14 ms·

Justice Department withdraws FBI subpoena for USA Today records ID'ing readers

346 points by prostoalex 5y ago

whereis 5y ago
Did they want the readership data for malicious, unjustified reasons?
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
  Probably not
- chrischen 5y ago
  They probably just wanted it to make their jobs easier.
  - serf 5y ago
    That's a brilliant side-step over a morality qualm, without ever really answering the question.
    - subroutine 5y ago
      What do you mean?
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - decremental 5y ago
      "They probably just wanted it [...]" is the same as writing "No, they probably wanted it [...]."
- xwolfi 5y ago
  No: they wanted to identify one sex offender, probably because they knew he read this article somehow. They did not care who read the article itself which was benign. They wanted to create a precedent to make their job easier, not realizing maybe people care less abt solving crimes than making it forever possible to track who reads what.
- tootie 5y ago
  It's in the article. It was a criminal investigation. This is no different than subpoenaing phone records or financial records. They had a very narrow target and a specific objective well within their purview and serving the public interest. The subpoena was withdrawn because they caught the guy.
xvector 5y ago
I wish services didn't store IPs at all. If abuse is an issue, why not hash the IP with a nonce?
- codetrotter 5y ago
  IPv4 space is small so they will subpoena the nonce and find what the original IP was
- kadoban 5y ago
  For ipv4 is there a difference between storing IPs and storing their hash with a nonce? You can calculate the hash of every IP address in reasonable time, so it's reversible. Only benefit I can think of is you can forget the nonce and now the data is securely useless, if the nonce was secure, but that doesn't seem that useful really.
  - xvector 5y ago
    I think if we use a difficult enough hash function it should be okay? With 4 billion IPv4 addresses it would take 120+ years to iterate through all of them. You could probably rotate the nonce periodically, making it effectively worthless to pre-compute any table. But this gets complicated fast.
    - rpadovani 5y ago
      Why 120 years? It is easily parallelized, and with any cloud provider you can launch hundreds of thousands of computing unit in seconds. I'd say, as a private citizen, I can create a rainbow table of the IPv4 space in half a day, more or less?
    - somethingwitty1 5y ago
      Except you are still storing the nonce/salt (not sure which you are proposing)...which means you can reverse it, so the data is subpoenable. It doesn't really buy anyone anything, in this scenario. It could help if the logs were stolen, but that isn't what is being discussed here.
myself248 5y ago
I'm curious if we'll ever find out what they thought they'd learn from this.
- mathattack 5y ago
  From the article, that’s why they withdrew it. —- “ The subpoena, issued as part of an investigation seeking to identify a child sexual exploitation offender, was withdrawn after investigators found the person through other means, according to a notice the Justice Department sent to USA TODAY's attorneys Saturday.”
  - resoluteteeth 5y ago
    I think you may have replied to the wrong comment.
    - tekromancr 5y ago
      I don't think they did. That reply tracks
      - Dylan16807 5y ago
        To paraphrase: "What did they think they'd learn?" "That's why they withdrew it." I don't understand how that reply works. Can you elaborate? (The best way for me to reconcile those would be to interpret it as a snarky "you're realizing it's useless, they also realized that, so they withdrew it" but that doesn't answer the question of why they made the request in the first place. Or I could interpret it as "the quote below is why they withdrew it" but that's even further from answering the question of why they made the request in the first place. Is it supposed to mean "they withdrew it so we don't find out what they'd learn"? It's hard to see how withdrawing the request helps very much there. Overall, I'm lost.)
        weaksauce 5y ago
        > but that doesn't answer the question of why they made the request in the first place most likely the fbi was monitoring some website somewhere and the person of interest posted a link to or talked about the article and it was 35 min after the story was posted when the guy linked to it.
boomboomsubban 5y ago
>The government's own guidelines require the FBI to pursue alternative sources before subpoenaing a newspaper Or "we could always just buy this data, we requested it for some other reason but the media got more pissy than we expected." The entire thing is just so strange, why was the challenge not hidden when the subpoena was?
Turing_Machine 5y ago
> President Joe Biden recently criticized the policy, saying it's "simply wrong" to seize journalists' records. The FBI is part of DOJ, which is an executive branch department under Biden's direct authority. If he thinks it's "simply wrong", he can just order them not to do it. He's not limited to "criticizing" it.
- bowmessage 5y ago
  Good point. I'm not sure he's even aware of that option, unfortunately.
  - hellow0rldz 5y ago
    Oh, he is. But it's good PR to make positive statements while doing whatever you want.
    - Sebguer 5y ago
      He literally did ban the practice, though, and the quoted line is after the reporting saying he did so?
      - hellow0rldz 5y ago
        No he did not. He gave a "direction". Which, legally, means almost nothing. > “Going forward, consistent with the President’s direction, this Department of Justice – in a change to its longstanding practice – will not seek compulsory legal process in leak investigations to obtain source information from members of the news media doing their jobs,” Anthony Coley, Justice Department spokesman, said in a statement. They are changing a "practice". One uses laws to prevent practices one does not like, not "directions".
        ncallaway 5y ago
        > One uses laws to prevent practices one does not like, not "directions". If you want a law to prevent this I'm not sure why you're criticizing Biden. He is the President, no the Legislature. If you think there should be a law, then your complaint should be for congress.
wydfre 5y ago
