Feds take major step back from trying to obtain visitor information of Anti-Inaugural Protest website – PB/TK
Feds retreat from demand for info on Trump inaugural protest website – By Josh Gerstein / Aug 22 2017
Federal prosecutors have dramatically narrowed their legal demands for information about a website used to organize protests of President Donald Trump’s inauguration.
The move follows complaints from privacy advocates and civil liberties groups that a search warrant a D.C. Superior Court judge issued last month for data about the disruptJ20.org website was wildly overbroad and could have swept up data on thousands of people who simply visited web pages about anti-inaugural activities.
In a new court filing Tuesday, lawyers from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia said “factual revelations” led them to drop a demand for visitor logs and to limit the government’s demand for other data to July 2016 through Inauguration Day.
“Over the past week, DreamHost has made numerous public statements and made many statements in its opposition brief which provide information about the website that were unknown to the government and the Court at the time that the Warrant was issued,” Assistant U.S. Attorneys Jennifer Kerkhoff and John Borchert wrote. “The government could not exclude from the scope of the Warrant what it did not know existed.”
Continue to politico.com article: http://www.politico.com/story/2017/08/22/trump-inaugural-protests-prosecutors-241918
