District Attorney subpoenas a parody account on Twitter

In a peculiar turn of events, the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office has issued a subpoena for a parody Twitter account in relation to the July incident that saw white flags placed on top of the Brooklyn Bridge. According to The New York Times, the subpoena was issued to the @BicycleLobby Twitter account on Friday, a move intended to reveal the identity of the person or persons behind the posts. The subpoena’s existence seems to indicate that investigators believe those behind the account could potentially be helpful in determining who placed the flags on the bridge.

The Twitter account purportedly representing an “all-powerful” coalition of radical cyclists has claimed responsibility for knocking out Metro-North Railroad service, swinging the World Series and strong-arming Bruce Springsteen into changing a song title to “Thunder Lane.” So when the account, @BicycleLobby, wrote on Twitter last month that it had placed white flags atop the Brooklyn Bridge “to signal our complete surrender” of the bridge’s bicycle path to pedestrians, most followers of the self-described “parody account” allowed themselves a chuckle at the several news organizations that reported the remark as a proper confession before backtracking. On Friday, though, with the authorities still searching for the perpetrators in the flag affair, it seemed that @BicycleLobby had not been cleared. Steve Vaccaro, a lawyer for the account’s author, who has remained anonymous, said Twitter had received a subpoena from the Manhattan district attorney’s office in a bid to identify his client. “He’s claimed credit for the moon landing, for the faking of President Obama’s birth certificate, for the crash of the New York Times website,” Mr. Vaccaro said. “It should be transparently clear to anyone that this was a joke.” The district attorney’s office declined to comment.