Did anybody bother to lookup the article they wanted to get the IPs for and get scared out of their minds when they realize what the title was? No, I am wrong, Hacker News is right, I have learned my mistake, we need anonymity - from everything. I don't want responsibility for my actions - that's why I support the EFF, and I don't care about the FSF. We deserve the same anonymity as the upper echelon of the government, and who cares about unconditionally accelerating the singularity with open-source. Transparency - only Satan could want such a thing! At least in my sect of Christianity, Satan only hurts bad people - it's people themselves that are evil or want to make others evil. Bit more theologically consistent.
jb775 5y ago
> should remind the Biden administration of the importance of an independent press. "Independent Press" a.k.a. leftist propaganda machine owned by a handful of super rich elites.
DaniloDias 5y ago
Julian Assange reminds us that our entire journalism justice system is fraudulent. This story is a drip in the ocean of journalistic and justice corruption. We are not doing any better today than we were yesterday.
a3n 5y ago
So DoJ is like Google or Facebook: They silently do whatever they want until it appears on HN, then they fix it.
- judge2020 5y ago
  All three share the trait of being in the public sphere. Graver atrocities are happening across every other industry, they're just boring/not newsworthy so nobody really applies scrutiny.
  - cschep 5y ago
    They also all three share the trait of not caring at all what we hacker newsers think :D There just aren't enough of us.
    - judge2020 5y ago
      I think the reason we often see FAANG-related issues actually resolved when they're posted on HN is that so many programmers who work at these FAANGs read HN and can escalate real issues internally. While there probably are thousands of real issues that don't make it onto HN and thus never get resolved, there's probably multiple millions of people just as desparate that are just trying to skirt some rule or are telling half-truths to try to get their way and bypass policies.
      - nexuist 5y ago
        This makes me wonder how a Hacker News-for-politicians variant would fare, if political managers at various levels in the chain could post under a pseudonym to bring high level attention to some broken or un-oiled cog. Not necessarily for civilians to find out but for other political operatives to learn about and pull whatever levers they can pull to resolve issues internally. My understanding is that the government (at least the US Fed) is very top->down information wise, and e.g. a town clerk in Kansas has no available way to interact with INS even when they need to for their job. Let's say one day you stumble upon some nuclear centrifuge in the middle of a field. Who do you even call and how do you do it in such a way that you don't end up on the no-fly list for the rest of your life?
sarak12070 5y ago
Look 20 years younger than your age Naturally http://healthwithbeauty.xyz/2021/06/05/how-to-look-20-years-younger-in-30-days/ http://healthwithbeauty.xyz/2021/06/05/how-to-look-20-years-... creepy animals that exist I am sure you don't know about these animals https://www.interestingnews.club/2021/06/creepy-animals-that-exist.html https://www.interestingnews.club/2021/06/creepy-animals-that... Hong Kong parking space sells for $1.3M, sets new world record https://www.interestingnews.club/2021/06/hong-kong-parking-space-sells-for-13m.html https://www.interestingnews.club/2021/06/hong-kong-parking-s...
PragmaticPulp 5y ago
I'm glad they withdrew this. That said, it does appear that the subpoena was more selective than I initially thought, given the headlines. From the other USA Today article: > The subpoena, issued in April, demands the production of records containing IP addresses and other identifying information "for computers and other electronic devices" that accessed the story during a 35-minute time frame starting at 8:03 p.m. on the day of the shooting. A 35-minute window could still produce a large number of readers, but I assume they had some other information that would have immediately narrowed it down or otherwise confirmed their suspicions.
dredmorbius 5y ago
In an age where newspapers were bought at news stands for cash, identity of the reader was entirely anonymous. In an age where printed periodicals were delivered by subscription, the subscriber information was available (and yes, often tracked by local and federal law enforcement), but not the specifics of what articles were read. Today, with Web-based document delivery and Javascript instrumentation, the specifics of who reads what articles, time on page, sections read, interactions, shares, and more, are available not just to the publishere but advertisers, any entities hacking into or accessing their systems, app developers, and more. And, yes, law enforcement, whether under warrant, subpoena, or ... other methods.
- qualudeheart 5y ago
  You can get around that if you search for link urls in archive sites. Someone usually will have archived the article there. If you feel a bit more ambitious you could make a bot that runs on a vps somewhere and automatically scrapes news articles.
  - TooCleverByHalf 5y ago
    Sure. But that's not the point.
  - dredmorbius 5y ago
    Tor seems to work reasonably well, except that many mainstream media sites block, throttle, or CAPTCHA it.
    - pabs3 5y ago
      Combine Tor Browser with the archive.org/archive.is sites?
      - dredmorbius 5y ago
        Internet Archive / Wayback Machine works. Archive.is runs Tor through a Cloudfront captcha which fails consistently in my experience.
morpheos137 5y ago
I am confused how reading a news story in a certain window of time could serve as evidence or probable cause or reasonable suspicion of anything. Seems utterly bizarre.
- arp242 5y ago
  My guess is that they have some sort of photo, screenshot, or video that happens to show that a suspect had this page open on a computer or mobile phone, and that they can reliably date the time of this photo or video. Depending on details, it may not be an unreasonable request. The question is more one of trust: do we trust the FBI that it's a reasonable request? This is why all the stuff like the activities the Snowden leaks demonstrated or Trump's idiotic harassment of the press through the DOJ are so harmful far beyond the direct harm they did: they justifiable and seriously erode trust, and then there is a serious case like this and "trust us" no longer carries any value. A sad state of affairs where everyone loses.
