Slashdot Mirror
US Government Has 'No Right To Rummage' Through Anti-Trump Protest Website Logs, Says Judge (theregister.co.uk)
A Washington D.C. judge has told the U.S. Department of Justice it "does not have the right to rummage" through the files of an anti-Trump protest website -- and has ordered the dot-org site's hosting company to protect the identities of its users. The Register reports: Chief Judge Robert E. Morin issued the revised order [PDF] Tuesday following a high-profile back and forth between the site's hosting biz DreamHost and prosecutors over what details Uncle Sam was entitled to with respect to the disruptj20.org website. "As previously observed, courts around the country have acknowledged that, in searches for electronically stored information, evidence of criminal activity will likely be intermingled with communications and other records not within the scope of the search warrant," he noted in his ruling. "Because of the potential breadth of the government's review in this case, the warrant in its execution may implicate otherwise innocuous and constitutionally protected activity. As the Court has previously stated, while the government has the right to execute its Warrant, it does not have the right to rummage through the information contained on DreamHost's website and discover the identity of, or access communications by, individuals not participating in alleged criminal activity, particularly those persons who were engaging in protected First Amendment activities." The order then lists a series of protocols designed to protect netizens "to comply with First Amendment and Fourth Amendment considerations, and to prevent the government from obtaining any identifying information of innocent persons."
Hmmm... you nailed publicly, but whiffed on accessible... Your no pure-blooded grammar Nazi, are you laddie?
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Since the most influential of them are appointed by the party in power at the moment, the process is subject to gaming; yet, the nature of the voting public is fickle, and when the ruling party begins to leave a foul taste in their mouths, the voters generally have dismissed the party in power in favor of the ephemeral change.
Though impartiality is a ruse, and the illusion of the change is little more than that, the balance of power between the right and left has kept the Republic safe.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Of corse he is. What would be the fun of trolling a grammer nazi-wannabe.
The expression "grammar nazi" is interesting because:
1) actual nazis had, on average, poor grammar skills. Goebbels himself (who wanted to obtain a PhD in literature but had to fall back to literary history) wanted to become an author but his grammar was terrible. His own teacher, von Waldberg, once made fun of the fact that Goebbels was a huge fan of Dostoyevsky but never managed to write down the author's name properly.
2) nazis rarely took initiatives; they had a deeply hierarchical culture with centralized decision-making. Nazism was a textbook case of corporate statism.
Therefore, a person who engages on their own in grammatical nitpicking on the internet should not be called a "grammar nazi", but rather a "grammar vigilante", which is at the opposite end of the social spectrum.
In fact, one could argue that "grammar phony" would be an even better expression since grammatical nitpicking does not aim at correcting mistakes, but is rather a thinly veiled form of virtue signalling.
lucm, indeed.