Facebook fights New York court over hundreds of warrants for user data

Facebook says it is fighting back against what it calls overreaching information requests from U.S. courts.

The company announced this week that it was forced to hand over the data — including private photos and messages — of 381 people to a New York court last year as the state investigated cases of disability benefit fraud.

Facebook appealed the warrants but lost, and has now filed an appellate brief in an attempt to invalidate the warrants, which Facebook says are unconstitutional. The company says it was able to reveal the existence of the case on Thursday after a judge unsealed the court filings earlier this week.

“We’ve gone to court and repeatedly asserted that these overly broad warrants — which contain no date restrictions and allow the government to keep the seized data indefinitely — violate the privacy rights of the people on Facebook and ignore Fourth Amendment safeguards against unreasonable searches and seizures,” the company’s deputy general counsel Chris Sonderby said in a statement.

In fighting the Manhattan district attorney’s office, Facebook joins a long line of companies, including Google and Twitter, that have complained about perceived government overreach.

Perhaps the most high-profile example was in 2012, when Twitter said it objected to a Manhattan criminal court requiring the service to hand over the tweets of an Occupy Wall Street protester who was arrested for blocking car traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge.

The Manhattan DA says the warrants in the Facebook case were necessary to prosecute criminals.

“The defendants in this case repeatedly lied to the government about their mental, physical and social capabilities,” Joan Vollero, a spokeswoman for the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus R. Vance Jr., told the New York Times. “Their Facebook accounts told a different story. A judge found there was probable cause to execute search warrants, and two courts have already found Facebook’s claims without merit.”

But Facebook points out that only 62 people of the nearly 400 for whom the government obtained warrants were charged in the case, and that all of the data is being held indefinitely.

“This means that no charges will be brought against more than 300 people whose data was sought by the government without prior notice to the people affected,” Sonderby wrote. “... We will continue our legal fight to retrieve data that has been seized and retained by the government.”

Al Jazeera