Department of Justice demands IDs of people who visited anti-Trump site; DreamHost won't comply
"The DOJ Is Demanding IDs of People who visited anti-Trump site, but web host won't comply," 15 August 2017
Web hosting company DreamHost said on Monday [14 August 2017] that it would not comply with the U.S. Justice Department's request for data on more than 1 million visitors to [disruptj20.org] a site it hosts... The activist group was behind a coordinated effort to organize "mass protests to shut down the inauguration of Donald Trump," according to its DisruptJ20's site.
Other hosting companies and web service providers regularly acknowledge government data requests, but site visitor data isn't typically requested. In recent months Alphabet, Cloudflare, Microsoft and other companies have publicly posted redacted versions of national security letters they have received after disclosure bans were lifted. In most cases, the U.S. government was only seeking data for individual account holders.
"A lot of these issues have only been about a single customer, a single account - very narrow in scope," said Chris Ghazarian, general counsel at DreamHost, in an interview. "This is a completely different issue. This is not just about this account. It's not just about users of the account. It's about the internet users and about the community as a whole."
DreamHost responded to the Justice Department's data request by saying it was asking for too much. The government then asked the Superior Court of the District of Columbia to compel DreamHost to hand over the data, as the company detailed in a blog post...