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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
Assuming the website is publically acecssible, of course it does.
Wrong assumption. They are "requesting" (demanding) that Dreamhost provide them with logs containing IP addresses of 1.3M people that merely visited the site (without participating in any discussion). That info is not publicly available. If it was, they wouldn't need a warrant.
Here is the relevant law:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Since there is no probable cause for 1.3 million people, the judge was right to deny the warrant.
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
Yessir. Lest we forget, the protections afforded citizens by the Bill of Rights are tested most severely when they protect the rights of the people you disagree with.
I see the President for what I believe he is, a charlatan with a magician's gift for distraction, but I would never condone the outing of his supporters' personal information in a warrant-less search.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Bullshit and you know it. There were lots and lots of anti-obama websites, some coming close to calling for armed insurection. I mean besides fox news et. al. The Obama DOJ didn't go after them at all. Something to do with The Constitution.
Russia is not covered by the 1st Amendment.
If you want to use it, you need to be a citizen of the United States or a person within its borders.
Not a guy in Russia buying ads on Facebook. They'd need to do it from within US borders. Then they would be bound by the laws related to political campaign advertising.
The headline is quite misleading, the real details are in the order that, thankfully, the summary links to.
Basically, the judge granted a protective order that lets the feds search for evidence of criminality (e.g. more info on those plans to dump butyric acid into the ventilation shafts or to chain trains), without the ability to go fishing around for evidence of other crimes they may have committed.
In short, it's a reasonable protective order that lets the feds do their job while addressing the privacy concerns. From the headline, you'd assume they lost, but if you look at the details, the feds will be able to search the site for evidence with the judge acting as an intermediary to ensure that all the searches are justified.
>Since there is no probable cause for 1.3 million people, the judge was right to deny the warrant.
He didn't deny the warrant you utter nincompoop.
To ensure that the identities of innocent persons are not revealed, the government must adhere to the following safeguards: (1) file a report with the Court explaining the government's intended search protocol and review procedures designed to minimize access to data and information not covered by the Warrant; (2) if the Court approves the report, the government may only conduct its search on a redacted data set that omits non-subscriber identifying
information; (3) upon completion of review, the government must file an itemized list of the materials it seeks to retain with the Court, and explain how such materials are relevant to its investigation and its basis for removing any redactions; and (4) only upon a finding by the Court that the requested information is evidence of criminal activity, as described in the Warrant for which this Court has found probable cause, may the government obtain any un-redacted information, such as the identity of the user.
The judge just set a number of conditions and protocols that the government has to abide by in order to minimize exposing the information not sought in the warrant.
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
Russia is not covered by the 1st Amendment.
If you want to use it, you need to be a citizen of the United States or a person within its borders.
Nope. Freedom of speech is considered by the United States to be a natural right, and the first amendment does not create it, only recognize it. In general, the USA has extended the right of free speech to non-citizens. This is not the case worldwide; for example, it's still illegal for a noncitizen of the UK to engage in "seditious" speech while on their soil, while they basically eliminated that for their own citizens some while ago.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Well, with there now being undeniable video of CNN and NYT actually being the antithesis of real journalism (which NBC is doing as well), why should they allow them to continue to spread disinformation?
Are you suggesting that CNN is less accurate than our White House? If DJT tells me one thing and CNN tells me another, I know who I'm going with. Because that keeps happening and DJT is wrong every time. He's still spouting off about America being "the highest-taxed nation in the world" and poor Sanders is stuck trying to defend it.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
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
This is the Superior Court of DC, so I think this is actually the relevant law on search warrants:
https://beta.code.dccouncil.us/dc/council/code/sections/48-921.02.html
The Constitution doesn't exactly provide a lot of details, so one normally looks at the actual laws on the subject. To re-derive the constitutional contours of search warrants from constitutional principles every time would be sort of like trying to do this every time you want to add 2+2. In short, no, it doesn't work that way.
It's normal for demands to be overly broad. They ask for whatever they might plausibly get, because sometimes the judge agrees with them and they won't get anything they don't request. This is how an adversarial justice system works. There are other models, for example, inquisitional systems, in use in other countries.
Note that I am not arguing with you about this being non-public information. You were right to correct the other poster about that. And you were right that it is, in fact, completely obvious from the fact that they issued a search warrant. The judge realized there were real concerns here, so they narrowed the scope of what was asked and are allowing the police to search it first, then unmask people later if they have probable cause to believe they were participants in a crime.
In short, it's a detailed and perfectly sensible decision that appears to be quite fair to both sides.