In the physical world, the government can search only one apartment in an apartment building with a single warrant; it can’t search the entire apartment building. Are the collective records of a website more like an apartment building or a single apartment?
If this is the reasoning they're going then yes, Dreamhost is out of luck. One account is pretty obviously an apartment on a server (building) with the website being an even smaller part than that.
It's also extremely pertinent that the warrant is being executed against an organization exercising political speech. That's very different from, say, the DoJ requesting visitor logs to a film torrent site.
Free speech protection in American law is with its limits. Speech itself isn't protected if it is directed to incite or produce imminent lawless action. See Brandenburg v. Ohio.
> Speech itself isn't protected if it is directed to incite or produce imminent lawless action. See Brandenburg v. Ohio
Correct, but for that argument to hold within the context of this case (EDIT: warrant) we would need the government to show that most people who visited this site did so with the intent to incite imminent lawless action. (Note, too, that Brandenburg v. Ohio specifically struck down a law banning the mere advocacy of violence.)
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. This is not legal advice.
> Correct, but for that argument to hold within the
> context of this case we would need the government to
> show that most people who visited this site did so with
> the intent to incite imminent lawless action.
Of course that's not true. For the government to prosecute all of those visitors requires additional proof, to be sure. However, for the government to gather evidence on a subset of those visitors who have already been arrested and are being charged with politically inspired violence, is perfectly appropriate.
> for the government to gather evidence on a subset of those visitors who have already been arrested and are being charged with politically inspired violence, is perfectly appropriate
If this warrant were replaced with demands for visitation logs from specific IP addresses or relating to certain people, it would be far less controversial.
Imminent lawless action would be an impossible standard, and if that's your standard, then accepting harsh KKK political speech should be within your realm. Maybe they step out of line sometimes, but they know how to play the Westboro Baptist game. There's so much hate speech that can't be obviously said to incite violence.
Also, at the heart of banning bad speech is the fear that your fellow countrymen are too weak and stupid to deal with political, racial, sexual, or just scientific thought in general, and you fear the democratic reigns in their hands.
Many countries have different rules (and even sentences limits or additional rights for political prisoners) for politically motivated acts. It's because these are vital to democracy.
But I agree with you and hold a more cynical view that it's because laws are made by politicians.
The express purpose of Free Speech provisions is to prevent the government from persecuting citizens engaged in political speech that the government happens to dislike.
Given the political-speech context, apartments in an apartment building are less apt than offices in a political party's building. If someone commits fraud or corrupt acts from e.g. the DNC's office, the DoJ doesn't get to collect everything at that building.
Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer. This is not legal advice.
Is the government really asking for all those visitor logs?
"Yes, they definitely are," says Electronic Frontier Foundation senior staff attorney Mark Rumold. EFF advocates for Internet privacy and free speech, and has advised DreamHost in its case.
Rumold tells NPR that when DreamHost first approached EFF about responding to the warrant, he guessed "that DOJ would realize how broad the warrant was, and say, oh you know, in fact we're not actually looking for IP logs for everyone who's ever visited the site" and would narrow its request accordingly.
But instead, the government insisted on DreamHost's compliance with the warrant as written.
So if any charges are brought against anyone as a result they could most likely get any evidence from it thrown out because the initial warrant was too broad and violated their right preventing unlawful search?
The real test for the legality of these warrants is typically in the courts for the defendant's trial, which is unfortunate. It's not often thoroughly challenged by the initial judge from what I've heard.
Which is interesting when you think of the implications of NSA FISA warrants not having any public scrutiny at all, just a judge's opinion in total secret.
I know in Canada it's not even full judges who sign off on police warrants but people called "Justice of the Peace" who are less trained than a judge and spend all day working with police signing off warrants.
Various defense attorneys I've spoken to have said they sign almost everything the police give them and tend to give the police the benefit of the doubt. Which is why the first thing every defense attorney does is look to challenge any warrants because they are usually the lowest hanging fruit in terms of how well thought out the police investigation was.
