Justice Dept. Demands Data on Visitors to Anti-Trump Website, Sparking Fight
The government’s filing declared that Dreamhost “has no legal basis for failing to produce materials in response to the court’s search warrant.”
The fight, which came to light on Monday when Dreamhost published a blog post entitled “We Fight For the Users,” centers on a search warrant for information
about a website, disruptj20.org, which served as a clearinghouse for activists seeking to mobilize resistance to Mr. Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20.
On July 12, Judge Robert P. Wertheim, who was appointed to the District of Columbia’s superior court in 1981 and retired in 1992 but still occasionally hears matters and was on duty
that day, signed off on prosecutors’ request for the sweeping search warrant in pursuit of information about people who organized or participated in rioting.
WASHINGTON — The Justice Department is trying to force an internet hosting company to turn over information about everyone who visited a
website used to organize protests during President Trump’s inauguration, setting off a new fight over surveillance and privacy limits.
“In essence, the search warrant not only aims to identify the political dissidents of the current administration,
but attempts to identify and understand what content each of these dissidents viewed on the website,” two lawyers for Dreamhost, Raymond Aghaian and Chris Ghazarian, wrote in a court motion opposing the demand.
And after inconclusive negotiations over the search warrant, the assistant United States attorney handling the matter, John W. Borchert, asked another
superior court judge, Lynn Leibovitz, who is overseeing the rioting cases, to order Dreamhost to show cause for why it was not complying
Federal investigators last month persuaded a judge to issue a search warrant to the company, Dreamhost, demanding
that it turn over data identifying all the computers that visited its customer’s website and what each visitor viewed or uploaded.