US Attorney Channing Phillips drafted in the brief that they held only after a small group of people who organized and engaged in “a planned riot.” He explained that the DOJ announced a lawful warrant, but repeated that the additional facts Dreamhost acted “were strange to the government at the time it petitioned for and obtained the Warrant…” Consequently, “the administration could not eliminate from the range of the Warrant what it did not know endured.”
As a result of Dreamhost’s complaint, the DOJ has narrowed down the kinds of information it’s demanding. It’s now only asking for the website’s content and actions from July 1st, 2016 to January 20th, 2017. The owner is also not expected to reveal the contents of undistributed drafts, images, and metadata anymore. It won’t have to expose HTTP requests and error logs, either.
In an effort to relieve people’s fears that it will use the information it gets for other ideas, DOJ says any data Dreamhost hands over will be distributed under seal with the court. If you’ll recall, when Dreamhost stated its concerns about the warrant’s unnecessary scope, it said: “That message could be used to know any people who used this site to exercise and show political speech protected under the Constitution’s First Amendment. That should be just to set alarm bells off in anyone’s mind.”
EFF senior staff lawyer Mark Rumol told News that he required the agency to narrow down the scope of its license from the start. However, the fact that it’s still investigating for personal and identifying data doesn’t sit well with the lawyer and his business:
“Before it was more or less a network and a witch hunt and now it’s just a witch hunt. It’s considerably narrower but they’re still after a large amount of content.”
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