> So if any charges are brought against anyone as a result they could most likely get any evidence from it thrown out because the initial warrant was too broad and violated their right preventing unlawful search?
No, IIRC, because you can only get evidence excluded if our were the target of the unlawful search; an unlawful search of Art's papers that turns up evidence used against Beth doesn't qualify for the exclusionary rule.
> On an un-related matter, domain registrars (Google, Go-Daddy) shouldn't be the ones censoring free speech of the alt-right by revoking Daily Stormer's registration. However vile and despicable the views expressed on the site, they have a constitutional right to it.
Google and GoDaddy are not beholden to the constitution and are well within their rights to reject the Daily Stormer. White supremacy isn't a suspect class. It's perfectly legal for a business to discriminate against such views.
While we remain on the off topic, what happens if it is a private company providing a service that seems very similar to one the government provides? Imagine if eventually USPS went away, could FedEx/UPS decide to not do business with a group they didn't like (say no mail for anyone under 30)? What if all public libraries were eventually replaced by private ones and any pro-liberal material removed?
I think discussing Constitution protections from the government should include discussions on protections applying when the government allows the private sector to take over some of its work. If privatization reduces constitutional protections... that feels a bit like an exploit, not an intended feature.
I wonder where we draw the line, particularly with ubiquitous companies like Google, Facebook, and ISPs.
Would you be ok if Comcast decided to disallow you from accessing sites they determine are offensive? Or filesharing? Or porn? Even if it is their right to do so, it'd make me uncomfortable.
There's no planet on which you can lump those three together. One provides access to the internet, one provides a service on top of it.
ISPs can and should be regulated... in fact they should pass a law... maybe call it net neutrality.
That is where we should draw the line, beginning and end of story. If google deems a site offensive and doesn't want to return it in search listings, I'll find another search engine. I don't use facebook and couldn't care less what they do or don't display. If it's vital to you, pick a different social network.
ISPs on the other hand are a utility and should be treated as such. The DOT doesn't get to tell me which stores I can visit before I pull onto the highway. My ISP shouldn't have any right to tell me which websites I can visit either.
There are hundreds (thousands?) of registrars you can choose to do business with. Meanwhile, there's only one power company that's run lines to your house, only one water company running pipes, and you have a choice of 2-3 ISPs if you're lucky. Those are utilities. A random business service provider with hundreds of choices available on a competitive free market is not a utility.
A key argument for ISPs being treated as utilities (which is, itself, a controversial idea) is that they tend to be local monopolies or oligopolies. This is not the case with domain registrars, a field in which there are many available alternatives selling an interchangeable commodity product.
ISPs are common carriers, requiring them not to do this. (Same thing with airlines, as another example; they would not be allowed to deny someone transport because they became aware that that person was participating in the Charlottesville thing, like Airbnb did.)
Google and Facebook are not common carriers, so they are under no obligation to be content-neutral. (If you're arguing that they should be common carriers, that's a perfectly fruitful discussion to have.)
No, but it's not a constitutional issue. Likewise, you can host your alt-right views on the internet, but you don't have a right to a domain name and third-party hosting.
I'm certainly not a fan of nazis or "white power" groups, but this can easily turn into the kind of behavior that turns into hunts for communists or socialists.
Most of the HN crowd, including myself, are big fans of a lot of programs that are easily seen as socialist such as universal healthcare or universal income.
I know the "slippery slope" trope seems tired at times, but this might be a case where it's warranted.
I actually respect companies and organizations that uphold the rights of people they disagree with, such as the ACLU and Cloudflare. They get a lot of flak for that (ACLU for defending neo-nazi rights to protest, cloudflare for protecting websites for pirates, hackers, radicals, etc).
