Last week, the New York Times reported that New York City has sub­poe­naed the cre­ator of TxtMob, a web- and SMS-based ser­vice that helped facil­i­tate pro­tes­tor com­mu­ni­ca­tions dur­ing the 2004 Republican National Convention. From the story:

The sub­poena, which was issued Feb. 4, instructed Mr. Hirsch, who is com­plet­ing his dis­ser­ta­tion at M.I.T., to pro­duce a wide range of mate­r­ial, includ­ing all text mes­sages sent via TXTmob dur­ing the con­ven­tion, the date and time of the mes­sages, infor­ma­tion about peo­ple who sent and received mes­sages, and lists of peo­ple who used the service.

The good news is that Tad Hirsch, TxtMob’s cre­ator, is refus­ing to turn over any records, at least for now. The bad news is that this sub­poena hap­pened at all, adding SMS logs to the list of elec­tronic com­mu­ni­ca­tions that gov­ern­ments want to get their hands on, next to emails, web brows­ing his­to­ries and tele­phone calls.

Another unre­lated yet awe­some thing that Hirsch has done is to make the source code open and free. Maybe I could use this to power a future project…

Source: City Subpoenas Creator of Text Messaging Code