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| Name: |
lotowner
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| Subject: |
Intrusions Into Freedoms
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Date:
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11/10/2009 5:25:01 PM
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Just an example of what COULD happen in this country!
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 grand jury subpoena also required the Philadelphia-based Indymedia.us Web site "not to disclose the existence of this request" unless authorized by the Justice Department, a gag order that presents an unusual quandary for any news organization.
Kristina Clair, a 34-year old Linux administrator living in Philadelphia who provides free server space for Indymedia.us, said she was shocked to receive the Justice Department's subpoena. (The Independent Media Center is a left-of-center amalgamation of journalists and advocates that – according to their principles of unity and mission statement – work toward "promoting social and economic justice" and "social change.")
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.
"I didn't think anything we were doing was worthy of any (federal) attention," Clair said in a telephone interview with CBSNews.com on Monday. After talking to other Indymedia volunteers, Clair ended up calling the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco, which represented her at no cost.
Under long-standing Justice Department guidelines, subpoenas to members of the news media are supposed to receive special treatment. One portion of the guidelines, for instance, says that "no subpoena may be issued to any member of the news media" without "the express authorization of the attorney general" – that would be current attorney general Eric Holder – and subpoenas should be "directed at material information regarding a limited subject matter."
Still unclear is what criminal investigation U.S. Attorney Morrison was pursuing. Last Friday, a spokeswoman initially promised a response, but Morrison sent e-mail on Monday evening saying: "We have no comment." The Justice Department in Washington, D.C. also declined to respond.
Kevin Bankston, a senior staff attorney at the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation, replied to the Justice Department on behalf of his client in a February 2009 letter (PDF) outlining what he described as a series of problems with the subpoena, including that it was not personally served, that a judge-issued court order would be required for the full logs, and that Indymedia did not store logs in the first place.
Morrison replied in a one-sentence letter saying the subpoena had been withdrawn. Around the same time, according to the EFF, the group had a series of discussions with assistant U.S. attorneys in Morrison's office who threatened Clair with possible prosecution for obstruction of justice if she disclosed the existence of the already-withdrawn subpoena -- claiming it "may endanger someone's health" and would have a "human cost."
Lucy Dalglish, the executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of The Press, said a gag order to a news organization wouldn't stand up in court: "If you get a subpoena and you're a journalist, they can't gag you."
Dalglish said that a subpoena being issued and withdrawn is not unprecedented. "I have seen any number of these things withdrawn when counsel for someone who is claiming a reporter's privilege says, 'Can you tell me the date you got approval from the attorney general's office'... I'm willing to chalk this up to bad lawyering on the part of the DOJ, or just not thinking."
Making this investigation more mysterious is that Indymedia.us is an aggregation site, meaning articles that appear on it were published somewhere else first, and there's no hint about what sparked the criminal probe. Clair, the system administrator, says that no IP (Internet Protocol) addresses are recorded for Indymedia.us, and non-IP address logs are kept for a few weeks and then discarded.
EFF's Bankston wrote a second letter to the government saying that, if it needed to muzzle Indymedia, it should apply for a gag order under the section of federal law that clearly permits such an order to be issued. Bankston's plan: To challenge that law on First Amendment grounds.
But the Justice Department never replied. "This is the first time we've seen them try to get the IP address of everyone who visited a particular site," Bankston said. "That it was a news organization was an additional troubling fact that implicates First Amendment rights."
This is not, however, the first time that the Feds have focused on Indymedia -- a Web site whose authors sometimes blur the line between journalism, advocacy, and on-the-streets activism. In 2004, the Justice Department sent a grand jury subpoena asking for information about who posted lists of Republican delegates while urging they be given an unwelcome reception at the party's convention in New York City that year. A Indymedia hosting service in Texas once received a subpoena asking for server logs in relation to an investigation of an attempted murder in Italy.
Bankston has written a longer description of the exchange of letters with the Justice Department, which he hopes will raise awareness of how others should respond to similar legal demands for Web logs, customer records, and compulsory silence. "Our fear is that this kind of bogus gag order is much more common than one would hope, considering they're legally baseless," Bankston says. "We're telling this story in hopes that more providers will press back and go public when the government demands their silence."
Update 1:59pm E.T.: A Justice Department official familiar with this subpoena just told me that the attorney general's office never saw it and that it had not been submitted to the department's headquarters in Washington, D.C. for review. If that's correct, it suggests that U.S. Attorney Tim Morrison and Assistant U.S. Attorney Doris Pryor did not follow department regulations requiring the "express authorization of the attorney general" for media subpoenas -- and it means that neither Attorney General Eric Holder nor Acting Attorney General Mark Filip were involved. I wouldn't be surprised to see an internal investigation by the Office of Professional Responsibility; my source would not confirm or deny that.
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| Name: |
MAJ USA RET
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| Subject: |
Intrusions Into Freedoms
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Date:
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11/11/2009 9:19:17 AM
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The fourth estate is indeed the last bastion of freedom. The Indymedia is a liberal website. Though I vehemently disagree with that sort of activism, I would never shut them down. We ALL have first amendment rights.
The minute you hear “Shut up!” you know that you are hearing a superior, in authority, telling someone, whom he or she considers inferior, to reassume their submissive demeanor. Authority in government is allowed by the people… NO, that has not faded completely. The media is the path to rekindle the spirit of America.
There is no dearth of patriots, though we have been perhaps too reserved. The Constitution provides for Plan B in the Second Amendment (Article the fourth [Amendment II]). God help us if that becomes necessary.
Is the concept of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” less applicable or appropriate than in 1776? Is the brightness of biological existence dimmed in the intervening 233 years? Are the needs of the masses so great that the freedom, industry, and responsibility of the individual should be carved away? Is the striving spirit of the modern man so objectionable that it must be subdued?
No! We have been desensitized to behave as sheep. We are wool and meat and the government wants to decide the time to shear and the time to slaughter.
Is that so? Thus, written by very astute men in 1776: “…That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness…”
I am not calling for revolution. But, the current Executive and Legislative branches are building a case for it.
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| Name: |
Old Diver
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| Subject: |
Intrusions Into Freedoms
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Date:
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11/12/2009 10:05:25 AM
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The Declaration of Independence is, in effect, America's birth certificate. It clearly spells out the right of the people to alter or abolish any government that becomes opperssive. I have always wondered what would have happened if the South had gone to court rather than to war.
Given todays climate though, the ruling class seems little bothered with something as inconvenient as the Constitution. Their high handed acts are far more like Stalin than Jefferson.
In your wildest dreams did you ever think you would see the government seize auto companies, banks, property etc without due process of law?
We need to flood them with law suits, tea party protests, letters and every other legal means to stop their destruction of our country. God forbid that we have to resort to the 2nd ammendment, however, in their great wisdom, with that the founding fathers poisoner the well for any tyrant.
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| Name: |
MAJ USA RET
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| Subject: |
Diver
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Date:
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11/12/2009 10:30:50 AM
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Diver, you sound like a veteran. Did you, by any chance, go through Indian Head?
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| Name: |
MAJ USA RET
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Ah!
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Date:
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11/12/2009 10:32:59 AM
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Oops! Sorry for the non sequitur.
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| Name: |
Old Diver
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| Subject: |
Diver
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Date:
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11/14/2009 11:48:09 PM
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Yeh, USAF 61-65 Worked on Bomarc missles.
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| Name: |
MAJ USA RET
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| Subject: |
Diver
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Date:
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11/15/2009 9:06:33 AM
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BOMARC! Yer an ANCIENT diver. I was a teenager then and Polaris was in sea trials. My father was at Key West TEVDET then. Good place to be a boy.
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