As an individual that leans very left, my instinct is to say "Alright Google and GoDaddy! Screw those Nazis!" but the same leftist freedom-loving side of me says "I would hate it if a controversial site I ran was shut down because it had an unpopular opinion"
Exactly. I don't share their beliefs but I think we are all capable of looking at what they say and making up our own minds. I trust the good judgement of the general public a hell of a lot more than I trust censorship, and censoring them just plays into their narrative of persecution. The ends do not justify the means.
Everyone agrees with that. The problem is with the semantics of that statement i.e. who is a Nazi and who decides who is a Nazi? Anyone can call anyone a name and then ban them for being that. That doesn't mean the person in question actually is that thing.
This is why instead of names we should use verifiable actions IMHO. Are you calling for acts of violence against people of another race y/n? Are you attacking and injuring people y/n? Are you destroying public or private property and entering into acts of vandalism y/n? Are you telling people they are worth less because of some attribute they can't control like skin color, sexual orientation, etc y/n?
We can pretty much all agree on this stuff. It just gets problematic when you start throwing labels around and basing policy of off that, because everyone has a different idea of what some label means. For instance, Nazis were a socialist workers party who preached a large and benevolent social welfare program, but many socialists or social democrats would be offended if we called them Nazis even though there is much overlap in many of their particular policies. The same is true of conservatives who could also be broadly labeled as Nazis since they may tend to be more nationalist as were the Nazis.
Again its just a flawed way of thinking about the issues IMHO.
This is nitpicking. If somebody shows a Hitler greeting and uses swastikas and other well-known derived symbols, then he is a Nazi. There is absolutely no problem spotting them or distinguishing them from nationalist conservatives. For a start, Nazis are not promoting representative democracy.
Nazis were a socialist workers party who preached a large and benevolent social welfare program
That must be the understatement of the year. You're either trying to rewrite history or are very uninformed. The Nazis conspired to overthrow the government long before they gained any widespread popularity, that's why Hitler rightly went to prison. The SA was roaming the streets, beating up and even killing Jews and political opponents. They were very dangerous and spread terror wherever they showed up.
Of course, socialists and social democrats would be offended to be called Nazis. They literally went to prisons and Concentration Camps because of their socialist views.
> If somebody shows a Hitler greeting and uses swastikas and other well-known derived symbols, then he is a Nazi.
I agree. I don't see where I was claiming anywhere that if someone openly proclaims to be something, we shouldn't take them at their word for it. My issue is mainly with people being labeled as something when they are not themselves claiming to be that thing.
> That must be the understatement of the year. You're either trying to rewrite history or are very uninformed.
I don't see how insulting me adds anything here. I got my undergraduate in German Studies and have lived in Germany my entire adult life. I suppose I could have been clearer in my statement in that the Nazi party was only in part built on the principles of a large social welfare state [1]. I thought that was clear since I also mentioned the very nationalistic [1] part of the Nazi party.
Anyway, I don't really know what you're claiming other than general agitation at a claim I didn't make. I pretty much agree with you.
Nazis are being told they can't speak in others' places of business. It is no more "illegal" to make that rule in a private space than to throw out people who talk in a movie theater.
> It's perfectly legal for a business to discriminate against such views.
Well-intentioned question: where do you draw the line? Where does it start or end? Businesses that have used this same logic to discriminate against LGBT patrons based on the owners' religious beliefs have had a very difficult time selling this same spiel.
Edit: Scrolling down, I can see this same question asked multiple times. My assessment is that, it's a very difficult thing to do and we must admit our biases even as we make our voices heard.
This comment basically ensures that it will be difficult to really discuss what's going on with Dreamhost and the DOJ, and that we'll all instead have to grapple with some other issue you prefer. That's not a polite thing to do to an HN thread.
And Google and Go-Daddy have a right to deny service to anyone they like. The constitution only protects individuals from the government infringing on their right to free speech.
