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Subpoena Sought For Browsed News Articles
The Xoxo Reader writes "A new filing in the Autoadmit Internet defamation lawsuit (previously discussed here on two occasions) reveals how the plaintiffs' lawyers have attempted to discover the identities of the defendants, who posted under pseudonyms on a message board without IP logging. The defendants had posted links and excerpts of several Web pages that mention the plaintiffs, including a Washington Post article, a college scholarship announcement, and a federal court opinion. Now the plaintiffs are asking those Web sites for logs of everybody who accessed those articles in the hours before the allegedly defamatory content was posted. (All the more reason to read the web through Google cache!) The plantiff's motion for expedited discovery includes copies of the lawyers' letters to hosting providers, ISPs, and others. It also includes replies from the recipients, many of whom point out that the lawyers' requests are technically impossible to fulfill. No matter; the plaintiffs are asking the court to issue subpoenas anyway. This thread contains a summary of the letters in the filing."
records that don't exists?
Idiots!
If you disagree with me on social issues, then it's pretty clear that you are a narrow-minded bigot.
And the stupid and idiotic thing is? These attacks are being perpetrated by fucking law students! Although maybe I shouldn't be so surprised. You certainly, well I don't see this amoung medical students. I thought libel was illegal?
They don't have to ask the court to issue a subpoena, the attorney can just issue one themselves. And the link isn't to the motion for expedited discovery, it's to an attorney's declaration in support of that motion.
This is a pretty good reason to view the web through a proxy, or even Tor (if you can stand the performance hit you'll take).
The Illinois Toll Authority implemented the EZ-Pass system with a lot of fanfare about how no records were kept. They made a big point about how there were no privacy considerations for having a transponder (not RFID in the usual sense) in your car.
An enterprising divorce attorney then took it upon himself to subpoena records from the Toll Authority, in spite of their PR campaign and very public statements to the effect that such records simply did not exist. The attorney was awarded the records and I believe it was material the divorce proceeding.
Shortly after that, detailed records were made available in billing information to customers. I guess there wasn't any point in denying that the information existed any longer.
Everyone can be surprised by what can be found when a court orders it to be turned over.
/Big Voice/ I'll squash those little defamitive bastards if its the last thing... /Big Voice/
...just hope to god they'll get caught. This story only shows, once again, that people can to pretty terrible things to each other using the internet.
who says that the people who posted anonymously even visited the site any time close to when the most was made? I mean if you really didn't like someone you'd probably know about sites like that DAYS before posting anything. Or that they posted on the same computer as the one they found the search results? find the results at a public station and post elsewhere or vice versa?
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
If you surf exclusively through Google cache, I think that just makes it easier to resolve the correlation between sites. After all, at that point the logs are centralized and synchronized already.
Computers can do everything.
And they make no mistakes too.
Duh. We all know that.
Privacy is terrorism.
If a judge makes an order that is impossible to comply with, it's void. If he does it with malice, he can be removed from the bench.
Plaintiffs can't issue a subpoena without the court's permission since discovery hasn't began. That's the whole nature of the motion for expedited discovery.
http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=753317&mc=167&forum_id=2#9222459
After all things added, it should all fit on a single truck.
... or was it a series of tubes?
Note to self: get a sig.
"All the more reason to read the web through Google cache!"
Right...because centralizing the record-keeping of all your online activity is going to protect your privacy...
Do you vote? We're doomed.
Copy the cache URL, paste to address bar and add &strip=1 to the end. It will ignore anything not in the cache'd record. You won't see any images and the like, but you also won't end up in the website's logs.
Murphey's fighting Occam, and we're in the stands.
I submitted the story and I agree my comment to use Google cache was misleading. To the flamers, yes I know it won't really protect you and that Google isn't the most privacy-loving company in the world.
What I meant to imply was that the defendants could have been using Google cache. The defendant posted links to three articles and copied some text from each. You don't need to load the original page for that. Just the Google cache will do, and often it's faster.
Plaintiffs didn't send a letter to Google, at least not one that's in the court filing. AFAIK Google uses a very distributed and dynamic system to store its cache, so good luck finding which system cached that page at a particular time almost one year ago. But maybe they can try.
