(Photo: Scott Beale, Laughing Squid)

For months, Twitter has gone back and forth with the District Attorney's office over one user's tweets related to the Occupy Wall Street protests. That user, Malcolm Harris, is being charged with disorderly conduct, and the tweets in question may help cement the case against him. Twitter originally appealed the subpoena to provide them, but earlier this week Judge Matthew A. Sciarrino Jr. told the company it had until today to cooperate or face a fine for contempt of court.

Now the Post says that Twitter will cooperate, and a report from Reuters seems to corroborate.

As the AP pointed out yesterday, as the deadline to hand over the tweets or face a fine loomed, Twitter had already started sounding like it was backing off:

Twitter had said the case could put it in the unwanted position of having to take on legal fights that users could otherwise conduct on their own.

Hear that? That's the sound of running water, as Twitter washes its hands of this whole fiasco.

Sure enough, the Post reported this morning that the company would "tweet like canaries" (never change, Post writers) and turn over the information, rather than face the fine. Reuters also reported late last night that the protestor's lawyer says Twitter plans to hand over the tweets--unless his motion for an emergency stay is accepted. But perhaps more crucial than the fine was what it meant. Judge Sciarrino told Twitter earlier this week that determining the appropriate fine would require handing over two quarters' worth of earnings statements.

Is it just us, or does that sound like one of Jack McCoy's more creative legal manuevers on Law and Order?

Of course, it's not exactly shocking that a private company would choose to keep its books closed where the rubber meets the road. And for all the questions that remain about Twitter's revenue model, it's still a business, not an NGO. But it's a sorry end to a principled stance, and judging from this summer's furor over the temporary suspension of a gadfly journalist with the nerve to criticize media partner NBC, users aren't going to take this very well.

UPDATE: Twitter declined to respond to questions about the case, but directed Betabeat to a statement from Terryl L. Brown of Harris Beach, outside counsel for Twitter, made to the Criminal Court of the City of New York. Mr. Brown framed the decision before Twitter as "a fundamentally unfair Hobson’s choice that is contrary to the core of our justice system." Since Twitter handed over the documents rather than disobeying a court order, Mr. Brown requested that the court keep the documents under seal, "without inspection or production to the District Attorney," under the appeals process is decided.

Tartan Metrics (Screen grab)

Russian news outlet RT.com has been excitedly suggesting that the TrapWire surveillance system marks the advent of an American police state. Now RT is suggesting a fairly direct connection between the shady ex-CIA types behind TrapWire and something called Tartan Metrics.

Tartan certainly uses dense doublespeak to describe itself, stating on its site landing page that it "quantifies key influencers and hidden connections in social networks using mathematical algorithms" for "un-biased output." RT doesn't note that Tartan is so secretive those interested in its services can try them for free over the web, but maybe they have more important information to impart--Tartan expressly mentions using its software and services to analyze Occupy Wall Street and related movements:

Tartan is advertised on their site as a must-have application for the national security sector, politicians and federal law enforcement, and makes a case by claiming that “an amorphous network of anarchist and protest groups,” made up of Occupy Oakland, PBS, Citizen Radio, Crimethinc and others, relies on “influential leaders,” “modern technology” and “illegal tactics” to spread a message of anarchy across America.

“The organizers of Occupy Wall Street and Occupy DC have built Occupy networks through online communication with anarchists actively participating in the movements’ founding,” the executive summary reads. On the chart that accompanies their claim, the group lists several political activism groups and broadcast networks within a ring of alleged anarchy, which also includes an unnamed FBI informant.

RT also reports a Margaret A. Lee registered TrapWire Inc. with the Virginia Commonwealth's State Corporation Commission in March of 2009. Margaret A. Lee appears to also be on the board of Ntrepid Corporation, which produces Tartan.

Simply stated: Ntrepid links TrapWire and Tartan, and the latter may be actively investigating the Occupy movement.

