[119267] in Cypherpunks
Companies Subpoena Sites to Identify On-Line Detractors
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Anonymous)
Wed Oct 20 17:31:55 1999
Date: 20 Oct 1999 21:09:22 -0000
Message-ID: <19991020210922.18245.qmail@hades.rpini.com>
From: Anonymous <nobody@remailer.ch>
To: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
Reply-To: Anonymous <nobody@remailer.ch>
From <http://www.cpuniverse.com/news/news092799.shtml#subpoena>
Companies Subpoena Sites to Identify On-Line Detractors
Users who like to sound off about companies they don't like on public
Web forums under anonymous aliases might want to watch their step.
The Wall Street Journal reported this week on the upswing of companies
tracking down their critics, finding out their identities, and filing
lawsuits against them. Even a Web site that pledges not to reveal its
users' personal information is helpless when issued a subpoena -- and
that's happening more and more often as companies step up efforts to
silence negative comments.
Web sites that have been subpoenaed for user information aren't legally
able to resist. They can warn customers, however -- and some do, but
many don't. Silicon Investor, a popular stock site, says it simply doesn't
have the resources to notify all the users whose information they are
required to provide. "It's just not practical for us," said Ethan Caldwell,
general counsel for the site's parent company, Go2Net, in the WSJ
article. "We would need an entire subpoena staff to handle something
like that." He said the site gets about one subpoena every day, and that
they are able to notify users about half the time that their information is
being given out.
Other sites don't warn because they don't collect identifying information.
Yahoo! Finance sometimes complies with subpoenas by revealing a
user's IP address, which a company can use to identify the user's ISP
(whom they can then subpoena for the user's identity).
America Online is one of the few organizations that does have a policy
of notifying users who are the subject of subpoenas. They give users two
weeks' notice before responding to a subpoena. Even so, two weeks is
often not enough time to fight back -- especially since most users'
attempts to block subpoenas are unsuccessful.
"The average message-board user just isn't prepared for this," said
Lyrissa Lidsky, a law professor at the University of Florida, in the
article. She added that "These people [the companies are] suing don't
have any money to pay for damages. There's nothing else to sue them for
except silence." And when faced with a million-dollar lawsuit from a
big corporation, many users have no choice but to comply.