  - morpheos137 5y ago
    Still even if they had such a screen shot I don't get how reading a news article about a sex offender would be incrimnating even if you were a sex offender yourself. That said...https://www.cbsnews.com/news/luka-magnotta-wanted-for-canada-dismember-slay-caught-while-reading-about-himself-at-online-cafe/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/luka-magnotta-wanted-for-canada...
    - arp242 5y ago
      > Still even if they had such a screen shot I don't get how reading a news article about a sex offender would be incrimnating even if you were a sex offender yourself. What? Absolutely no one said or even implied any such thing. Photos of in child sex abuse cases are routinely scrutinized in great detail to reveal clues about the location, time, and anything else that might lead to the individuals in the case. Interpol has an entire website dedicated to help identify objects in pictures[1], asking members of the public to help identify everyday things like T-shirts. Actually, one of the top results pictures right now is "do you recognise this newspaper?" No one is suggesting that "wearing this t-shirt" or "having this newspaper" is incriminating in and of itself. Finding these people from vague online pictures where they intend to remain anonymous is tricky business, and sometimes with a bunch of these clues combined with some other information they can identify offenders and/or victims. Of course there are trade-offs involved in all of this, and it's important we have robust public conversations discussing those; as I mentioned in my previous comment, the lack of trust here is a big issue. But much of this entire thread is ... disappointing. I wish people would keep cooler heads (as well as, you know, actually read the article before commenting). [1]: https://www.europol.europa.eu/stopchildabuse https://www.europol.europa.eu/stopchildabuse
codezero 5y ago
It likely means they got this data more easily from a third party, like an analytics or ads provider.
malwarebytess 5y ago
They'll just send a NSL instead.
- Scoundreller 5y ago
  Don’t think that works for pedos. But if we’re not allowed to see the NSLs, then who knows what they contain.
grouphugs 5y ago
the nazis constantly obstruct the future they're imagining with their own bullshit, this shits hilarious
wolverine876 5y ago
Biden has now made it policy to protect journalists from certain means of investigation, but that can be reversed easily by the next president, by Biden if they want, and because the has no legal force, courts won't enforce it and it may be that the biggest risk taken by violators is to lose their job. Why isn't this made into a federal law? What constituency in Congress is opposed?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
mrmckizzle 5y ago
I must be missing something here. How does it help an investigation by fetching the meta data of those who read an article? Anyone could of read the article within that time period.
throwitaway12 5y ago
This is a disgusting over reach of power as usual by the American TLA's. Please remember to always use a VPN, Tor, or other similar technologies when using the internet to shield your self from basic infringements of your privacy like this.
mortdeus 5y ago
im just curious how they knew the person of interest read that article? Was he a person of interest in the lead up to the shootout, who got away, and they were just grasping at straws to discover a list of local area IPs correlated with known addresses he might have been hiding out at so they could obtain a search warrant? If that's the case, then honestly I don't think this is any worse than when they force say Google or Facebook to provide such data to government. I don't see why the USA Today should get any special privileges over any other tech company just because they are "media". If we want to have an argument about the Government abusing it's power to spy on us in general, that's one thing. But the USA Today is literally saying its more important they protect the illusion of their readers "privacy" (which we all know they don't care about your privacy are willing to sell all your personal info to the highest bidder, its in all their TOS) than it is to try and help the cops catch a child predator... I do agree that this does establish a troubling precedent, but i kinda thought Snowden already made it blatantly clear that the NSA and the CIA is already doing this. It seems to me that the FBI is basically just trying to play catch up, which we should be concerned about because they are supposedly the agency put in place to police us. Those other agencies are supposedly only supposed to police the world. (which i never understood why thats supposedly okay. Americans are the only people entitled to their privacy?)
- mschuster91 5y ago
  > I don't see why the USA Today should get any special privileges over any other tech company just because they are "media". Because freedom of press is (in all democracies) one of the highest ranking human rights.
giantg2 5y ago
They're just going to get it from they payment providers like Visa, Mastercard, etc. Maybe even ISPs. Just because they gave up on one avenue doesn't mean they won't use other methods to get what they want.
slumdev 5y ago
This is almost certainly a case of attempted parallel construction. Indulge my hypothetical: 1. A newspaper article is posted at 1PM. 2. A suspicious comment that contains nonpublic, incriminating information is posted on a message board at 1:15PM. That comment links to the USA Today article. The message board is outside of FBI jurisdiction. 3. The Feds already know the identity of the commenter through an illegal and/or unconstitutional means of data gathering. (Think of all the secret taps built into AT&T's networks, their Stingray devices, all of the unpublished vulnerabilities exploited every day by TLAs, etc.) 4. If the Feds can get the identities of everyone who read the article during the window immediately before and after that comment's submission, they may be able to use other information to narrow that list down to one or two suspects and use that to sway a judge to issue a search warrant. Because they already know who they're looking for, I wouldn't expect this "narrowing down" process to be particularly even-handed.
splithalf 5y ago
They need to be penalized. For every high profile incident like this, there are many more that never reach public scrutiny. The leadership needs to be made accountable.