>And Google and Go-Daddy have a right to deny service to anyone they like
People keep saying this but I don't think it is true at all. Not trying to be inflammatory, but that wasn't too popular of an opinion when it was the bakery refusing to make a cake for a gay couple
Sexual orientation is (or at least should be) protected so it cannot be used as the basis for discrimination, neither can race or religion. Being an inflammatory racist is not (and should not be) protected.
It's not in the Constitution, but it is in the Civil Rights Act of 1964. At least it is for discrimination against race and religion. Sexual orientation has some coverage, but the refusing to serve gays scenario is not currently accepted to be covered by the Civil Rights Act.
Laws -- including constitutions -- are in some sense arbitrary.
But actually the distinction between political belief and sexual orientation makes a ton of sense and is not arbitrary.
Avoiding discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation is super easy and clear-cut.
But it's very hard for me to imagine a world where political belief is a protected class. The category is just way too broad and encompasses basically every legitimate reason you might want to fire someone or turn down a customer.
Every restriction I can think of (e.g., party affiliation) is weak to the point of basically being pointless ("I fired/refused to serve you because you support abortion and because you support theft of my money via taxation, not because you're a democrat").
So although I really do believe that 99.9% of people should not be fired for political beliefs (as long as those beliefs don't interfere with the work place), and that 99.9% of financial transactions should proceed regardless of political beliefs, I still don't think it's workable to make political belief -- writ large -- a protected class.
If we're going to outlaw firing people for political opinions, it might be much easier to just end at-will employment all-together. And if we're going to outlaw discriminating against customers on the basis of political belief, we might as well just force businesses to accept every non-fraudulent client. I don't really think anything less than this -- but which still achieves "no discrimination based on political belief" -- is practically implementable.
So, in my mind, that's the major non-arbitrary distinction. Discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation has a clear bright line. Political discrimination not so much.
And all of the bright line problems aside, there actually is a pretty big non-arbitrary distinction between being gay and being a Nazi. So we can talk about whether that distinction should be codified in non-discrimination law. Or even, in the case of Germany, in criminal law. But the distinction is pretty fucking non-arbitrary...
> Not in the US Constitution either.
Which is why it's legal for bakeries and others to discriminate against LGBT customers in over half of the 50 states. What's your point?
Right, it should be. So GoDaddy et al would get more than just bad press if they suddenly decided to unlist gay rights websites.
Which brings me to my point. Protected classes are arbitrary and discriminatory in themselves. Did you know that it is not possible to discriminate against someone under 40 based on their age? Only people over 40 are a protected class for age discrimination. Why should the protections of the law only apply to those deemed worthy of protection?
It's interesting - it's perfectly fine legally to discriminate against someone for being ugly. Isn't this terrible? Why is it worse to discriminate on the basis of race or sex?
You're right! Which is why such a case is going to the United States Supreme Court, because it's not a settled question.
But let's say, refusing to bake a cake for a black couple?
There exist groups in the United States we consider protected classes, and the state or federal government passes laws to protect these classes, or court precedent protects them from discrimination.
That bakery was not forced to do anything they didn't want to (sexual orientation is protected from discrimination in some contexts but is not a fully recognized protected class). That decent people think that they're assholes for their decision to deny service is orthogonal to whether they had a right to deny service. And, in turn, Nazi symps and merchants of false equivalency can think Google and GoDaddy are assholes for refusing service to Nazis.
IANAL, but my understanding is that there are venues of business and association where sexual orientation is protected (housing, employment, etc.) but that it is not a protected class in the same sense as race.
Google and Go-Daddy also have a constitutional right not to associate or do business with the alt-right (or really, anyone else they disagree with). You are protected from the government restricting your speech, no one else has any obligation to put up with you.
Transplanted example of this same line of reasoning:
JimBob's Cake Bakery also has a constitutional right not to do business with same-sex couples (or really, anyone else they disagree with). You are protected from the government restricting your speech, no one else has any obligation to put up with you.
