Information for law enforcement

Where to send legal process

Email legal@tethrd.us, or write to NovaHawk Labs LLC, Series Tethrd, 1122 Colorado St, Unit 1410, Austin, TX 78701. Process may also be served on our registered agent in Texas at that address.

Please include:

• Your agency, your name and how to reach you, from your agency's own email domain.
• The accounts, by email address, profile address (https://tethrd.us/p/…) or member id.
• The dates the request covers, and the date you need an answer by.
• Any court order that we not tell the member.

We confirm a request by calling the agency's main number from its official website before we act on it.

What each kind of process can get

• Preservation request (18 U.S.C. 2703(f), or the Texas or New Jersey equivalent): we preserve what exists for 90 days, and another 90 days on a written renewal. Nothing is disclosed.
• Subpoena: basic subscriber information only: name, email address, profile address, sign-up date, account type, and sign-in times and IP addresses. From New Jersey agencies we accept only a grand jury or trial subpoena.
• Court order under 18 U.S.C. 2703(d) or a state equivalent: records without content, adding birth month and year, account status, communities and roles, parent and guardian links, and who the member exchanged messages with and when, but not what anyone wrote.
• Search warrant: content, such as messages, profile text, photos and posts. We require a warrant for all content, however old.
• Consent: written consent from an adult account holder, confirmed from the account's own email address. We do not accept consent for a member under 18.
• Civil and criminal-defense subpoenas: never content. Basic subscriber information only, after telling the member and giving them 14 days to object.
• Foreign governments: content only through a mutual legal assistance request or an order under a CLOUD Act agreement.

We hold no payment card data, phone numbers or street addresses, and we store birth month and year, never the day. Messages are text only.

Emergency requests

If someone faces danger of death or serious physical injury and you need information without delay, email legal@tethrd.us with “Emergency” in the subject. Say what the emergency is, who is at risk, and what you need. Our on-call staff are alerted at once. We confirm the request with your agency, disclose only what the emergency needs (18 U.S.C. 2702(b)(8) and (c)(4)), and ask you to send legal process afterwards.

We tell members

We tell a member before we disclose their information, at least 7 days ahead when your deadline allows, unless a court order (such as one under 18 U.S.C. 2705(b)) or the law forbids it, or telling them would put someone at risk. If an order has no end date, we ask after a year whether it can be lifted. For a member under 18, we also tell their confirmed parents or guardians, except one who is connected to the request.

Members under 18 and child safety

A minor's content is disclosed only under a warrant or in an emergency. A parent's consent does not stand in for legal process. We report apparent child sexual exploitation to NCMEC's CyberTipline and preserve what we reported for at least a year. Send requests that follow a CyberTipline report to legal@tethrd.us.

Transparency

Each January we publish how many requests we received the year before, by kind, how many accounts they named, how many we answered in full, in part or not at all, and how many CyberTipline reports we filed.