So following your analogy (which I'll state upfront is a poor one), where do you think the government attorney is wrong? Because from where I sit the government attorney, if not completely correct, is at least on the right track. Other companies can piece this together (how else do they know that you are logged in somewhere else?), and I would be shocked if there isn't some means on Twitter's backend to do the same.
And from reading the transcript, it would seem that Twitter's objection is about analyzing the data, as opposed to simply providing it.
I just think it will realistically take Twitter more than two weeks to come up with this data. Seems like a long time but my experience at companies of 1,000+ is that things move very slow.
Not when it's for a court case or a legal requirement, in which case they put one or more people on it full time until it's done and make sure whoever else needs to get them the data is in the loop and knows it's a priority.
Bureaucracy is what slows down larger companies, but that's because incentives aren't aligned. When incentives are aligned and priority is understood, often that bureaucracy fades away to a large extent, even if for short periods.
> Nonetheless, the district court gave Twitter an
opportunity to purge its contempt by producing the account
information. When the court asked Twitter's counsel whether
the company could produce the required materials by 5:00 p.m. that evening, counsel answered: "I believe we are prepared to do that. Yes, Your Honor."
If I'm understanding the transcript correctly, the major issue wasn't that Twitter couldn't collect the information or needed to do extra work to collect the information; Twitter just didn't want to provide the information, seemingly so that they could Trump and have him lodge a (bogus) executive privilege claim.
Not really. It's not like this is the first time they are issued a subpoena. Any decent big tech has a decent system for attending to legal requests and, probably, a technical team on call with the power to run custom queries if necessary.
And from reading the transcript, it would seem that Twitter's objection is about analyzing the data, as opposed to simply providing it.