Not subpoenaing Google creates some problems, because it could be that the subpoenas have no chance of finding the actual poster but have a good chance of finding innocent readers. The plantiffs' names had been posted numerous times before, and plenty of people could have searched for and found and read those pages without any malicious intent. And of course the plaintiffs are actual people, law students in fact, so they may have had friends, classmates, etc. that innocently searched for their names as well.
But I should put "innocently" in quotes, because who knows if that is about to change.
is read Shakespeare.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
Yes, because obviously Google would never log that information into their NSA data mine.
Did the person identified by the supposedly non-existent records sue the Toll Authority then?
Google's engineers have written a special toolkit that can discriminate stupid subpoenas and discovery requests from those that have merit. Once the script determines that a given subpoena is frivolous, an automated response is sent back to the plaintiff using a standard template that combines legal terms with curse words and fills in important fields like names, dates, URLs, and docket numbers.
You can download the toolkit from Google yourself (Apache license). Do a search for friv.ol.ous.js.
I'm reading the linked article which is being targeted by the Plaintiffs. How is it libelous to note, as the Post reported, that a World Bank official, "Kazem Iravani, allegedly used a complex scheme involving several aliases, phony businesses, unwitting intermediaries and counterfeit checks to buy two horses and horse-related supplies valued at more than $20,000, according to prosecutors."
If quoting the news becomes libelous, God help public discourse!
why sites that solicit controversial posts just plain flat out don't keep log files, even momentarily (surely it's possible to configure any server to not keep any records *at all*). Granted, they could try go after the ISP, but unless the ISP is logging all connection attempts from anywhere, it's going to be a lot harder to get that information.
Even assuming that someone insanely keeps logs that long, what are the legal requirements for accurate time of day on the server (none, as far as I know)? If page entries are manually timestamped or timestamped by a javascript on the poster's machine, there's no particular reason to have an accurate clock. Was the clock on your machine accurate a year ago? How do you know? How do you prove that in this case the accesses didn't occur after the URLs were posted by people reading the posts? This isn't just one machine, but multiple machines. How do you perform a time correlation with data that has no requirement for validity?
Can You Say Linux? I Knew That You Could.
(title says it all)
-- I was raised on the command line, bitch
What they are really looking for is a list of people who accessed a resource. To what end? How do you identify your defendant? Based on what evidence? Do they already have suspects?
They are gathering information, and IMO, harming people that were never party to the original action by doing so.
I can only accept that law enforcement has the rights to conduct investigations in this manner. Gathering a list of 100 people and investigating them till they have suspects. It just scares me to think that any lawyer can start doing the same.
Until they subpoena Google. Or we find out that Google secretly turns over its data already.
--
make install -not war
I'm just about to do the upgrade to Web 2.0. I'm pretty much done with 1.0 and eager to move on. I haven't been able to get pricing on it from Amazon though.
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This is something that has always confused me about American law. I've never lived in the USA, but I have lived in a few other places (Australia, several European countries), and I don't remember ever hearing about a controversy on whether a particular piece of evidence is 'admissible' or not, although that seems to be happening all the time in the USA. I don't know what the actual rules are, but as far as I know in other countries, in a criminal case (at least) pretty much any relevant information is admissible. But obviously, if it was obtained illegally then whoever was responsible would also find themselves in the dock, in the courtroom next door.
What would happen, for example, if in the aftermath of a well-publicized murder, someone robbed a house and in the process found a blood-soaked knife and turned it over to the police? Would it then be returned to the owner, no questions asked, on the grounds that under the 4th amendment the robber had no right to search the house and seize the weapon? Or does that apply only to police officers? The amendment itself doesn't mention any such restriction, but perhaps it is implicit? What happens if a police officer pays someone else to break in? AFAIK, in other places in this situation, it wouldn't matter too much to the murder case who exactly had seized the weapon (as long as the evidence trail was clear, etc), but obviously if it was a police officer acting illegally, he/she would be in very serious trouble.
By the way, just having looked at the text of the 4th amendment, "persons, houses, papers, and effects". It seems reasonable to me that 'papers' here should refer to pretty much any communications, including telegraph, phone, email, etc. But I'm not sure that it does? Can you clarify?
For example, a police officer doesn't need a search warrant to seize something which is in plain sight, such as a joint of a table. But if that joint is concealed then if it were to be seized then it would be inadmissible.
