of those who are in power who ought not to be. The list remained an abstract concept, however, as Mr. Harris refused to suggest any specific individuals or groups who should be added, even at the behest of Rachel Rosenfelt (his boss at The New Inquiry).

Ms. Rosenfelt, despite being in attendance at the panel, had submitted her question via Twitter—each of the panels had a designated hashtag for exactly this purpose. The hashtag moderator would sift through the questions and choose which would be asked, although this was not always an entirely successful strategy.

“There are a lot of comments on Twitter, but not a lot of questions,” hashtag moderator Karen Gregory told the panel on “The Facebook Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism.”

Matters were complicated further around 11:30am on Saturday, when Twitter accounts with busty female avatars began flooding the conference’s main hashtag (#TtW13) with spam. “I’ve seen it happen at conferences before,” laughed Mr. Rey. “We’ll take it.”

This was not the only instance in which the technology seemed to betray its theorists: for the first 15 minutes or so of Friday’s public symposium, the panelists were forced to compete for the audience’s attention with an insistent, distracting digital buzz — the sort that computer speakers make when a nearby cell phone is about to ring.

There too the panelists sat onstage in front of a massive screen. Enormous and glaringly white, the backdrop made the panelists somewhat difficult to look at for too long at once.

“Throughout the conference, we are trying to embody the theories that we are talking about,” Mr. Rey told me on Thursday when I met up with him, Mr. Jurgenson, and a number of other participants at a bar after they had tweeted an open invitation to come have a few drinks. “This night is a microcosm of the whole weekend.”

Data serfing (Photo: Aaron Thompson/Picasa)

That may be so, but beers and conversation at a Lower East Side bar hardly prepared us for David Lyon’s keynote address, “The Emerging Culture of Surveillance: Digital Data, Visibility, and the Web.” Mr. Lyon, a sociologist, is the director of the Surveillance Studies Centre at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario.

His address offered a survey of surveillance from the medieval Eye of God to the Cold War. “There’s no point in imagining some kind of Zuckerberg-moment in 2004,” he proclaimed.

By his own admission, Mr. Lyon is not a prolific user of social media. Thus horizontal surveillance—the modern condition of everyone watching everyone else—went largely uninvestigated.

Earlier on Saturday, however, at the panel on “The Facebook Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism” Jeremy Antley, an independent researcher from Portland, took steps towards bridging the gap, arguing that companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Google—what he called “data platforms”—are creating a modern version of feudalism. “We are all data serfs,” he argued. “Corporations collect vast amounts of data, even more than governments.”

We’re not unaware of this, either, Mr. Antley says. “The most appealing aspect of being a Data Serf,” he claims, “is the promise of becoming a Data Lord.”

(Photo: Scott Beale, Laughing Squid)

As promised, today Twitter officially appealed the ruling of Judge Matthew A. Sciarrino Jr. that required the company to provide tweets by Occupy Wall Street protestor Malcom Harris published during an October 2011 demonstration. Last month, Twitter's legal counsel Ben Lee announced the company would be appealing, but the document was officially filed today.

According to The Next Web:

The issue of the appeal alleges that Harris’ fourth-amendment rights were violated, and that he further would have been protected under New York’s own constitution should the government cede that Harris’ tweets were not publicly available.

You can read the whole appeal here.

Twitter: loves its users, hates its devs.

(Photo: Scott Beale, Laughing Squid)

The legal battle between Twitter and the Manhattan Criminal Court is heating up. Just a few weeks ago, we reported that Judge Matthew A. Sciarrino Jr. struck down Twitter's protest of a subpoena requiring it to hand over tweets by Malcolm Harris, an Occupy Wall Street protestor who was arrested for disorderly conduct during the Brooklyn Bridge protests.

Today, Twitter counsel Ben Lee announced--via Twitter, natch--that the company will be appealing Judge Sicarrino's decision, stating that, "It doesn't strike the right balance between the rights of users and the interests of law enforcement."

The decision is merely the latest chapter in the long saga of Twitter vs. the New York courts. The company originally refused to cooperate with the subpoena in May, due to the fact that Twitter's terms of service clearly state that all users own their tweets. Judge Sciarrino scoffed at that reasoning, ruling that:

The Constitution gives you the right to post, but as numerous people have learned, there are still consequences for your public posts. What you give to the public belongs to the public. What you keep to yourself belongs only to you.

