Will Twitter's lax data ownership policy result in jail time?

Update: My real-time traffic feed says it all. 🙂 Thanks for the mention and link-love M.G. and Techcrunch.

Two people died and 19 passed out at an Arizona sweat lodge last night. The author who hosted the event is James Arthur Ray and is an avid Twitterer. He deleted his 10 most recent tweets after the deaths, but Twitter search still has them cached. I’ve been aware of this for a while because every now and then I’ll go flying into asshole mode, post a tweet and then delete it within the hour. But it remains in Twitter search for all to see.

But I suspect this case of losing control of your data is going to show up in court and be very high profile for Twitter. James most recent tweets are shown in the screenshot below. The two most recent tweets are the pertinent ones.