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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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday August 15 2017, @04:34PM
Lots of things like NSA mass surveillance are not directly admissible in court. And I imagine that they'd be extremely reluctant to do so even if they could. One of the reason all the lawsuits against mass data collection fail is because the plaintiffs can't prove standing. They need to prove that they were surveilled and suffered consequences as a result of such. As long as nobody can do that our intelligence agencies can party like it's 1984.
Parallel construction [wikipedia.org] is very much an accepted thing (which is absurd) but in this case I see no reason to think that's the case.
Police arrested and charged some 200 people with felony rioting in January. There phones were confiscated as evidence. By March the FBI was involved and actively working on extracting data from all the phones. In April additional charges were filed against many of the rioters including inciting riots, conspiracy to riot, destruction of property, etc. That indicates at least some of the phones had likely been breached. Last month the FBI sought to enter into evidence data that was from 8 cracked phones including 6 which were encrypted. And now we have this warrant which was signed off on with affidavit that was sealed. It's a given that they know exactly what and who they're looking for. So why not specify? I think it's the same reason the affidavit for the warrant is also sealed - naming names at this point could compromise an ongoing investigation.