Occupy Wall Street protester Malcolm Harris is not alone in having his tweets subpoenaed: according to Twitter's semi-annual first semi-annual report, the company said it has produced information in 75 percent of the 679 requests it has received so far in 2012 from U.S. government agencies, and fulfilled 75 percent of those requests. Unsurprisingly, the United States, where Twitter is based, represents the lion's share of requests for user information. But expect other nations to catch up. Jeremy Kessel, manager for Twitter's legal policy, writes, "We’ve received more government requests in the first half of 2012, as outlined in this initial dataset, than in the entirety of 2011." 

Twitter receives far, far more copyright complaints, reporting 3,378 takedown requests under the Digital Millenium Copyright Act. (The company joins other tech firms by forwarding such requests to the website Chilling Effects.) But the company only fulfilled 38 percent of requests to take down content under copyright complaints.

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Adam Martin