While there are clear documented links between these shadowy outfits, it's hard to separate fact from frenzied theorizing and assumptions made from tenuous links.

So for now just know basically that someone may always watching and analyzing whatever you do online and in public. That's creepy enough.

Image via Vice

The New York Times has an odd article out today framing data usage on mobile networks in the rhetoric of the Occupy Wall Street and the 1%. Because the more data some fat cat in his limo uses while watching streaming CNBC, the less bandwith there is for the truly needy student just trying to watch an stimulating TED talk, right?

The world’s congested mobile airwaves are being divided in a lopsided manner, with 1 percent of consumers generating half of all traffic. The top 10 percent of users, meanwhile, are consuming 90 percent of wireless bandwidth. "Some people may draw the parallel to Occupy Wall Street, and I’ve already heard comments about ‘Occupy the Downlink'," a mobile consultant told the NYT.

Give me a break. The major difference in consumption is driven by the fact that certain parts of the world have much higher adoption of smartphones and tablets, better 3G and 4G networks and plans that offer unlimited data to customers. Large swaths of the developing world are still using 2G phone mostly for talk and text.

The NY Times throws in a handy paragraph reminding us about the imbalance in the consumption of oil worldwide, again drawing parallels to a rich minority gobbling up more than its share of a limited resource.

But the way they are measuring data usage has nothing to do with scarcity. The article points out that in Finland, the average user consumes 1 gigabyte of data over mobile networks per month, ten times the European average. Does that mean users in France and England can't get enough access to the web? Hardly. We'll let CUNY firebrand Jeff Jarvis take it from here.

"The NY Times get spun by the telcos," Prof. Jarvis tweeted this morning. "I smell something rotten. Times paints users as bandwith greedy. Problem is greedy telcos not building infrastructure to provide what they sell."

Mr. Louis.

It’s been two months since about 100 people started occupying a small park near Wall Street and from there, the seeds of what appears to be a growing movement has hatched. I’ve written in the past about the Occupy Wall Street movement but have continued following it since. Strip out the political content and what you have here is one of the fastest growing startups in America and one that could redefine how business is run.

The active class

As many people have mentioned, the movement was initially made up of younger people, primarily recent college graduates who could not find jobs. But what none of the commentary appreciated (and something I was also not fully aware of) was that this was the first massive movement led by a generation that had not known a time when the internet did not exist. In my previous note on the subject, I had highlighted how much of that movement had the feel of internet philosophy brought into the real world but it wasn’t until more recently that I realize that #OWS is a breakdown of the boundary between virtual and real world.

As a whole generation has learned to chat, exchange ideas, create content, and spread messages over the online medium, they have been affected in a way that many had prognosticated but few had seen: one of the fascinating thing about the internet’s lack of ownership is the fact that it leaves all of us as owners of the internet.

Whereas some activists, myself included, once worried that it was only left up to a few to protect this wonderful public sphere that had been created, the truth is that support for an open internet, and by extension a more open society, is strong. Witness, for example, what happened last week when SOPA threatened this opennesss: not only did net people rise up and confronted their lawmakers on this but users of those services also did, generating thousands of calls to Congress.

Two things happen when someone makes that first call to Congress: first, they feel a sense of kinship with the other people who are fighting for the same cause, and secondly they feel they have a say and can have an impact in changing the system, making them more likely to be socially and politically active in the future.

For over a decade now, many have talked of internet activism but we also need to think about the longer impact that such thing has. I’d venture that the activism created by the ability of quickly sharing political stories or quickly reaching out to politicians is creating a more active political class on all sides of the spectrum: on the right, we’ve seen the rise of the Tea Party, and on the other side, we’re seeing the rise of #OWS.

What has traditionally been known as the left (the side that wants a more active government instead of a less active one) is also more in line with the model set in place by the early founders of the internet. Remember that the net has largely been administered as a common, with all parties involved being given more or less equal rights. There has been tensions when some parties have tried to reach for more rights, as can be witnessed in the recent fight over SOPA.

