Justice Department Demands Five Twitter Users' Personal Info Over an Emoji (techdirt.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Techdirt: Back in May, the Justice Department -- apparently lacking anything better to do with its time -- sent a subpoena to Twitter, demanding a whole bunch of information on five Twitter users, including a few names that regular Techdirt readers may be familiar with. If you can't see that, it's a subpoena asking for information on the following five Twitter users: @dawg8u ("Mike Honcho"), @abtnatural ("Virgil"), @Popehat (Ken White), @associatesmind (Keith Lee) and @PogoWasRight (Dissent Doe). I'm pretty sure we've talked about three of those five in previous Techdirt posts. Either way, they're folks who are quite active in legal/privacy issues on Twitter. And what info does the DOJ want on them? Well, basically everything: [users' names, addresses, IP addresses associated with their time on Twitter, phone numbers and credit card or bank account numbers.] That's a fair bit of information. Why the hell would the DOJ want all that? Would you believe it appears to be over a single tweet from someone to each of those five individuals that consists entirely of a smiley face? I wish I was kidding. Here's the tweet and then I'll get into the somewhat convoluted back story. The tweet is up as I write this, but here's a screenshot in case it disappears. The Department of Justice's subpoena is intended to address allegations that Shafer, who has a history of spotting weak encryption and drawing attention to it, cyberstalked an FBI agent after the agency raided his home. Vanity Fair summarizes the incident: "In 2013, Shafer discovered that FairCom's data-encryption package had actually exposed a dentist's office to data theft. An F.T.C. settlement later validated Shafer's reporting, but in 2016, when another dentist's office responded to Shafer's disclosure by claiming he'd violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and broken the law, the F.B.I. raided his home and confiscated many of his electronics. Shafer was particularly annoyed at F.B.I. Special Agent Nathan Hopp, who helped to conduct the raid, and who was later involved in a different case: in March, he compiled a criminal complaint involving the F.B.I.'s arrest of a troll for tweeting a flashing GIF at journalist Kurt Eichenwald, who is epileptic. Shafer began to compile publicly available information about Hopp, sharing his findings on Twitter. The Twitter users named in the subpoena had started a separate discussion about Hopp, with one user calling Hopp the "least busy F.B.I. agent of all time," a claim that prompted Shafer's smiley-faced tweet."

Comments

Re:Well...

[rtb61]

Collecting data might not seem all that harmful but when it is used to create stupidly flimsy search warrants and the agent that hates you is first through the door, hot to shoot anyone for anything (I saw a bulge in his under shorts and when he reached for them, In emptied my magazine three times in order to stop him). Either that or the beat the piss out of you and your family and shoot your pets or they destroy your career with a security warning or they destroy you finances with a drawn out fake arse criminal trial and on it goes. When they go out of control, which it seems in this case they have, they can cause an extreme amount of damage to the people they target and in the end to the taxpayers who pay the fine for their corruption.

People have every reason for extreme caution when low quality investigative agents, basically incompetents get on them and start fabricating reasons for legal attacks, fo what ever egoistic reasons those agents choose, whether it just be an easy target for career advancement (easy to fabricate evidence out of nothing and they lack the ability to defend themselves), to wanting to screw a particular persons and needing to get someone out of the way, to a straight up ego trip by destroying someone who has offended them.

US law enforcement is widly out of control, there is every reason to fear any interaction with them and to avoid them as much as possible, they are shite and you people let them turn into shite, by going performance based (more arrest more advancement and better pay, numbers count not quality), specially hiring dumber people rather than smarter people because the dumber people last longer (because they are feeding a power ego trip), cheap ass moronic training (training them to be soldiers on a battlefield rather than police officers), protecting corrupt officers to save on civil suits (totally insane psychopathic capitalism right there). Then not giving a fuck because they will only beat up, kill and falsely imprison the poor because you are not poor (until the make you poor or don't recognise you as rich and treat you like the poor).