Sexual Orientation, unfortunately, does not have explicit federal protections from all forms of discrimination. Though there are state-level protections, and there are a couple of cases that will be heard at the Supreme Court this year that claim otherwise (we'll see if those pan out).
Response to this is overwhelmingly "private corps reserve to right to political speech within their premises"
I found hobby-lobby's denial of contraception illegal and unconstitutional, and I find Google/GoDaddy's actions unreasonable. In both cases, the left and right leaning crowd claimed the exact same exemption for their unreasonable actions. You're all the same - free speech and freedom when it suits you.
The whole motivation behind free speech is to keep it free, especially when it's unpalatable
They have a constitutional right to say whatever they want without punishment by the government. Thats where that right ends.
The constitution has no power in the private sector, its an agreement from the government. If a dns provider doesn't want to take money from a hate group and support them by providing them with visibility, why should they be forced to? Its a private company. Now, if the US government was a domain registrar, the constitution may apply, but even then hate speech is a gray area and is easily worked around.
>The constitution has no power in the private sector, its an agreement from the government.
So going the libertarian route and shrinking government would remove protections. That doesn't seem quite right, because it was still the government that allowed the private sector to take over a duty of the government.
What duty? You think that domain registration is by default a duty of the government? The government has no real say over the internet - and the little it has should be removed. Thats like saying space travel or planetary colonization should be reliant on the approval of a government... its not their place to be in charge...
There isn't an approved list of what the government handles. Much of politics is disagreements in this. But it is still a point worth discussing, and saying that it cannot be the government's duty because it currently isn't a valid reason to stop discussion of it.
"That doesn't seem quite right, because it was still the government that allowed the private sector to take over a duty of the government."
You aren't talking about discussing it, you're already calling it a duty of the government that the government allowed to be taken over. The discussion is fine, just dont start it from a stance already...
There are these little paragraphs most of us never read called "Terms of Service" that out line reasons why a website may or may not restrict your use.
This is indeed an unrelated matter. But since you ask: Hundreds of thousands of US soldiers died fighting against Nazis to free Europe from tyranny. Not doing business with Nazis is everyone's patriotic duty.
Yes, that set a very frightening precedent. The people replying to you by nitpicking the fact that companies are not legally obligated to behave in a certain manner are totally missing the point (not to mention repeating a very tiring trope that occupies 40% of the thread any time free speech comes up).
If we start biasing registrars and holding them accountable for the content hosted by all registrants, we get some content put into an "IP only" ghetto, and that fundamentally destroys one of the internet's most important components (even worse than it's already been destroyed by walled gardens like Facebook et al): the convenient ability of anyone to publish anything instantly and accessibly.
Do we really want to have to use IP addresses to access anything that is contrary to corporate-approved narratives? Use a rogue "politically incorrect" DNS server?
ICANN should really step in here and strongly insist that registrars never do this kind of content policing again.
EDIT: This post was not flagged when I started replying, was flagged after. Vouched for content/to counteract what I assumed were reactionary flags, unvouched based on others' assertions that this is derailing the parent thread which is not technically about this issue, which I guess is probably correct. Mods, please consider whether this is really too far off-topic to be allowed.
They're seeking the identities of the rioters on January 20th. Over 200 people were arrested but many more have yet to face the consequences for what they did.
No, they are grabbing all of the comments and all of the logs so that they don't have to go back and get a new warrant every time they find something of interest. Broad warrants for electronic records are quite common.
"...the site's administrators didn't keep this data for DisruptJ20.org, but DreamHost did...
DreamHost keeps server logs in order to manage the sites of its 400,000-plus customers and identify issues like Distributed Denial of Service attacks.
"We only retain those logs for a very brief time," Dunst wrote. "The DOJ served us with a preservation notice immediately after the inauguration, which is why we still have access to that data in this case."
It's not overreach if the political organization is behaving like a criminal organization. Much of the rioting and property damage at the inauguration was clearly planned, so the DOJ is just doing its job here.