The people’s microphone

So what does this all have to do with #OWS? Well, let me get to that. In order to do so, we must look at the people’s microphone. What started as a way to get around laws requiring a permit to use amplification equipment has become a key component of this new movement.

A few days ago, I tweeted that “Mic Check is the RT of #OWS”. What I meant by that is that it’s becoming clearer to me is that through those words, #OWS are asking the rest of the crowd to spread a message.

From a messaging standpoint, there are a few components at play here. First, there is the use of simple words to trigger attention. To paraphrase Will Rogers, belonging to the left is not belonging to any organized movement. But the “mic check” changes that: it opens up a request for the crowd to lower their message and agree to amplify someone else’s. A basic assumption here is that while there may not be agreement as to what is being talked about, there is an agreement that the message will be relayed forward.

This is in line with the current principle of “net neutrality” many fights have arisen about online: there is a general agreement between all parties on the internet that no matter what the traffic is, every internet service provider agrees to carry it without discrimination. So “Mic Check” can be seen as a request to open a web page or application on the internet, with the assumption that communication will continue until the message has been communicated.

Psychologically, this type of agreement already primes the brain to be more receptive to an idea. The next step in what happens with the people’s microphone is the amplification, or the repeating of that other message one has agreed to carry. Here again, some interesting components happen: Because the message is to be repeating by a large crowd, who repeats it to the people behind them, it enforces an oratory style that requires something in line with the type of pithy statement that would fit in the 140 characters allowed for a tweet.

By repeating the idea, however, something else might happen in people’s brain (and this is based on the kind of psychological primers that are used in many videogames): having opened up to a mike check (and thus agreed to carry the message), the brain is more receptive to the message being amplified. When the message is repeated, a certain sense of ownership of the message is conferred on the person amplifying the message.

That sense of ownership is something that probably translates into a sense of belonging and lasts longer than the meeting the person has attended. I suspect that, through the use of the people’s microphone, #OWS is increasing the overall number of converts to its movement.

Large orgs and #OWS

Having built a relatively leaderless movement and managed to get a large amount of supporters, #OWS has attracted the attention of many established players in the political world. And on this part Thursday’s anniversary events at Foley Square, many organized labor members could be seen with placards for their own causes.

However, what is becoming increasingly clear is that while #OWS is a very inclusive movement, it is not a movement that will be easily hijacked. The unions may be allowed to voice their message but they will not be allowed to lead the leaderless movement, nor will anyone else. Partnerships and inclusive behavior is something that has been more common in the technology industry (though that is, unfortunately, starting to change among some of the bigger players) and there may be a lesson here for all organizations as to how to balance their own interest while working together with other groups (Yes, Wall Street, even you can learn from #OWS!)

Foley square may have been an organized event for the second anniversary of #OWS but the use of amplified equipment seemed to have given it less fervor, with more people milling about and having different discussions about different topics. The cohesion that arose out of gatherings of thousands at Zuccotti Park did not appear to be there at Foley Square and seemed more in line with what traditional political rallies look like than the kind of effort seen around #OWS.

However, political organization of all stripes have a lot to learn from #OWS. For example, looking at the people’s microphone I mentioned above, there may be value in considering how to drop amplified equipment from smaller gatherings (sub-10,000 people). In an age of retweeting and sharing, political images and hashtags are also extremely important. The hashtag, that weird # symbol before a specific term is a unifying force between different efforts. It has been widely adopted across most content sharing services and can serve as a way to aggregate and integrate content from many different services into a single place (or allow users to search for said content in a consistent fashion). Here, #OWS did some of its own learning: in its early days, they were gathering around the tag #occupywallstreet, which is fairly lengthy and thus steals away from the rest of the message when dealing with a service with limited character availability, the shorter #OWS has allowed the movement to recapture precious characters. How that learning was incorporated into their ongoing efforts could be seen with the selection of #N17 as the date of November 17 to celebrate their anniversary.

