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: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday August 15 2017, @03:18PM
... since it started about a century ago. The closest anybody has ever come to stopping federal government surveillance of everybody:
1. The Church Committee, who in 1975 did a detailed report on the activities of the 3-letter agencies. Nothing came of it after that report, because the Ford administration decided to completely ignore the findings and Congress was unwilling to act against the 3-letter agencies.
2. The defunding of the "Total Information Awareness" program by Congress in 2003. The Bush administration promptly renamed it to "Terrorism Information Awareness", reshuffled the budget around, and continued exactly like they had before.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.