The District Attorney's office declined to comment.

(Photo: Scott Beale, Laughing Squid)

Things are not looking very good for Malcolm Harris, the Occupy Wall Street protestor who was arrested for disorderly conduct for taking place in the 2011 protest march across the Brooklyn Bridge. Back in April, a Judge ruled that your tweets are not your own, striking down a motion from Mr. Harris’s lawyer to block the courts from subpoenaing his tweets.

Twitter stood up for Mr. Harris in May, protesting the subpoena on several grounds, including the fact that the company's terms of service explicitly state that all users own their content. Twitter's Legal counsel, Ben Lee, told Betabeat, "As we said in our brief, 'Twitter’s Terms of Service make absolutely clear that its users *own* their content.' Our filing with the court reaffirms our steadfast commitment to defending those rights for our users."

Unfortunately for Twitter, the company's motion was overturned today by Manhattan Criminal Court Judge Matthew A. Sciarrino Jr., who demanded that Twitter furnish Mr. Harris's tweets. "While noting that laws regarding social media are evolving, [the judge] held that public speech, regardless of the forum, does not enjoy the protections of private speech," reports the New York Times.

In this ruling, Judge Sciarrino wrote:

The Constitution gives you the right to post, but as numerous people have learned, there are still consequences for your public posts. What you give to the public belongs to the public. What you keep to yourself belongs only to you.

Based on that reasoning, it seems like the court will only be soliciting Mr. Harris's public tweets and not his DMs or private account information. Still, definitely not a good day for Internet privacy advocates.

Chief Assistant District Attorney Daniel R. Alonso provided Betabeat with the following statement: “We are pleased that the court has ruled for a second time that the Tweets at issue must be turned over. We look forward to Twitter’s complying and to moving forward with the trial.”

(Photo: Scott Beale, Laughing Squid)

You must have known those terms of service you didn't read would come back to bite you in some Orwellian way. This can't be good, said a tiny voice in the corner of your mind as you clicked "yes" on Twitter's lengthy legalese. Oh well! Hashtags! But a New York judge just ruled that the state does not need a warrant to subpoena “any and all user information” related to a Twitter account. Why? Because your tweets belong to Twitter.

The question came up in the case of an Occupy Wall Street protester who is being charged with disorderly conduct during a march across the Brooklyn Bridge. The defense's legal team filed a motion to quash the subpoena, which was just denied.

Says Reuters:

The judge compared Harris to a bank account holder who by law cannot challenge a subpoena of his records served on his bank. "Twitter's license to use the defendant's Tweets means that the Tweets the defendant posted were not his," the judge wrote in a decision filed Friday.

Twitter's privacy policy says it will hand over "nonpublic" user information if served with a subpoena. Then the question becomes, what's Twitter got on you? Private messages, drafts of tweets, maybe location information? There's a lot of data in them there tweets.

Mr. Harris's Twitter avatar. (twitter.com/@destructuremal)

The Manhattan District attorney recently faxed Twitter a subpoena asking the social media company to appear in court and to bring "any and all user information" related to the Twitter account of Occupy Wall Street protester Malcolm Harris. (No, it wasn't because Mr. Harris started the rumor that Radiohead was playing in Zuccotti Park: the subpoena is related to Mr. Harris's alleged disorderly conduct during the famous Saturday march that got more than 700 protesters arrested for walking in the street over the Brooklyn Bridge.) Yesterday, Mr. Harris's lawyer asked the court to toss the subpoena, calling overbroad, improper and abusive, according to the New York Times. But would Twitter have heeded the call?

The company declined to comment on this specific case, but a representative pointed us to Twitter'sprivacy policy, which says it will comply with lawful orders for information. The bar is pretty high; the police can't hit Twitter up for DMs on a whim. Twitter only responds if there is a subpoena or court order. "Requests for contents of communication require a U.S. search warrant," Twitter says.

Twitter's policy is to notify users when there has been a request for information on their accounts, so Mr. Harris got a note from Twitter letting him know his account was under scrutiny, which is somewhat comforting: at least you'll know when they want to know. In the meantime, Mr. Harris has changed his Twitter bio: "real stories, callous revolutionary fervor, trickery ALL TWEETS PROPERTY OF TWITTER, INC."