The tents may be gone from Zuccotti Park and many other #OWS encampments but I suspect that the movement will continue growing because, at the end of the day, what made it strong was not a set of tents and tarps but a sense of ownership of the future by all its members and that, as a society, is something we all need more of.

And now a word from our sponsors

In 1997 in Boston I had the pleasure of witnessing in person what Steve Jobs called "my worst and stupidest staging event ever." He had recently made his triumphant return to Apple, and I was amongst those psychopathic faithful that continued to use OS 9 even though it was obviously a piece of crap compared to Windows XP. But to have Steve back meant there was hope again. That our dream of using computers like they do on Star Trek, with swipes of fingers and beautiful, intuitive interfaces, was back on track. It turned out in the long run, our hope was justified, but that day he did something that nearly knocked me out of the reality distortion field.

Onstage at Macworld Boston, Jobs announced his settlement of legal disputes and a partnership with Microsoft. And in a move eerily reminiscent of his landmark 1984 advertisement, Bill Gates' satellite-broadcast image filled the hall, a looming face looking every bit the overlord out of place. He was the Orwellian big brother we had come to despise. People booed as he spoke. In the end, the deal was probably a good thing, but the symbolism was catastrophic. But we'll get back to that in a second.

Fast track. 2011. New York tech. Parties. Parties in New York tech are a double-edged sword. The city's density naturally leads to parties, since everyone's apartments too small to have anyone over. Despite the fact that techno-dbags use "networking" as an excuse for excess, networking is a vital skill for any startup in tech. In the Silicon Alley 1.0 days, Jason Calacanis said of his domination over his early competitors: "Those guys will never really amount to much because they are not part of the Alley. They have to go back to the suburbs at night to take care of the wives and kids, and I stay out all night. I'm part of the culture." There's a legitimate reason and need for tech parties. They can be an economic equalizer, giving the outsiders, the young and the poor the chance to make connections often reserved for the insiders and the rich. I made extensive use of them in the early days of building my business.

The problem, of course, is that you can get lost in them, using the legitimate utility of them to justify an utterly unhealthy lifestyle. This is the painful truth for all of us, but it doesn't make it any less true: the moment you find yourself at a NY tech party thinking about who you're going to hook up with rather than who will help your business, you have lost the plot when it comes to your startup, and you may as well shut it down or quit now. This is work, never forget it.

The other problem is that the parties can raise to absurd heights of decadence or inappropriateness. During the Dot Com boom 1.0 there were something like a dozen parties every night in New York. We're not there yet. But we're getting close. Publications like this one are covering the industry, making tech entrepreneurs, even of zero-revenue startups, bold faced names again. It woud be simplistic to assume that because there were lots of parties last time around and the market imploded that the parties are some bellwether or that doomsday is nigh. I don't believe it and I'm a giant proponent of New York tech. That's why I'm starting this column. But we're getting to a point where we need to be careful. It was easy to emulate Silicon Ally 1.0 up to now, but soon we're going to have to break from the past and blaze a new trail. And, as Jobs learned that night, symbols matter.

To that end, last week's Raise Cache party was a cautionary tale. Now first, the good: it was a charitable event, supporting HackNY, an academic-industry partnership to support education in tech, something this country desperately needs. Charitable parties are almost always above reproach. You gotta go, you gotta help out charities, and the impact that the organizers of Raise Cache have made should not be discounted.

But sitting in the Armory swilling free booze, when our Orwellian overlord Mr. Bloomberg appeared in a canned speech joking about New York tech, just days after he had taken his campaign against the Occupy Wall Street protesters to a new level, struck me as a move reminiscent of Bill Gates looming over the Apple faithful at Mac World 2007. Bloomberg, like Giuliani before him, has been a great supporter of New York tech. But whatever your opinion of the OWS movement, the police's actions have been eyebrow raising at the very least. While Fred Wilson walked the runway sporting an #OWS sign, Bloomberg's "appearance," in the wake of these actions, risks symbolically tying New York tech with a mayor who is perceived to be increasingly out of touch with his constituency.

