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On 14 August 2017, the web hosting company DreamHost announced through their blog that the Department of Justice had sent them a search warrant on 12 July asking for information about visitors to the web site disruptj20.org. The web site, which is explicitly anti-Trump, helped organize protests of his inauguration. This warrant was the latest effort by the Department of Justice to compel the company to turn over information about disruptj20.org. The department first issued a grand jury subpoena in January 2017 for information about the owner of the site. While DreamHost says that they complied with the earlier subpoena, the July warrant requests — in the company’s words — all information available to us about this website, its owner, and, more importantly, its visitors. DreamHost published a complete copy of the July warrant, saying that their legal team has taken issue with this particular search warrant for being a highly untargeted demand that chills free association and the right of free speech afforded by the Constitution. The warrant allows the government to seize information from DreamHost that brings to light any evidence implicating people potentially involved in criminal activity associated with inauguration protests, including: In response to the warrant, DreamHost filed a counter motion against the Justice Department with the legal help of Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), a nonprofit dedicated to internet privacy protection. In that document, DreamHost essentially asks the government to narrow the request because, in their view, it is unconstitutionally broad: Specifically, the counter motion argues that the warrant is so broad that it violates the Fourth Amendment (which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures), the First Amendment (which protects, among other things, a citizen's right to free speech and free assembly), and the Privacy Protection Act. The EFF argues that the potential risks to a person's First Amendment rights are significant enough to require a higher level of specificity (legally termed particular exactitude) to be considered constitutional under the search requirements of the Fourth Amendment: Albert Gidari, Director of Privacy for the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School, told us he agrees with the EFF's argument: He told us that warrants this broad are rare, and they are often later narrowed by the courts: But Jennifer Granick, a former Director of Civil Liberties in the same Stanford center as well as a former director of the EFF's civil liberty division, told us it's hard to know for sure how common this phenomenon is: Bill Miller, a representative for the U.S. Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia, told us we have no comment beyond our filing, and that a hearing on DreamHost’s counter motion was scheduled 18 August 2017. In a subsequent e-mail, he told us that the hearing has now been postponed to an unspecified later date. On 21 August 2017, the Department of Justice announced that the hearing would be held on 24 August 2017 and, in an amended filing, stated that they did not intend for the request to be broad: In a post on their blog, DreamHost described the amended filing as a win for internet privacy: On 24 August 2017, Judge Robert Morin of the DC Superior Court delivered a setback to DreamHost, allowing the collection of a wide-ranging set of records from the company, which will now include emails for users who signed up for an account associated with the website, organizers' membership lists and emails of third parties who sent messages to disruptj20.org account users, among other information. A lawyer for DreamHost suggested during the hearing that the company may appeal the ruling.
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