An across-the-aisle analog would be a Democrat President demanding detailed visitation logs to Breitbart in response to the Charlottesville riots. You can prosecute violent crime without lazily trampling over the First and Fourth Amendments.
Except that there's no indication Breitbart had any involvement in Charlottesville (and anyway the rioting was mostly Antifa). Here we have tweets from people plugging their organizations and promising disorder.
While individuals may have used the platform to plan illegal acts that does not mean everyone on the platform should have their information revealed. This type of dragnet investigation is illegal for a reason. The DOJs job is to collect evidence on criminals without trampling on the bill of rights. Asking for this information is lazy at best and malicious at worst.
Party registration is a matter of public record in almost every state in the US. Though that is admittedly different than a smaller group of people who participated in a particular riot.
The media hoopla around that story was largely Fake News. Everything in that database was taken from public records. The only value of the database is the painstaking work of making all of those public record requests to the thousands of jurisdictions in the United States, and then merging and cleaning up the data. But several organizations have done it at this point and all a leak would do is potentially cause those organizations to lose money or competitive advantage against organizations without that data.
I believe its a new term for what used to be called the radical left.
There is evidence they go beyond attacking nazi's, to attacking journalists or just people who "look" like nazis.
Antifa is a good example with their huge riots and firebombing of cars during Trump's inauguration.
Huge riots: 40 guys running around knocking over trash cans. Firebombing cars: one limo got torched at one protest that one time. Antifa: some group of random protestors, or maybe those two dudes that punched Richard Spencer. IDGAF if the son of Israel's PM prefers Duke's mayonnaise, much less his opinion of the American protest landscape.
Oh, so you meant the groups of counter-protestors that protected the clergy from a mob of heavily armed white supremacists? The same group that was later victims of a domestic terrorist? Alright then.
The lesson to take away from this regardless of your political leanings is that whatever power you give the state to go after a group you may disagree with will always, eventually be used against you.
It makes no difference if the target groups are alleged terrorists, alt-right, alt-left or or any other group. When you expand the power of the state that diminishes the privacy rights of the citizen that law applies to you, your family and your friends also.
Sorry, but antifa is more than Anti-Trump Activists, they are dangerous. They attack people for political reasons and are largely unpunished because they wear all black and wear masks. They are the clowns that started fires in berkeley and hit the Trump support in the head with a bike lock, causing a fractured skull. That's no good imo.
By fascists we are talking about the white supremacists fascists with Nazi flags and salutes that staged violence in Charlottesville last weekend?
If you openly glorify Nazi-ism then I'm going to assume that you would kill a few million people you don't like, given any political power. Incidentally a person was killed by fascists.
Given that background, whats wrong with being against fascists?
Now that you mention it, I am an anti-fascist and still firmly committed to non-violence.
And the alt-right is getting dumber. Seriously, "bigleaguepolitics.com"? Are you going to peddle Seth Rich conspiracy theories now too? Because that's also on their front page.
Don't refer to these morons committing violent acts in the name of protest as "alt-left." It does nothing but legitimize them, much as the moniker "alt-right" legitimizes white supremacists.
There is a time and a place for violent protest/revolution, but we're nowhere near there yet.
> much as the moniker "alt-right" legitimizes white
> supremacists.
Actually, alt-right was coined as a term to differentiate people who adhere to the traditional republican/libertarian views about personal liberty and small government from the neo-conservatives such as Romney, McCain, Graham, and others who push so strongly for nation-building and big government.
The collection of people that are drawn to the ideal of small-government and liberty is larger than the subset you describe.
The Southern Poverty Law Center is notoriously biased [1] against any non-progressive ideology, which includes alt-right and libertarian ideals. If this is indeed their actual opinion, it is wrong. I suspect even they know it is not true. Alt-right traces is lineage back to Ron Paul and the tea-party.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15011636
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15018429