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Subpoena Sought For Browsed News Articles

Posted by kdawson on from the figuring-out-that-you're-a-dog dept.

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."

18 of 172 comments (clear)

  1. Cyberbullying at its worst by the_humeister · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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?

    1. Re:Cyberbullying at its worst by Romancer · · Score: 5, Insightful

      And it's not even a close call issue in any grey area. it's flat out threats and slander.

      FTA:
      "According to court documents, a user on the site named "STANFORDtroll" began a thread in 2005 seeking to warn Yale students about one of the women in the suit, entitled "Stupid Bitch to Enter Yale Law." Another threatened to rape and sodomize her, the documents said.

      The plaintiff, a respected Stanford University graduate identified only as "Doe I" in the lawsuit, learned of the Internet attack in the summer of 2005 before moving to Yale in Connecticut. The posts gradually became more menacing.

      Some posts made false claims about her academic record and urged users to warn law firms, or accused her of bribing Yale officials to gain admission and of forming a lesbian relationship with a Yale administrator, the court papers said."

      Law Students? Anyone hiring these people needs to seriously check their own ethics.

      --


      ) Human Kind Vs Human Creation
      ) It'd be interesting to see how many humans would survive to serve us.
    2. Re:Cyberbullying at its worst by russ1337 · · Score: 4, Funny

      I thought this kind of behavior was a pre-requisite to work for the RIAA...

    3. Re:Cyberbullying at its worst by Tablizer · · Score: 5, Insightful

      named "STANFORDtroll" began a thread in 2005 seeking to warn Yale students about one of the women in the suit, entitled "Stupid Bitch to Enter Yale Law." Another threatened to rape and sodomize her

      Hey, welcome to the internet. Somebody just today threatened to hit me with a 2x4 because I accused him of making up a definition of "science".

      --
      Table-ized A.I.
  2. Google Cache doesn't help by dereference · · Score: 4, Informative

    (All the more reason to read the web through Google cache!) You're horribly misinformed if you think that will help. Any images, scripts, or other "external" content referenced from the cached HTML is still fetched from the original server by your browser. Unless it's a self-contained text-only page (as if many of those exist) your IP address is still in their logs.
    1. Re:Google Cache doesn't help by martin-boundary · · Score: 3, Informative
      It's worse than that. Google (cache) is a single point of failure. All it takes is a valid subpoena from a court to the company Google, and Google will divulge all the information it has about an IP or a user account etc. That may include web pages visited, search terms, emails, etc., eg your whole online life.

      From a privacy perspective, it's a lot better if the information that the lawyers are looking for is physically scattered over many websites, each owned by a separate legal entity with different hardware capabilities, different backup strategies, different technical expertise, and different political beliefs.

      Remember, the company Google has enough information already to reconstruct your email conversations (if you use gmail or you exchange emails with someone who uses gmail), your searches terms on Google and partner search engines (agreements to pass along complete search histories to Google in exchange for help with searching), and the actual pages on third party web sites that you visit (world wide text ad tracking by Google/Doubleclick is enough for browsing history reconstruction).

  3. Re:How can you subpeona by rustalot42684 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  4. Re:How can you subpeona by BSAtHome · · Score: 4, Funny

    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.

  5. Subpoena for non-existent materials by cdrguru · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  6. Re:Proxies? by DustyShadow · · Score: 3, Informative

    Many of the users of autoadmit do use Tor now. Threads about it pop up every now and then.

  7. Impossible? by Fuzzums · · Score: 4, Funny

    Computers can do everything.
    And they make no mistakes too.

    Duh. We all know that.

    --
    Privacy is terrorism.
  8. Re:hmm by nomadic · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  9. Could have saved a lot of hassle... by RepelHistory · · Score: 3, Funny

    According to court documents, a user on the site named "STANFORDtroll" began a thread in 2005 seeking to warn Yale students about one of the women in the suit
    If he had just changed his name to STANFORDanonymouscoward, this would have never happened...
  10. Can't issue subpoenas until discovery begins by HazelrahXo · · Score: 3, Informative
    This explanation was posted on Autoadmit:

    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

  11. Exactly! by TheChromaticOrb · · Score: 3, Funny

    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.
  12. Text of some of the letters by HazelrahXo · · Score: 5, Informative
    Excerpt from letter to HighBeam Research, from page 48 of the Justia link. The plaintiffs actually asked for a week's worth of access logs:

    We have reason to believe that at least one defendant used your service to post allegdly tortious content regarding out clients on AutoAdmit.com and/or to email that content to third parties. That defendant posted or sent that information on March 7, 2007 at 5:23 p.m. EST after using your service to access an article titled "Ex-World Bank Official Disappears From Trial," which is found at http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1P2-915261.html.

    We hope that, given the egregious conduct that is alleged in this case, HighBeam will disclose certain information that may allow us to determine the identities of the named defendants in this lawsuit. To that end, we request that HighBeam provide us with information that identifies the person(s) using your service to locate the above-identified article, including but not limited to first and last names, present or last known mailing addresses, telephone numbers, e-mail addresses, and all logs containing the source Internet Protocol ("IP") addresses of all access to the location or file "1P2-915261.html", "915261" or other variants thereof between 12:00 a.m. EST on March 1, 2007 and 5:23 p.m. on March 7, 2007.

    Response from HighBeam, page 86:

    We spent a fair bit of time determining whether it was technically possible to comply with this request. We have determined that our system simply does not allow us to obtain the information you are seeking about the identity of a person accessing a particular story at a certain time.

    I cannot begin to explain to you the complex technical reasons for this. However, if you have a technology consultant working with you, I will be happy to put that person in touch with our CTO for a complete explanation.

  13. Not necessarily; &strip=1 by Xelios · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.
  14. well, they can by nguy · · Score: 3, Insightful

    "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.