346 points by prostoalex 5y ago

whereis 5y ago

Did they want the readership data for malicious, unjustified reasons?

2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
Probably not
chrischen 5y ago
They probably just wanted it to make their jobs easier.
- serf 5y ago
  That's a brilliant side-step over a morality qualm, without ever really answering the question.
  - subroutine 5y ago
    What do you mean?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - decremental 5y ago
    "They probably just wanted it [...]" is the same as writing "No, they probably wanted it [...]."
xwolfi 5y ago
No: they wanted to identify one sex offender, probably because they knew he read this article somehow. They did not care who read the article itself which was benign. They wanted to create a precedent to make their job easier, not realizing maybe people care less abt solving crimes than making it forever possible to track who reads what.
tootie 5y ago
It's in the article. It was a criminal investigation. This is no different than subpoenaing phone records or financial records. They had a very narrow target and a specific objective well within their purview and serving the public interest. The subpoena was withdrawn because they caught the guy.

xvector 5y ago

I wish services didn't store IPs at all. If abuse is an issue, why not hash the IP with a nonce?

codetrotter 5y ago
IPv4 space is small so they will subpoena the nonce and find what the original IP was
kadoban 5y ago
For ipv4 is there a difference between storing IPs and storing their hash with a nonce? You can calculate the hash of every IP address in reasonable time, so it's reversible. Only benefit I can think of is you can forget the nonce and now the data is securely useless, if the nonce was secure, but that doesn't seem that useful really.
- xvector 5y ago
  I think if we use a difficult enough hash function it should be okay? With 4 billion IPv4 addresses it would take 120+ years to iterate through all of them. You could probably rotate the nonce periodically, making it effectively worthless to pre-compute any table. But this gets complicated fast.
  - rpadovani 5y ago
    Why 120 years? It is easily parallelized, and with any cloud provider you can launch hundreds of thousands of computing unit in seconds. I'd say, as a private citizen, I can create a rainbow table of the IPv4 space in half a day, more or less?
  - somethingwitty1 5y ago
    Except you are still storing the nonce/salt (not sure which you are proposing)...which means you can reverse it, so the data is subpoenable. It doesn't really buy anyone anything, in this scenario. It could help if the logs were stolen, but that isn't what is being discussed here.

myself248 5y ago

I'm curious if we'll ever find out what they thought they'd learn from this.

