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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."
Sorry, but I know of NO 'public' websites that publish their log files, that is just ill-informed dumbassery, which must be very common in russian troll farms
LOL no the only thing that suddenly and mysteriously changed was your perception of the issue. Retroactively. If you can dig deep into your suppressed memories, you might remember free speech cages, and the right wanting to run the bill of rights through a crosscut shredder in the name of stopping those durn Muslim terr'ists under Dubya. Back when the mass surveillance kicked into high gear, that the right hardly ever complained about, even under Obama. Remember that?
Heck, remember when the right had this conspiracy theory that net neutrality was an attempt to bring back the Fairness Doctrine and that was considered a Very Bad Thing? Now the Golfer in Chief talks very plainly about bringing back the Fairness Doctrine in all but name, and nobody on the right bats an eye. One good thing that's come from the Senile Racist Uncle regime is that the shameless, all-encompassing hypocrisy of the right has been laid bare for all to see.
I'm still not sure what the right wants done to prevent boycotts, these days they're always complaining about people's freedom of speech and association when companies are pressured to fire outspoken deplorables in their employ like James Damore and Brendan Eich. Maybe an anti-boycott tribunal to force business relationships to continue when there's evidence of a political motive when ceasing them. Doesn't sound very constitution-friendly to me, but again, the right is very hypocritical about these things. They didn't make a peep about Jemele Hill after all.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Sadly, there aren't a lot of good guides that go into how it works that aren't overly technical. That said, I think that this info on search warrants covers the basics pretty well. As far as different justice systems go, I think, this article should be pretty readable.
To get a any sense of how things normally work, you pretty much have to read a lot of cases. That's harder these days because most news stories don't bother to link to whatever they're discussing, but I will give credit to this submission for linking to a proper source, at least.