New York tech is excited to have a mayor that supports it, especially compared to the pointless battles the city of San Francisco is waging with its tech companies. It means we're a grown up concern, a legitimate part of the city's fabric. We're learning to go toe-to-toe with other major New York industries. But we're in NEW YORK tech for a reason. Because we love NEW YORK. It's not "convenient city where lots of different industries are" tech. It's not "I'm a developer dude but I can also get a girlfriend here" tech. It's New York Tech. We love our city, and we love it the way it is. Occupy Wall Street is not the subway you're afraid to ride in 1994 for fear of getting mugged. The year before Rudy Giuliani took office there were more than 2,400 murders in New York. The last couple years have been less than a third that, the lowest since the 1930s. What we may have overlooked under Rudy is unacceptable now from a "safety" standpoint.

This is tech. We're new, we're disruptive. Many of us like Occupy Wall Street. We like their distributed approach. We like their use of technology. But even those of us who don't, we're not part of crony capitalism. Until we IPO for a billion bucks, we're not into being on the inside. We don't have lobbyists and we're not looking for unfair advantages. Mr. Bloomberg, just because we're an "industry" doesn't mean we want you to protect us from the scary protesters who might muck things up for our inside game. You're not doing us any favors down there, and while you're doing it, could you perhaps try and not pretend we're all buddies? It's embarrassing us.

At 1:03 a.m. on Tuesday, Betabeat received a text message. "URGENT: Hundreds of police mobilizing around Zuccotti. Eviction in progress!" We have no idea who was behind the missive, but it was the first news alert we got about the eviction—the text came in even before we saw it on Twitter. This is TextOccupy, a mass-texting listserve powered by Celly, a free group texting service based in Portland, Ore. that in the past has focused on use in schools.

"Celly/TextOccupy has been embraced by Occupy movements coast to coast, particularly #OWS and #OPDX," cofounder Russell Okamoto wrote in an email. "In the last week, we've sent a quarter million messages on behalf of the Occupy movements."

It's as if the Occupy Wall Street movement is building a technological infrastructure for all the mass protest movements of the future. "#OWS directly engaged us to integrate voice alerts into Celly," Mr. Okamoto wrote. "We designed, built, tested, and deployed that feature last week for them."

More than 4,000 members have created more than a dozen groups, he said, and OccupyTogether, one of the national Occupy movement coordination sites, directly engaged the startup for a nation-wide text alert system.

An iPad set up Saturday night for anyone to tweet from the protest.

Demonstrators down on Wall Street for the 'Occupy Wall Street' campaign as well as interested parties following the event online were wondering why the hashtag hasn't broken into Twitter's trending topics list, which right now feature Radiohead, Doritos and #thechew, a new talk show. Considering there is evidence that Yahoo is blocking emails about the protest with a message about "suspicious activity," it was suggested that Twitter was also censoring the topic.

Not so, says Twitter's Carolyn Penner, who pointed us to this blog post, written after people made the same speculation about the #wikileaks tag, which explains that Twitter's trending topics are based on what's breaking out rather than what's popular. "Twitter Trends are automatically generated by an algorithm that attempts to identify topics that are being talked about more right now than they were previously," it explains.

Sometimes a topic doesn’t break into the Trends list because its popularity isn’t as widespread as people believe. And, sometimes, popular terms don’t make the Trends list because the velocity of conversation isn’t increasing quickly enough, relative to the baseline level of conversation happening on an average day; this is what happened with #wikileaks this week.

Protesters have been using #occupywallstreet, #occupywallst and #ows to collect tweets about the demonstration.