Here's the government attorney explaining how Twitter should do it:
> To the extent that Twitter does not, it should be
a simple process.
You have cookies associated with an
account; you have the email for the subscriber information;
perhaps you have the phone number; you definitely have the
IP addresses. Control F that through your system to see what other accounts have come from those IP addresses, are linked to that email address, are linked to the phone
number, are linked to the same cookies.
I don't profess to be a technological wizard, but
it does not seem to be a complex issue.
Reminds me of freelancing nightmares where the client would being with: "This should only take a few hours but I need a website with a simple store front and shopping cart...". The best response I came up with to these clients was: if you know exactly how long it will take then you must know exactly the steps involved and how long each takes so you can do the work yourself and you don't need me :P
So following your analogy (which I'll state upfront is a poor one), where do you think the government attorney is wrong? Because from where I sit the government attorney, if not completely correct, is at least on the right track. Other companies can piece this together (how else do they know that you are logged in somewhere else?), and I would be shocked if there isn't some means on Twitter's backend to do the same.
And from reading the transcript, it would seem that Twitter's objection is about analyzing the data, as opposed to simply providing it.
I just think it will realistically take Twitter more than two weeks to come up with this data. Seems like a long time but my experience at companies of 1,000+ is that things move very slow.
Not when it's for a court case or a legal requirement, in which case they put one or more people on it full time until it's done and make sure whoever else needs to get them the data is in the loop and knows it's a priority.
Bureaucracy is what slows down larger companies, but that's because incentives aren't aligned. When incentives are aligned and priority is understood, often that bureaucracy fades away to a large extent, even if for short periods.
> Nonetheless, the district court gave Twitter an
opportunity to purge its contempt by producing the account
information. When the court asked Twitter's counsel whether
the company could produce the required materials by 5:00 p.m. that evening, counsel answered: "I believe we are prepared to do that. Yes, Your Honor."
If I'm understanding the transcript correctly, the major issue wasn't that Twitter couldn't collect the information or needed to do extra work to collect the information; Twitter just didn't want to provide the information, seemingly so that they could Trump and have him lodge a (bogus) executive privilege claim.
Not really. It's not like this is the first time they are issued a subpoena. Any decent big tech has a decent system for attending to legal requests and, probably, a technical team on call with the power to run custom queries if necessary.
> The best response I came up with to these clients was: if you know exactly how long it will take then you must know exactly the steps involved and how long each takes so you can do the work yourself and you don't need me
I don’t think Twitter really would want the government to take physical custody of Twitter’s assets and do the search themselves, but, sure, they could have tried that response.
> To the extent that Twitter does not, it should be a simple process. You have cookies associated with an account; you have the email for the subscriber information; perhaps you have the phone number; you definitely have the IP addresses. Control F that through your system to see what other accounts have come from those IP addresses, are linked to that email address, are linked to the phone number, are linked to the same cookies. I don't profess to be a technological wizard, but it does not seem to be a complex issue.
Reminds me of freelancing nightmares where the client would being with: "This should only take a few hours but I need a website with a simple store front and shopping cart...". The best response I came up with to these clients was: if you know exactly how long it will take then you must know exactly the steps involved and how long each takes so you can do the work yourself and you don't need me :P