ACLU Moves to Block Facebook Search Warrants for Anti-Trump Protesters
The motion asks the court to either quash the warrants or appoint a "special master" to review the information on the accounts before it's handed over to federal prosecutors.
September 28, 2017 at 01:37 PM
3 minute read
A group of activists filed a motion Thursday in Washington, D.C., Superior Court to block the enforcement of three government search warrants seeking information on their Facebook accounts.
Represented by lawyers from the D.C. branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, the activists claim the government's warrants seeking information on rioting during President Donald Trump's inauguration are overbroad. The motion asks the court to either quash the warrants or appoint a “special master” to review the information on the accounts before it's handed over to federal prosecutors. The warrants order Facebook to hand over users' private messages, comments on their pages, status updates, IP addresses for devices used to access the accounts, and other data.
“Opening up the entire contents of a personal Facebook page for review by the government is a gross invasion of privacy,” Scott Michelman, a senior staff attorney at ACLU-DC, said in a written statement. “The primary purpose of the Fourth Amendment was to prevent this type of exploratory rummaging through a person's private information. Moreover, when law enforcement officers can comb through records concerning political organizing in opposition to the very administration for which those officers work, the result is the chilling of First Amendment-protected political activity.”
Federal prosecutors have already indicted roughly 200 people for allegedly violating the district's anti-rioting statute.
The warrant include information from the personal accounts of Lacy MacAuley and Legba Carrefour. MacAuley and Carrefour are associated with the group DisruptJ20, which helped organize some of the Jan. 20 protests. The third account is the official Facebook page for DisruptJ20, which is administered by a third activist named Emmelia Talarico. In a statement, the ACLU-DC said none of the three activists have been charged with any Inauguration Day-related crimes.
It's not the first court challenge related to search warrants for information on the protestors or the Disruptj20 website. Facebook, represented by Perkins Coie partner John Roche, also challenged a gag order form the government in July that barred the company from informing MacAuley, Carrefour and Talarico about the warrants. The government withdrew the gag order Sept. 13, the day before a hearing on the issue was set to be held in the D.C. Court of Appeals.
The U.S. Attorney's Office has also been in a battle over warrants with DreamHost, the web-hosting company for Disruptj20's website. DreamHost, represented by Kilpatrick Townsend & Stockton partner Ray Aghaian, went to court to block a warrant that sought, among other information, IP logs that would allow the government to see information about every website visitor. The government later modified the warrant, though Aghaian still said it raised constitutional concerns.
After a hearing in D.C. Superior Court last month, Chief Judge Robert Morin allowed the government to proceed with the modified warrant but with certain conditions that included close supervision by the court. DreamHost indicated it may appeal that order Sept. 5, though Morin heard competing proposals from Aghaian and the U.S. Attorney's Office in a Sept. 20 hearing on how to move forward with collecting the information.
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