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eftychia at 07:41am on 2009-11-15A question that came to mind this morning: if Federal authorities tried to subpoena a newspaper's subscriber list and all records of newsstand sales for a particular day, would that be considered legit? Would it kick up a storm of "WTFingF?" reactions? Would it be treated as a fairly ordinary event? Or would it be calmly fought in a barrage of motions and countermotions as folks tried to pin down exactly where the line of reasonableness is?
(I honestly don't know the answer. I was going to start out by using that question as a rhetorical device, but then I realized that I don't actually know what the response would be if the Washington Post were ordered to turn over the names, addresses, SSNs, and bank account numbers of everyone who'd bought a copy of yesterday's paper or so much as checked the headlines on washingtonpost.com. Clues, please?)
The reason I'm wondering:
In a case that raises questions about online journalism and privacy rights, the U.S. Department of Justice sent a formal request to an independent news site ordering it to provide details of all reader visits on a certain day.
[...]
The subpoena (PDF) from U.S. Attorney Tim Morrison in Indianapolis demanded "all IP traffic to and from www.indymedia.us" on June 25, 2008. It instructed Clair to "include IP addresses, times, and any other identifying information," including e-mail addresses, physical addresses, registered accounts, and Indymedia readers' Social Security Numbers, bank account numbers, credit card numbers, and so on.
Is it just me, or does the idea of shipping every single packet by way of the onion router and using anonymized payment methods wherever possible and pseudonymous email accounts, seem just a bit more reasonable than it did a week ago? Maybe not because I expect my own government to find anything they'd bother to use against me in this kind of fishing expedition, but just to frustrate such attempts in the future (uh, assuming a large majority of other Internet users adopted the same habits, that is).
Maybe all of this will look very different to me after I've slept (or after my body finally vanquishes this damned virus and I can breathe properly again). Or maybe not. At the moment I'm finding the idea of serving a news site such a broad subpoena somewhat disconcerting.
I should probably disclose that I haven't read that PDF yet and am going on the description of it at the site I linked to.
(no subject)
Hey! That'd be a great way for a slimy incumbent to get a list of personalized names to send campaign literature to! Just pretend you need to do some digging...
(puts away the tin foil hat)
(no subject)
Subscriber lists -- hmm. Newspapers, for all they want to find out everything about others, are not happy when someone wants to find out about them. Also, the subscriber list is just that: Iread Thisrag, 222 Some Street, City, State, Zip. It's not the payment records; that's accounts receivable, which is separate. I think a newspaper might do better at distinguishing personal info from payment records than online sources can.
(no subject)
Smells fishy to me, but I'm also due for sleep and didn't even take time to click the link, much less check out the PDF - and am a Canuck besides. (Whyinhell would a news purveyor, print or electronic, have its readers SSNs??)
I'll try to remember to come back to this when I have more time and brain cells.
(no subject)
That'd make Morrison a conceited ninny, but not a new variety of ninny; trying to take advantage of (real or perceived) citizen ignorance of the details of the law has been in the toolbox of (some) employees of officialdom since... well, since law began having provisions to prevent employees of officialdom from mistreating citizens.
Sunflower