Newspaper Gets Federal Subpoena For Identifying Information Of Anonymous Commenters On Its Website
On May 26 the Review-Journal published an article about an ongoing federal tax evasion trial. The primary defendant, Las Vegan Robert Kahre, stands accused of tax fraud for using the rather inventive argument that he could pay people in U.S. minted gold and silver coins based on their precious metal value but for tax purposes use their face value, which is many times less.
The story was posted on our Web site. When last I checked nearly 100 comments were appended to it, running the gamut from the lucid to the ludicrous.
This past week the newspaper was served with a grand jury subpoena from the U.S. attorney’s office demanding that we turn over all records pertaining to those postings, including “full name, date of birth, physical address, gender, ZIP code, password prompts, security questions, telephone numbers and other identifiers ... the IP address,” et (kitchen sink) cetera.
Tantamount to killing a gnat with an A-bomb.
There was no indication what they were looking for or what crime, if any, was being investigated, just a blanket subpoena for voluminous and detailed records on every private citizen who dared to speak about a federal tax case.
So what are the federal investigators looking for? Apparently some of the commenters were bragging about having evaded taxes. And now the feds want to look into it.
Now, if the feds had merely asked for the information of commenters who had specifically bragged about having evaded their taxes (or committing any other crime) I might go along with this. But the information of every single commenter?
Sounds like overreach to me. Especially when many of the commenters were critical of federal prosecutors. The law is the law, I guess, and law enforcement is tasked with investigating possible crimes. But with all the federal government has on its plate, are internet commenters really who we want to go after? Especially when this appears to be more about prosecutors who got their egos bruised by said internet commenters than any real concern over broken laws?
For some reason this all makes me think of Hamilton and Madison and John Jay writing the federalist papers anonymously. Not that the random bloviators of any given internet comments section are on par with the authors of the federalist papers, but even so.
