Department of Justice seeks personal info of 1.3 million anti-Trump website users
WASHINGTON (UPI) — The U.S. Department of Justice has demanded information about 1.3 million users of a website that helps people organize protests against President Donald Trump‘s administration, the website’s hosting service announced Monday.
Los Angeles-based Dreamhost said the department served the company a search warrant asking for “all information available to us about this website, its owner, and, more importantly, its visitors.”
The website, disruptj20.org, was used by some protesters as a way to organize mass protests against Trump at his inauguration. Although the website appears to have been used to organize protests at the time, there hasn’t been an update on the site since March.
The search warrant seeks a variety of specific information from the website’s visitors, including “names, addresses, telephone numbers and other identifiers, e-mail addresses, business information, the length of service (including start date), means and source of payment for services (including any credit card or bank account number), and information about any domain name registration.”
Dreamhost criticized the Justice Department’s demands and said it plans to challenge it in court.
“That information could be used to identify any individuals who used this site to exercise and express political speech protected under the Constitution’s First Amendment,” Dreamhost said. “That should be enough to set alarm bells off in anyone’s mind.”
According to CNN, 214 people were charged with felony rioting during mass protests at the president’s inauguration in Washington, D.C.
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