When a New York judge ruled in April that Harris did not have the standing to fight the subpoena (arguing that his tweets actually belonged to Twitter) and that there were no privacy grounds on which the individual user could refute the demand for his Twitter records, this seemed to suggest something worrying: that we have little jurisdiction over our online identities and can't even fight for our online speech in court.

Harris' lawyer, Martin Stolar, told me at the time that he planned to file another motion against the judge's decision -- to re-argue that his client indeed has a standing in fighting the order, and there are strong privacy grounds to resisting the authorities obtaining records of someone's accumulated Twitter activities (including deleted messages) without a warrant. But now it seems Stolar doesn't need to file this motion; Twitter has stepped in.

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It's no accident that the president's change of heart happened to make for a perfect sound bite. Nearly as fast as Barack Obama, leader of the free world, could utter the words "Same-sex couples should be able to get married," to ABC News correspondent Robin Roberts, @barackobama -- the president's not-nearly-as-popular-as@JustinBieber Twitter account -- was announcing "Same-sex couples should be able to get married." As of Thursday morning, it had been retweeted over 56,000 times and counting.

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But the most wildly out-of-touch element to the whole affair was what Cowley did next. He shut down his Twitter account. It's a classic response to an online attack of verbal diarrhea -- the old waving of the magic delete wand to make all the bad stuff disappear. Too bad it doesn't work.

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On Monday, a Manhattan judge ruled that writer, Occupy Wall Street participant and prankster (and, for the purpose of full disclosure, my good friend) Malcolm Harris will not be able to block a subpoena on his Twitter account, including "any and all user information including email addresses" tied to it because, according to the judge, our tweets are not ours at all.

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Granted, Ms. Love has never been the traditional SUV-driving, cookie-baking kind of mom who posts incredibly detailed stuff about her baby's poops.  But her recent slew of attention-getting Twitter insanity -- and her 19-year-old daughter Frances Bean's mortified response – suggests we are entering a new era of fail, one in which a parent's awkward behavior isn't of the adorable "What's this button do?" variety. Instead, it may be more like "S#&% My Dad Said At Burning Man."

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To hear even his own family describe him, Carroll sounds like a bit of a handful. Last month, he earned a suspension for violating the school dress code and wearing a kilt, and last fall, he ran afoul of the school administration for tweeting an F bomb via a school computer.

But Carroll insists his more recent Twitter tirade -- which Indiana News Center colorfully quotes as "BEEP is one of those BEEP words you can BEEP use in any BEEP sentence and it still BEEP make sense" -- was banged out from his personal account on his home computer. The school district says the post came from a school-issued device or the school's network. (Both Carroll and the district seem to agree that the post was not directed at any individual or the school itself.)

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Franzen’s A Great American Writer and all but I don’t give a much of a damn about his opinions on anything (see: Edith Wharton obvi). Or I do. Is it really surprising that Franzen doesn’t care for Facebook or Twitter? His overall comportment does not suggest an affinity for the levity of social networking. I can’t really say I love Facebook, myself. It has become increasingly hard to make sense of the interface and I keep getting invited to parties and readings in Bali and Temecula and I don’t live in those places, so the experience is, at best, fragmented. At the same time, I don’t need to proselytize my dislike unless I’m on Twitter. Who cares? My opinion doesn’t matter nor does Franzen’s, though he is Very Fancy, so in the calculus of mattering, his irrelevant opinion is less irrelevant than mine. Math.

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Obsessed with idea of being alone in a room w/old unwanted glassware & crockery, obliterating things till satiated, then someone else sweeps 7:25 AM Aug 3rd, 2009 from web

Consider the supermarket sagas. It was a place I spent a lot of time, both because I had young children to feed and because that’s where the pharmacy was. I would wait in line to pick up the narcotics and antiemetics, trying not to look at the varied pleasure-enhancing condoms. If my husband Kevin hadn’t “followed” me, I would have whipped out my phone to share some bitter thoughts about ribbed strawberry rubbers. But when I wheeled my cart away after begging for one or two pills to get him through a Sunday night, I did tweet:

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Politico’s Josh Gerstein reports on the extent to which the Army’s public affairs office is interested in public and media opinion of the Bradley Manning case, noting that P.R. staffers prepared daily summaries of the coverage of the ongoing legal proceedings. This bit jumped out at me:

The Army used a commercial service called VOCUS to track traditional and social media coverage of Manning's hearing. The Pentagon pays close attention to the volume of tweets about the U.S. military during high-profile incidents, like the Air Force One flyover that distressed New York City residents in 2009 …

Here (.pdf), via Gerstein, is the Public Affairs Office media coverage summary that refers to “1,045 social media conversations about the hearing.” It also notes that “the VOCUS media site listed most of the coverage of Manning as negative, the majority of the coverage about the hearing remains balanced and factual.”

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When Texas Gov. Rick Perry declared his candidacy for the Republican nomination Aug. 13, the same day as the Ames Straw Poll, those watching social streams could have rightfully assumed he had won the Iowa contest. Twitter exploded with Perry mentions, even though he didn’t participate in the straw poll, while the winner, Rep. Michele Bachmann (Minn.), drew far less attention. Social media was the writing on the wall. Perry would soon trend up in polls, surpassing Bachmann and the rest of the field. Twitter was the early — scratch that — Twitter was the real-time warning system.

