Manhattan District Attorney subpoenas Twitter account of @destructuremal (aka 23-year-old Brooklyn writer Malcolm Harris) because of his participation in Occupy Wall Street.

[Via]

Prosecutors have subpoenaed the Twitter records of an Occupy Wall Street protester who was arrested in October during a mass protest on the Brooklyn Bridge.

The January 26 subpoena from the Manhattan District Attorney's Office seeks "user information, including email address," along with three months' worth of tweets from @destructuremal, the Twitter handle for Malcolm Harris.

Harris, 23, a freelance writer and editor who lives in the New York borough of Brooklyn, said Tuesday that Twitter sent a copy of the subpoena to him on Monday. He posted it -- where else? -- on Twitter.

"When you get an email from Twitter Legal, you assume it's a phishing scam, trying to get your password," he said. "It turned out that it is a phishing scam, but it's from the prosecutors."

It is not clear what specific evidence prosecutors are after. But the subpoena is an example of posts on social media sites posing potential legal problems for authors.

Harris said his lawyer, Martin Stolar of the National Lawyers Guild, would file a motion to quash the subpoena. Twitter has agreed not to comply with the subpoena while Stolar prepares the motion, Harris said.

A spokeswoman for the Manhattan district attorney's office declined comment.

You can read the subpoena here.

The subpoena was received via fax last Thursday at Twitter's headquarters in San Francisco, and included the following message: "Twitter is directed not to disclose the existence of this subpoena to any party. Such disclosure would impede the investigation being conducted and interfere with the enforcement of the law."

In another Twitter subpoena from Suffolk Country, MA...they want all the information for two users and two hashtags.