The US government has backed away from an effort to obtain personal information about 1.3m visitors to an anti-Trump website, following a public outcry over what was widely perceived as a “fishing expedition” for political dissidents.
Federal prosecutors on Tuesday substantially narrowed the scope of a search warrant seeking information related to a website, www.disruptj20.org, that was used to coordinate protests during Donald Trump’s inauguration.
The original warrant sought every piece of information possessed by website-hosting company DreamHost related to the site, including the IP addresses of the site’s 1.3m visitors. The revised warrant excludes the IP addresses of visitors as well as unpublished blogposts or other media.
“The government has now withdrawn entirely its unlawful and highly problematic request for any data relating to the visitors of the website and any unpublished data subject to the Privacy Protection Act,” a DreamHost attorney, Raymond Aghaian, said by email. “This is a tremendous win for DreamHost, its users and the public.”
DreamHost publicized the existence of the warrant on 14 August when it announced its intention to challenge the government in court. Chris Ghazarian, general counsel for DreamHost, called the warrant “pure prosecutorial overreach by a highly politicized Department of Justice” and argued that allowing the government to obtain such information would have a chilling effect on Americans’ freedom of association.
In the court filing seeking to modify the search warrant, however, federal prosecutors said they were unaware that DreamHost possessed so much information when they obtained the warrant.
Paul Alan Levy, an attorney for the consumer rights group Public Citizen, called it a “tremendous victory for the right to read anonymously online” – but said the government’s explanation as to why it included a request for individual IP addresses in the original warrant “defies belief”.
“That any competent prosecutor could think that any web host would somehow not retain such sensitive and personal information, and [it] therefore would not be included in its search warrant, is disingenuous at best,” he said.
“The government values and respects the first amendment right of all Americans to participate in peaceful political protests and to read protected political expression online,” the prosecutors Jennifer Kerkhoff and John Borchert wrote in the new filing. “Contrary to DreamHost’s claims, the warrant was not intended to be used, and will not be used, to ‘identify the political dissidents of the current administration’.”
The government brief was filed in advance of a hearing on Thursday over the disputed warrant. DreamHost said in a blogpost that it still planned to challenge certain “first and fourth amendment issues raised by the warrant” at the hearing.
The warrant is just one aspect of the aggressive prosecution of inauguration day protesters that have raised concerns among advocates of civil liberties. The US attorney’s office in Washington DC charged more than 200 people swept up in mass arrests with identical crimes, including felony rioting.
“Despite narrowing the warrant, you can’t get away from the fact that what the Department of Justice is investigating is a website that was dedicated to planning and organizing a political protest,” said Mark Rumold, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “They’re still trying to get what I think most people would describe as core, first amendment-protected speech.”
“It was a dragnet and a witch-hunt before,” Rumold added. “Now it just seems like a witch-hunt.”