Brad Kutner reports:
The Department of Justice tried to use a grand jury subpoena to reveal the name of an online critic of California Congressman Devin Nunes, according to court documents unsealed Monday.
The documents, filed by Perkins Coie Attorney John K. Roche in March, are a response to a grand jury subpoena the company claims aimed to unmask @NunesAlt, one of several parody accounts that have used Twitter to demean Nunes, a close ally of former President Donald Trump.
Read more on Courthouse News, via Joe Cadillic.
DOJ seeking to unmask a Twitter user is an issue very near and dear to my heart and it has happened to me. The case mentioned on TechDirt was sealed for a long time, but when it was unsealed, I was disappointed with the court’s reasoning in agreeing with DOJ. You can download the relevant court filings from that previously sealed case in a zipped archive from mega.nz (for some reason, trying to upload these files here keeps failing). Kudos to Twitter for fighting as hard as they did to protect my privacy, and shame on the court for thinking that it was okay to sacrifice my privacy because I had communicated with someone who was a target of a criminal investigation. It’s clear from the filings that the DOJ knew that I was reporting on Shafer and had reported on him in the past. That should not entitle them to get my details from Twitter. To the contrary, they should have recognized that since they had already read my DMs with Shafer from their access to HIS Twitter account and knew I was acting as a journalist and not as any accomplice to cyberstalking an FBI agent, there was no need for them to know who I am.
In any event, Jeff Kosseff has a book coming out on online anonymity and speech. Today, Jeff responded to the DOJ subpoena in the @NunesAlt matter. His wonderful thread begins here:
Some thoughts on this week’s news about the grand jury subpoena that sought to unmask @NunesAlt, as I’ve spent the past 2.5 years writing a book about anonymous speech.
— Jeff Kosseff (@jkosseff) May 20, 2021
As of now, we don’t know enough facts to fully evaluate the constitutionality of such a subpoena, and it has been withdrawn so we might never know. While there are circumstances under which such a subpoena could survive a 1A challenge, but it is a very high bar.
— Jeff Kosseff (@jkosseff) May 20, 2021
Jeff’s thread is truly informative about the 1-A issues and hurdles to unmasking. Start here to read the whole thread.