ARS | Twitter has asked a New York state judge to throw out a court order requiring it to turn over three months worth of messages posted by an Occupy Wall Street protester being prosecuted for disorderly conduct. In a motion (PDF) filed on Monday in New York City Criminal Court, Twitter lawyers argued the city's district attorney's office is overstepping its authority in ordering the tweets and other subscriber info of Malcolm Harris, whose handle on the microblogging site is @destructuremal. Prosecutors seeking the data failed to get a court warrant based on probable cause, making an order they obtained earlier a violation of federal law and the Constitution's prohibition against unreasonable searches and seizures, the Twitter brief argued.

BBC | Twitter has announced that it now has the technology to selectively block tweets on a country by country basis. In its blog, Twitter said it could "reactively withhold content from users in a specific country". But it said the removed content would be available to the rest of the world. Previously when Twitter deleted a tweet, it would disappear worldwide.

Federal News Radio | The Library of Congress and Twitter have signed an agreement that will see an archive of every public Tweet ever sent handed over to the library's repository of historical documents. "We have an agreement with Twitter where they have a bunch of servers with their historic archive of tweets, everything that was sent out and declared to be public," said Bill Lefurgy, the digital initiatives program manager at the library's national digital information infrastructure and preservation program. The archives don't contain tweets that users have protected, but everything else — billions and billions of tweets — are there.

NYT | British officials and representatives of Twitter, Facebook and BlackBerry met Thursday to discuss voluntary ways to limit or restrict the use of social media to combat crime and periods of civil unrest, while trying to dodge charges of hypocrisy and censorship that trailed Prime Minister David Cameron’s call to restrict use of the networks after this month’s riots.

The Register | Federal prosecutors on Friday defended their attempts to access the Twitter records of three WikiLeaks supporters, arguing their claims that the dragnet violates their constitutional rights should be rejected.In a 19-page filing in federal court, prosecutors said a ruling issued last month should be upheld despite the claims by WikiLeaks supporters Jacob Appelbaum, Birgitta Jónsdóttir, and Rop Gonggrijp that it violates their right to free speech. The filing came in an ongoing criminal investigation into Julian Assange, founder of the whistle-blower website.