The Department of Justice has backtracked on its request for identifying information of roughly 1.3 million visitors to a website that helped organized protests against President Trump.
In a reply brief filed by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia on Tuesday to the Superior Court of the District of Columbia, the Justice Department says it is modifying its request, no longer pursuing its broad request for the IP data — i.e. data that would have personally identified the visitors to the site — for visitors to disruptj20.org.
“The government has no interest in records relating to the 1.3 million IP addresses that are mentioned in DreamHost’s numerous press releases and Opposition brief,” U.S. Attorney Channing Phillips wrote in the brief.
But the Justice Department’s request still holds to some extent, Phillips says, conceding it is modifying it because it did not realize how much information they were actually seeking.
“To re-iterate: these additional facts were unknown to the government at the time it applied for and obtained the Warrant; consequently, the government could not exclude from the scope of the Warrant what it did not know existed,” Phillips wrote.
Now, the Justice Department wants the D.C. court to issue a new warrant to exclude visitor IP logs, unpublished drafts, and images.
DreamHost disclosed last week that D.C.’s Superior Court had issued a warrant for “over 1.3 million visitor IP addresses — in addition to contact information, email content, and photos of thousands of people — in an effort to determine who simply visited” disruptj20.org.
The website at question, disruptj20.org, helped coordinate demonstrations against Trump on Inauguration Day.
“That information could be used to identify any individuals who used this site to exercise and express political speech protected under the Constitution’s First Amendment. That should be enough to set alarm bells off in anyone’s mind,” DreamHost said last week.
The Justice Department did say Tuesday that the information request “is singularly focused on criminal activity. It will not be used for any other purpose.”
The move comes ahead of Thursday’s hearing on the warrant before D.C. Superior Court Judge Lynn Leibovitz, who is presiding over criminal cases stemming from Inauguration Day.
