Justice Department Demands DreamHost Info On Visitors To Anti-Trump Website

Web hosting provider DreamHost announced Monday that is is engaged in an ongoing legal battle with the United States Justice Department over its demand to see records of visitors to an anti-Trump website.

At the center of the conflict is disruptj20.org, a website run by a group of activists who were attempting to build “the framework needed for mass protests to shut down the inauguration of Donald Trump and planning widespread direct actions to make that happen.”

The U.S. Justice Department, currently headed by Attorney General Sessions, has demanded DreamHost—the company currently hosting disruptj20.org—to provide all information available about the website, it’s owner and its visitors.

On July 12, a search warrant was issued by the Superior Court of the District of Columbia that required DreamHost disclose a significant amount of information that would be stored on the company’s servers. The warrant included a request for all files associated with the site, email accounts the contents of those accounts associated with the site and contact and billing information of the person who registered the site.

The warrant also demanded DreamHost disclose any information it had about people who simply visited the website. The Justice Department asked for the IP addresses of visitors, which would generally provides information about a visitor’s location and other potentially identifiable information, as well as contact information of people who used the site.

DreamHost was required to comply with the search warrant within 10 days of it being issued but has been fighting the broad demands the Justice Department has made. The company filed an opposition motion in response to the warrant, objecting to its requests.

“In essence, the Search Warrant not only aims to identify the political dissidents of the current administration, but attempts to identify and understand what content each of these dissidents viewed on the website,” the company said in a legal filing.

DreamHost said it challenged the warrant and attempted to quell the requests through “reason, logic and legal process.” In response to that effort, the Justice Department filed a motion on July 28 asking the court to compel DreamHost to produce the requested records, prompting the hosting company to respond with its filing opposing the motion.

More than 200 people were arrested on the day of President Donald Trump’s inauguration, though it’s not clear how many of those people were directly or even loosely associated to disruptj20.org or events and demonstrations the site was used to organize.

Under the Justice Department’s warrant, it wouldn’t matter if a person used the site with the intention to break the law or simply looked at it out of curiosity; the information of every visitor would be collected by the agency.

“The internet was founded—and continues to survive, in the main—on its democratizing ability to facilitate a free exchange of ideas. Internet users have a reasonable expectation that they will not get swept up in criminal investigations simply by exercising their right to political speech against the government,” DreamHost said in a statement.

“We intend to take whatever steps are necessary to support and shield these users from what is, in our view, a very unfocused search and an unlawful request for their personal information.”

Earlier this year, the Trump administration attempted to compel Twitter to unmask an anonymous user on its site who had been critical of President Trump. Twitter challenged the effort and the administration eventually dropped the request.