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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."
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?
You must be new here. Convince the technologically-illiterate judge that they *do* exist, and then punish people for not providing them. Convincing technologically-illiterate judges of things that are simply not true has been going on for a while now.
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).
No, no, they should want a copy of the internet, every last bit of it. That should wrap up all possible angles once and for all.
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.
Unless there is some sort of local rule or local law I'm not noticing that's not right at all. For parties attorneys can make requests without going to a court. But, for non-parties, which these miscellaneous ISPs would be, they need a subpoena from the court to get the info. If the holders of the info are parties then yes the attorneys could get it by just asking. Assuming the other side doesn't refuse for whatever reason they might have, then a judge would be called in to settle the fight.
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.
Unless there is some sort of local rule or local law I'm not noticing that's not right at all. For parties attorneys can make requests without going to a court. But, for non-parties, which these miscellaneous ISPs would be, they need a subpoena from the court to get the info. If the holders of the info are parties then yes the attorneys could get it by just asking. Assuming the other side doesn't refuse for whatever reason they might have, then a judge would be called in to settle the fight.
Under Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 45 an attorney can sign and issue subpoenas for third parties, as an officer of the court. I know it's the same for my state, and considering most states base their rules to a large extent on the Federal ones, I'm assuming it's the same for most jurisdictions.
Just because some people decide to treat each other like dicks online doesn't mean that everyone should be easily identifiable. How would sites like Wikileaks work if everyone could be punished for rubbing someone the wrong way?
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.
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.
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.
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
"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.