Another example is that statements made to the police after arrest but before being read the Miranda rights (you have the right to remain silent...) cannot be admitted into court.
To make matters more complicated, excluded evidence (such as from an illegal search) can sometimes be admitted anyways for various reasons.
If you want more information try http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exclusionary_rule and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_of_the_poisonous_tree
Hey, the respondents should point to the highest office (aka President) and declare they followed His example in deleting 180 days of records.
Well, if its legal for the president to do so, then it must be OK for me...
If the judge asks them why they were so asinine, they can respond saying the judges did not nothing to prevent the president to do so, and hence by condoing a public action, the judges deemed it legal.
"Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer
I'd never looked at Autoadmit.com. I've never seen a bigger bunch of prestige queens in my life. If these really are Yale, Stanford, and Princeton law students, then why the hell are those places as highly rated as they are? This is like /b/tards for law school.
"They can't hide behind anonymity while they are saying these scurrilous and menacing things," said Eugene Volokh, a professor of law at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Seems to me that they can, both legally and practically. Anonymous speech is protected in the US. It's unfortunate that that also permits anonymous defamation, but that's the price we pay. If it hadn't been defaming speech on a web site, people might also have spread around anonymous pamphlets or sent anonymous mail.
Besides, even if this lawsuit were to succeed and even if they found the posters, the result will simply be that people will be more careful about anonymizing their IP addresses. For example, if you connect from Starbuck's, your name isn't linked to your IP.
Honestly where is the law that states that an ISP must maintain an accurate access.log for everyone using there services? My own log files are rotated weekly, and are destroyed monthly. not everyone has a massive filesystem to house 2 years of access.log's.
I believe the evidence is suppressed rather than the law enforcement agent who obtained it being punished is that punishing law enforcement agents wouldn't happen. There would be some public statement about them being bad, but privately they would be given attaboys.
"Mr. Wright. Though the court's patience is wearing thin and I see no further need to examine this witness... I will allow you this one last chance to prove his guilt. Show me a piece of evidence that provides the identities of all the people who accessed this defamatory online content."
"No sweat, Your Honor."
(And Phoenix would do it, too.)
Just another argument against IP logging in favor of privacy. If you keep logs, the courts will demand them. Heck, if you keep it in ram (TorrentSpy) the courts will try to demand them. If you're entitled to privacy on the Internet, then IP logging has to go.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
There are two ways to deal with illegally obtained evidence; that way and the way U.S. courts handle it, which is to exclude it. The U.S. Supreme Court compared the two and decided to go with the latter way. It's about upholding the integrity of the system as a whole.
From Mapp v. Ohio:
There are those who say, as did Justice (then Judge) Cardozo, that under our constitutional exclusionary doctrine "[t]he criminal is to go free because the constable has blundered." People v. Defore, 242 N. Y., at 21, 150 N. E., at 587. In some cases this will undoubtedly be the result. 9 But, as was said in Elkins, "there is another consideration - the imperative of judicial integrity." 364 U.S., at 222 . The criminal goes free, if he must, but it is the law that sets him free. Nothing can destroy a government more quickly than its failure to observe its own laws, or worse, its disregard of the charter of its own existence. As Mr. Justice Brandeis, dissenting, said in Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 438, 485 (1928): "Our Government is the potent, the omnipresent teacher. For good or for ill, it teaches the whole people by its example. . . . If the Government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy."
What would happen, for example, if in the aftermath of a well-publicized murder, someone robbed a house and in the process found a blood-soaked knife and turned it over to the police? Would it then be returned to the owner, no questions asked, on the grounds that under the 4th amendment the robber had no right to search the house and seize the weapon? Or does that apply only to police officers?
It only applies to agents of the government, like police officers.
What happens if a police officer pays someone else to break in?
Inadmissible.
By the way, just having looked at the text of the 4th amendment, "persons, houses, papers, and effects". It seems reasonable to me that 'papers' here should refer to pretty much any communications, including telegraph, phone, email, etc. But I'm not sure that it does? Can you clarify?
Yes, it applies basically to anything.
They now have their answer as to what happens when you sanction the breaking of one side of the anonymity wall on the internet. A daughter of Iran suffers the unveiling of family skeletons from which she unwittingly benefitted. Can we move on or simply require students to register on the board using student ids so there's little motivation for this kind of behavior. Mostly for fear of flame-war reprisals.
