"Huge Win! Avaaz Beats Monsanto in Court After Judge Blocks Subpoena to Collect Activists’ Personal Information", 17 Sep 2018

On September 6 (2018), a Manhattan judge threw out a subpoena filed by Monsanto against an activist group, going so far as to lecture Monsanto on the importance of free speech and democracy... The 168-page subpoena, issued on behalf of Monsanto from a New York court, would have forced the global activist organization Avaaz to hand over decade’s worth of internal campaign communications, including personal information belonging to millions of activists who signed petitions against Monsanto’s genetically modified crops and Roundup weedkiller...Avaaz campaign director Iain Keith said: "This subpoena was terrifying and would have had Avaaz spend months and hundreds of thousands of dollars digging up and handing over to Monsanto everything anyone on our team ever said or wrote about them for [years]. Including even the email addresses and identities of our members who had sent messages to officials about Monsanto!" ....But the case didn’t go Monsanto’s way.  Judge Shlomo S. Hagler of the Manhattan Supreme Court Justice “absolutely destroyed” Monsanto’s subpoena, Avaaz said. Judge Hagler said “the subpoena would have a ‘tremendous chilling effect’” and that “no member would want to have their privacy and their activity known.”...  [T]he ruling incited a wave of unease among Bayer investors, pushing the stock price to its lowest in five years.