Feds Demand '1.3 Million IP Addresses' Of Visitors To Trump Protest Website

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angie
Posts: 118
Joined: Tue Jun 28, 2016 1:28 am

Feds Demand '1.3 Million IP Addresses' Of Visitors To Trump Protest Website

Post by angie » Mon Nov 13, 2017 6:12 am

While the article does not really point this out. The fact the feds wanted the IP address of ALL visitors to the web site that hosted the anti trump protest means that a lot of people that visited the hosting service that were not the least bit concerned with and did not even enter that section of the site would likely be placed on a government watch list.

The government needs to get it back into its head that it needs to have reasonable cause and be specific with what it is looking for when it want to search anything.

A simple coalition would be a person that looked similar to me stole a 42" TV set. An 'anonymous' source claim to have seen me taking a TV into my house. The police get a valid search warrant to look though my house and property for the 42" TV. During the execution of that warrant it does not give them the right to open desk drawers, filing cabinets, medicine cabinets, tool boxes, etc. Basically anything to small for a 42" TV set to fit in is legally off limits for them to search. (or is suppose to be) since a 42" TV could not fit into those locations. Simply put they do not get to go through my address book thinking that the TV might be in there and take the names of everyone I know. But the way they like to do things is the warrant says we are looking for a 42" TV but while we are here we are going to look through everything take anything we want and probably break anything else we can.

Don't try to say it is any particular political party doing these things. This problem has been getting worse and crossing the span of many presidents.

Copied from:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrew ... -overreach

Aug 14, 2017

Feds Demand '1.3 Million IP Addresses' Of Visitors To Trump Protest Website

Thomas Fox-Brewster , Forbes Staff

The Department of Justice is trying to get data on Trump inauguration day protesters from DreamHost, a warrant shows.

Web hoster DreamHost says it has been asked to hand over more than 1.3 million IP addresses on visitors to a site that helped organize anti-Trump protests earlier this year. It published a search warrant Monday signed July 12th, in which a District of Colombia court said DreamHost had to hand over records from disruptj20.org covering "the individuals who participated, planned, organized, or incited the January 20 riot," Trump's inauguration day.

That data appears to include IP addresses, emails and physical addresses of the website owners, as well as similar details on all users of the site, such as information about messages submitted to the page and when they accesseddisruptj20.org. "The request from the [Department of Justice] demands that DreamHost hand over 1.3 million visitor IP addresses — in addition to contact information, email content, and photos of thousands of people — in an effort to determine who simply visited the website," wrote DreamHost. To be clear, that's 1.3 million IP addresses that hit the site, they're not all unique individuals, DreamHost confirmed to Forbes.

"That information could be used to identify any individuals who used this site to exercise and express political speech protected under the Constitution's First Amendment. That should be enough to set alarm bells off in anyone’s mind," the company added in its blog.

"This is, in our opinion, a strong example of investigatory overreach and a clear abuse of government authority."

Disruptj20.org, according to its site, was set up to build "the framework needed for mass protests to shut down the inauguration of Donald Trump and planning widespread direct actions to make that happen." Site owners hadn't responded to a request for comment at the time of publication.

DreamHost said it would fight the order. It's already filed an opposition letter, in which it argued the government had not provided enough particularity on what data it wanted and that the order violated the Fourth Amendment and privacy laws. In that complaint, DreamHost notes that a week after the inauguration, it had already provided registration details for the owners of disruptj20.org. It appears the government is now primarily after information on visitors.

"This is pure, prosecutorial overreach that's allowing the Trump Administration to use the DoJ to silence critics," added Chris Ghazarian, DreamHost general counsel. "We must prevail because we're hoping that our country still values privacy. Our companies shouldn't have to worry about untargeted, mass collections of user data by the government; nor should our citizens be dissuaded from legally exercising their associational freedoms for risk of being exposed."

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is assisting DreamHost on the matter, but isn't representing the firm. While there's no affidavit giving a full explanation as to the government's request, the EFF said in a blog there was "no plausible explanation" for such a warrant. "There's nothing the affidavit could say that would justify DreamHost having to turn over millions of records. It's the definition of overreach," Mark Rummold, senior staff attorney at the EFF, told Forbes.

"I think one can safely draw the conclusion they're casting as broad a net as they can in investigating the protest."

