A month ago, the Department of Justice served a warrant (PDF) to Dreamhost regarding one of its clients. This is routine for law enforcement to make such requests, the website hosting service said in a blog post -- except the page in question, disruptj20.org, had helped organize protests of Trump's inauguration. And the DOJ is demanding personal info and 1.3 million IP addresses of visitors to the site.
[...] After questioning the warrant's extreme volume of info requested, the DOJ fired back with a motion (PDF) asking the DC Superior Court to compel the host to comply. Dreamhost's counsel filed legal arguments in opposition (PDF), and will attend a court hearing about the matter in Washington, DC on August 18th.
It's not the first time authorities have tried to pry information from internet companies on users that attended anti-Trump protests.
Source: Engadget
Additional Coverage at The Guardian and DreamHost
Related: Facebook Appeal
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15 2017, @11:49AM (3 children)
You're lying.
Read the warrant yourself, it's stated in clear text that they want to see all of the data that the protest site has, and there is not a single word in the warrant about limiting it to suspects or whatever. They want everything. Literally everything. including credit card numbers.
Specifically, they want DreamHost to disclose all of the data to the government, and then the government will seize all that it deems relevant. What's the difference between disclosure and being seized when it comes to information is left as an academic exercise. I'm sure the government will delete all of the data that's not evidence of a crime, like it always does.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15 2017, @03:27PM (2 children)
"ATTACHMENT B: Particular Things to be Seized II. Information to be seized by the government": Quoting the warrant:
Information that is not specified in the seizure but is disclosed nonetheless is specifically inadmissible in court.
The affadavit for the warrant is sealed and there has to have been a justification for that. In a conspiracy case like this it's not hard to see. They are going to be building a network of perpetrators. Revealing exactly who they have pinned so far could undermine an ongoing criminal investigation. In an hierarchical conspiracy case revealing exactly who they have information on could even potentially put people in danger as higher ups seek to severe links (that could ultimately lead to them) that will likely be exposed by these data.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15 2017, @04:43PM (1 child)
Inadmissible in court, but the government will still have it. Do you really see no problem with that?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 16 2017, @08:49AM
So? What are they going to do with it, build cases via parallel construction? Oh, wait a second ...
Honestly, there will probably be more harassment, intimidation and the finding of unrelated activities & "crimes" than there will be parallel construction.