The problem is that, should you allow that, illegally obtained evidence encourages people to behave illegally - this undermines the whole legal system, especially with the fairly poor track record of prosecuting dirty cops. Better to let a murderer go free than condemn an innocent man.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Where did condemning innocent people come into it? I don't see the connection to illegally obtained evidence. I don't see why it should encourage people to behave illegally either - the only way a cop would get away with it is if they lied about how they obtained the evidence. But in that case, the exclusionary principle wouldn't even come into effect - since according to the (false) story of the cops, the evidence was legal! in other words, the exclusionary principle makes no difference as to whether the cop gets away with it or not. The only difference is that in the case where the cop doesn't get away with it, the evidence is assumed to somehow magically not exist anymore. That doesn't seem much of a disincentive to me - I'd expect a dirty cop would be much more worried about being busted than not getting a conviction.
In fact, I could even imagine the exclusionary principle being used as an excuse to not punish dirty cops. "But Judge, my client was investigating Mr X for three years, only to get the case dismissed when it was found my client obtained the fingerprints on the gun in an unlawful manner. Mr X is walking free today, and this weighs heavily on the conscience of my client. Hasn't he suffered enough?" Ok, this is far-fetched. But it seems like the penalties for being a dirty cop in the USA are not so severe, or perhaps just the chances of being caught are very low.
You should really study history some more. Allowing people to break the law to collect evidence leads to more lawbreaking, as that gets more convictions. Really, if you know that beating someone until they tell you where the bodies are, you might be willing to beat people on the off chance that they confess.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Who said anything about 'allowing' people to break the law? No one ever suggested that cops should get away with it. The topic of the discussion is the exclusionary principle - that is, whether illegally obtained evidence should be automatically inadmissible in court - not on whether cops should be able to get away with breaking the law. If you are suggesting that countries that don't have some equivalent to the exclusionary principle have more law breaking then I invite you to present some evidence. Going by the number of people in prison, the USA is leading the world, both in absolute numbers and per capita.
I just found a very interesting paper published in the Murdoch University Journal of Law: Suppressing the Truth: Judicial Exclusion of Illegally Obtained Evidence in the United States, Canada, England and Australia. Some highlights:
Hey, if you're willing to break the law to prosecute someone, as a department, why would you prosecute the cop? Best way around this is to throw out the evidence.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Sorry, I can't make any sense of that statement. For a start, the authority responsible for prosecuting the cop is not the cops themselves. At minimum it would be some kind of internal affairs department, and preferably some kind of independent commission. Secondly, while I can't speak for the USA, but in every country I have experience with, a department of the government that was collectively willing to break the law would be a serious scandal, at minimum enough to cause the resignation of the responsible minister (I guess that would be the head of the FBI/DHS/etc, in the US system), if it didn't bring down the government itself. I would have thought that 'institutionalized' law breaking was not the problem, rather individual rogues (or a small group).
Anyway, this is getting nowhere fast. Have a look at the paper in my other reply, and respond to that if you have any further arguments.
or on drugs.
If you want to get into the legal specifics of it, Libel, and all forms of defamation are Civil Torts under federal law. 17 states DO have CRIMINAL LAWS against defamation though.
For more information, I would recommend reading the Wiki article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defamation and check out this handy map on world wide defamation legality: http://www.article19.org/advocacy/defamationmap/map/
Defamation has NOTHING to do with dissenting speech, and in the US has a number of minimal criteria that must be met. For instance, saying "In my opinion, President Bush is a total douche bag" is NOT defamation. On the other hand (for sample only, I do not believe the following sentence to be true in any sense) "President Bush looks at kiddie porn, and I have logs to prove it!" could be libel, or at least it would be if not clearly presented in this context. You can insult people, you can oppose their point of view, you can let your opinion be known. But you can't make inaccurate statements about people that you know to be false in a factual manner, well you can, but if those statements go on to cause harm, you can be held liable (either civilly or criminally) for your statements.
In the United States, you are protected from libel, whether you take it onto yourself to sue the attacker in civil court, or if you reside in one of the states where defamation is a criminal act AND you can convince a DA to push the charges.
-Rick
"Most people in the U.S. wouldn't know they live in a tyrannical state if it walked up and grabbed their junk." - MyFirs