The government has previously attempted to take a broad approach to gathering digital data of those who took part in the inauguration day protests, some of whom have been prosecuted for causing damage to property in Washington D.C.

In March, it emerged police had managed to search the smartphones of 100 protestors, even though they were all locked.

angie
Posts: 118
Joined: Tue Jun 28, 2016 1:28 am

Re: Feds Demand '1.3 Million IP Addresses' Of Visitors To Trump Protest Website

Post by angie » Mon Nov 13, 2017 6:33 am

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/ ... -dreamhost

US government demands details on all visitors to anti-Trump protest website

Privacy advocates call warrant for IP addresses of 1.3 million people who visited inauguration protest website an unconstitutional ‘fishing expedition’

Julia Carrie Wong and Olivia Solon in San Francisco

Tuesday 15 August 2017 09.21 BST
First published on Tuesday 15 August 2017 01.52 BST

The US government is seeking to unmask every person who visited an anti-Trump website in what privacy advocates say is an unconstitutional “fishing expedition” for political dissidents.

The warrant appears to be an escalation of the Department of Justice’s (DoJ) campaign against anti-Trump activities, including the harsh prosecution of inauguration day protesters.

On 17 July, the DoJ served a website-hosting company, DreamHost, with a search warrant for every piece of information it possessed that was related to a website that was used to coordinate protests during Donald Trump’s inauguration. The warrant covers the people who own and operate the site, but also seeks to get the IP addresses of 1.3 million people who visited it, as well as the date and time of their visit and information about what browser or operating system they used.
In America, bias, hate and racism move from the margins to the mainstream

The website, www.disruptj20.org, was used to coordinate protests and civil disobedience on 20 January, when Trump was inaugurated.

“This specific case and this specific warrant are pure prosecutorial overreach by a highly politicized department of justice under [Attorney General Jeff] Sessions,” said Chris Ghazarian, general counsel for DreamHost. “You should be concerned that anyone should be targeted simply for visiting a website.”

The warrant was made public Monday, when DreamHost announced its plans to challenge the government in court. The DoJ declined to comment. A hearing is scheduled for Friday.

The government has aggressively prosecuted activists arrested during the 20 January protests in Washington DC. In April, the US attorney’s office in Washington DC filed a single indictment charging more than 217 people with identical crimes, including felony rioting.

Ghazarian said that DreamHost provided the government with “limited customer information about the owner of the website” when it first received a grand jury subpoena a week after the protests occurred. But the government came back in July with the much broader search warrant.

“We’re a gatekeeper between the government and tens of thousands of people who visited the website,” said Ghazarian. “We want to keep them protected.”

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has been advising DreamHost, characterized the warrant as “unconstitutional” and “a fishing expedition”.

“I can’t conceive of a legitimate justification other than casting your net as broadly as possible to justify millions of user logs,” senior staff attorney Mark Rumold told the Guardian.

Logs of IP addresses don’t uniquely identify users, but they link back to specific physical addresses if no digital tools are used to mask it.

“What they would be getting is a list of everyone who has ever been interested in attending these protests or seeing what was going on at the protests and that’s the troubling aspect. It’s a short step after you have the list to connect the IP address to someone’s identity,” he said.

Wide-reaching warrants for user data are sometimes issued when the content of a site is illegal such as pirated movies or child sexual abuse imagery, but speech is rarely prohibited.

“This [the website] is pure first amendment advocacy – the type of advocacy the first amendment was designed to protect and promote,” Rumold added. “Frankly I’m glad DreamHost is pushing back on it.”

It’s not the first time that the US government has sought to unmask people protesting against Trump or his policies.
President's first Trump Tower homecoming met with mass protest
Read more

In March this year, Customs and Border Protection (CBP), a division of the homeland security department, ordered Twitter to hand over the phone number, mailing addresses and IP addresses associated with @ALT_USCIS, an account that purported to convey the views of dissenters within the government.

The account, whose username is a reference to the US Citizenship and Immigration Services, is one of dozens of alternative Twitter accounts established after Trump was inaugurated. The unverified accounts claimed to provide an uncensored view of civil servants who disagreed with Trump’s policies.

To protect the identity of the person running the account, Twitter launched a lawsuit against the Trump administration, arguing that it would have “a grave chilling effect on the speech of that account in particular and the many other ‘alternative agency’ accounts that have been created to voice dissent to government policies”.

After public outcry over the administration’s overreach, CBP dropped the request.

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