This is breathtaking, both for the extent of government overreach and also for the media (mainstream, alternative, and blogs) silence on this story.
The target is Indymedia.us. Here is what the Electronic Frontier Foundation found through their own investigation of the matter:
On January 30th, 2009, Kristina Clair of Philadelphia, PA — one of the system administrators of the server that hosts the indymedia.us site — received in the mail a grand jury subpoena from the Southern District of Indiana federal court. The FBI had sent an email to Ms. Clair a couple of weeks earlier asking where a subpoena directed at the indymedia.us site should be sent. So, we at EFF were ready and waiting to evaluate the subpoena as soon as it arrived. Yet even we were surprised at what we saw. A PDF of the entire subpoena is available here.
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Grand jury subpoenas are very easy for the government to get — they are issued directly by prosecutors without any direct court oversight. Therefore, the SCA limits what those subpoenas can obtain, in contrast to a search warrant or other court order. Under the SCA's 18 U.S.C. § 2703(c)(2), grand jury subpoenas can only be used to get basic subscriber-identifying information about a target — e.g., a particular user's name, IP address, physical address or payment details — and certain types of telephone logs; any other records require a court order or a search warrant. This sample subpoena from the Justice Department's surveillance manual shows what the government typically asks for, tracking the statute's language.
However, with the Indymedia subpoena, the government departed from the text of the law and the Justice Department's own sample subpoena by inserting this demand: "Please provide the following information pursuant to [18 U.S.C. § 2703(c)(2)]: All IP traffic to and from www.indymedia.us" for a particular date, including "IP addresses, times, and any other identifying information."
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The government added insult to injury by also inserting this language on the first page of the subpoena: "You are not to disclose the existence of this request unless authorized by the Assistant U.S. Attorney. Any such disclosure would impede the investigation being conducted and thereby interfere with the enforcement of the law."
Regardless of what you think of Indymedia or if you even read Indymedia, the fact remains that this is a blatant violation of First Amendment rights, specifically, freedom of speech and freedom of the press. Everyone, left, right, and center, should be outraged. So where are all of the voices?