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"It's always wrong, that's obvious, but I'm rolling my eyes at all the attention she'll get."

While covering the Egyptian protests back in February, CBS reporter Lara Logan was separated from her crew and endured a horrifying sexual and physical assault. And when the news filtered out from Tahrir Square, New York University Center for Law and Security fellow Nir Rosen fired off a torrent of scathing tweets about the attack, admitting "She's so bad that I ran out of sympathy for her," and adding "it would have been funny if it happened to Anderson [Cooper] too." In the wake a furious backlash, Rosen swiftly deleted the tweets, apologized for his words, and resigned from NYU. Today, he's back on Twitter after a brief sabbatical, but as he wrote for Salon last winter, "with 480 characters I undid a long career."

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The first was a piece in the Washington Post profiling the Wiretappers' Ball, a recent gathering in suburban Maryland for those who make tools for surveilling, monitoring and throttling the Internet -- and for the people who buy them. The get-together, according to the Post, featured more than three dozen countries and nearly as many U.S. federal agencies. It's a showcase event for an industry in which behemoths like Cisco, and smaller players like Blue Coat, help control and track the Internet activities of the government's enemies in China (Falun Gong) and Syria (revolutionaries).

The second, smaller development, reported by the Wall Street Journal, was that San Francisco-based Twitter Inc. had acquired Whisper Systems, a two-person firm that specializes in securing the Android mobile operating system. The firm's only employees -- the marvelously named Moxie Marlinspike and fellow researcher Stuart Anderson -- seek to make it harder for snoops to monitor who and how) you are texting, calling and otherwise connecting with digitally.

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Emma Sullivan doesn't have the fiery rhetoric of a Paul Krugman or Rachel Maddow's comprehensive grasp of the issues. She isn't Keith Olbermann or even Howard Kurtz. She's a high school senior in Kansas, a young woman just eligible to vote. But her political commentary has nonetheless created a firestorm way beyond Shawnee Mission East school.

Last week, during a Kansas Youth in Government field trip, Sullivan watched Gov. Sam Brownback speak. Unmoved, she cavalierly tweeted to her roughly 65 followers, "Just made mean comments at gov. brownback and told him he sucked, in person #heblowsalot." A teenager tweeting that her governor "sucks" and "blows" – "a lot"? Sounds like grounds for an incident of national proportions!

Sure enough, Brownback's office – the Thin Skin Division -- noted Sullivan's tweet, and contacted Youth in Government. As Sherriene Jones-Sontag, Brownback's communications director, explained to the Kansas City Star, "That wasn’t respectful. In order to really have a constructive dialogue, there has to be mutual respect." She added, "It was important for the organization to be aware of the comments their students were making."

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As headlines across the world have made clear, the legendary 84-year-old was not ousted this week because of his age or his job performance. Instead, he was fired for his lackadaisical response to charges that former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky allegedly sexually abused a young boy in a campus locker room. Though Paterno related the alleged incident to his superiors, he did not report any wrongdoing to the police. On Saturday, Sandusky was charged with multiple counts of sex abuse involving eight boys over the course of several years.

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The story in the earlier article was that our sprawling intelligence and national security apparatus was caught off-guard by social media-fueled uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa, and that they were going to take steps to be better prepared in the future.

DHS Undersecretary Caryn Wagner said the department was still trying to figure out how to use Twitter and Facebook information for law enforcement purposes. And they seem to be starting completely from scratch:

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Fiennes, who's currently playing Prospero in the Theatre Royal Haymarket's version of "The Tempest," added, "I think we're living in a time when our ears are attuned to a flattened and truncated sense of our English language, so this always begs the question, is Shakespeare relevant?… I hear it too from people at drama schools, who say (young people) find the density of a Shakespeare text a challenge in a way that, perhaps, [students] a few generations ago maybe wouldn't have."

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It's not the first time it has been asked. Gilad Lotan at SocialFlow (and erstwhile Microsoft researcher), spurred by questions raised by participants and supporters of the Occupy Wall Street protests, asks the question: Is Twitter censoring its Trends list to exclude #occupywallstreet and #occupyboston? While the protest movement gains traction and media coverage, and participants, observers and critics turn to Twitter to discuss it, why are these widely known hashtags not trending? Why are they not trending in the very cities where protests have occurred, including New York?

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2. Obvious fact of the day: A new study by the Pew Institute reveals that "30 percent of adults 18-29 have pretended to be on the phone in order to avoid human interaction." The other 70 percent are either playing Angry Birds or sexting, no duh.

3. Terrifying Twitter of the day: Courtney Stodden, the child (but not childlike) bride of 51-year-old Doug Hutchison, continues to prove her classiness online with updates like this:

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If you've had enough of the depressing news for the week, feast those things in your ocular cavities on these 10 pop culture stories that we've culled from the Internet and beyond! (But mostly the Internet.) They aren't here to make you feel OK again, but maybe they'll take your mind off the fact that the world is going to hell in a hand basket.

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