NYPD demands Twitter turn over info on threatening tweets
David Lee Miller reports from New York
New York City cops will hit Twitter with a subpoena Tuesday to force the site to reveal the identity of a user who has threatened a "Batman"-style massacre at a theater on Broadway.
"This s--t ain’t no joke yo — I'm serious, people are gonna die like Aurora," the user scrawled in one tweet, referring to last month’s massacre at an Aurora, Colo., movie theater during a midnight premiere of "The Dark Knight Rises" that left 12 dead and 58 wounded.
According to an exclusive story in the New York Post, detectives immediately sent an "emergency request" to Twitter to determine the identity of the 140-character creep — but the social media site flat-out refused it in an e-mail the next day.
"We appreciate the timeliness and sensitivity of this matter, and have reviewed the reported Twitter account," the e-mail said.
"While we do invoke emergency-disclosure procedures when it appears that a threat is present, specific and immediate, this does not appear to fall under those strict parameters as per our policies."
One of the Twitter threats even spelled out the bloodshed he planned to unleash.
"Gosh I'm still making this hit list damn I wanna kill a lot of people," it read of the bloodshed at the Longacre Theatre in Midtown, home to Mike Tyson’s one-man show, "Undisputed Truth."
The response prompted the NYPD to dispatch officers, including heavily armed Hercules teams, to the theater, sources told the Post.
"We'll cover the theater until we find this guy," said police spokesman Paul Browne, adding that the NYPD obtained the subpoena yesterday from the Manhattan DA's Office in order to unmask the account holder — whose online handle is being withheld for security reasons.
"We needed a name and we needed it fast. Twitter said no," Browne fumed.
For more on this story, see the New York Post.
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