mathattack 5y ago
From the article, that’s why they withdrew it. —- “ The subpoena, issued as part of an investigation seeking to identify a child sexual exploitation offender, was withdrawn after investigators found the person through other means, according to a notice the Justice Department sent to USA TODAY's attorneys Saturday.”
- resoluteteeth 5y ago
  I think you may have replied to the wrong comment.
  - tekromancr 5y ago
    I don't think they did. That reply tracks
    - Dylan16807 5y ago
      To paraphrase: "What did they think they'd learn?" "That's why they withdrew it." I don't understand how that reply works. Can you elaborate? (The best way for me to reconcile those would be to interpret it as a snarky "you're realizing it's useless, they also realized that, so they withdrew it" but that doesn't answer the question of why they made the request in the first place. Or I could interpret it as "the quote below is why they withdrew it" but that's even further from answering the question of why they made the request in the first place. Is it supposed to mean "they withdrew it so we don't find out what they'd learn"? It's hard to see how withdrawing the request helps very much there. Overall, I'm lost.)
      - weaksauce 5y ago
        > but that doesn't answer the question of why they made the request in the first place most likely the fbi was monitoring some website somewhere and the person of interest posted a link to or talked about the article and it was 35 min after the story was posted when the guy linked to it.

boomboomsubban 5y ago

>The government's own guidelines require the FBI to pursue alternative sources before subpoenaing a newspaper Or "we could always just buy this data, we requested it for some other reason but the media got more pissy than we expected." The entire thing is just so strange, why was the challenge not hidden when the subpoena was?

Turing_Machine 5y ago

> President Joe Biden recently criticized the policy, saying it's "simply wrong" to seize journalists' records. The FBI is part of DOJ, which is an executive branch department under Biden's direct authority. If he thinks it's "simply wrong", he can just order them not to do it. He's not limited to "criticizing" it.

bowmessage 5y ago
Good point. I'm not sure he's even aware of that option, unfortunately.
- hellow0rldz 5y ago
  Oh, he is. But it's good PR to make positive statements while doing whatever you want.
  - Sebguer 5y ago
    He literally did ban the practice, though, and the quoted line is after the reporting saying he did so?
    - hellow0rldz 5y ago
      No he did not. He gave a "direction". Which, legally, means almost nothing. > “Going forward, consistent with the President’s direction, this Department of Justice – in a change to its longstanding practice – will not seek compulsory legal process in leak investigations to obtain source information from members of the news media doing their jobs,” Anthony Coley, Justice Department spokesman, said in a statement. They are changing a "practice". One uses laws to prevent practices one does not like, not "directions".
      - ncallaway 5y ago
        > One uses laws to prevent practices one does not like, not "directions". If you want a law to prevent this I'm not sure why you're criticizing Biden. He is the President, no the Legislature. If you think there should be a law, then your complaint should be for congress.

wydfre 5y ago

Did anybody bother to lookup the article they wanted to get the IPs for and get scared out of their minds when they realize what the title was? No, I am wrong, Hacker News is right, I have learned my mistake, we need anonymity - from everything. I don't want responsibility for my actions - that's why I support the EFF, and I don't care about the FSF. We deserve the same anonymity as the upper echelon of the government, and who cares about unconditionally accelerating the singularity with open-source. Transparency - only Satan could want such a thing! At least in my sect of Christianity, Satan only hurts bad people - it's people themselves that are evil or want to make others evil. Bit more theologically consistent.

jb775 5y ago

> should remind the Biden administration of the importance of an independent press. "Independent Press" a.k.a. leftist propaganda machine owned by a handful of super rich elites.

DaniloDias 5y ago

Julian Assange reminds us that our entire journalism justice system is fraudulent. This story is a drip in the ocean of journalistic and justice corruption. We are not doing any better today than we were yesterday.

a3n 5y ago

So DoJ is like Google or Facebook: They silently do whatever they want until it appears on HN, then they fix it.

judge2020 5y ago
All three share the trait of being in the public sphere. Graver atrocities are happening across every other industry, they're just boring/not newsworthy so nobody really applies scrutiny.
- cschep 5y ago
  They also all three share the trait of not caring at all what we hacker newsers think :D There just aren't enough of us.
  - judge2020 5y ago
    I think the reason we often see FAANG-related issues actually resolved when they're posted on HN is that so many programmers who work at these FAANGs read HN and can escalate real issues internally. While there probably are thousands of real issues that don't make it onto HN and thus never get resolved, there's probably multiple millions of people just as desparate that are just trying to skirt some rule or are telling half-truths to try to get their way and bypass policies.
    - nexuist 5y ago
      This makes me wonder how a Hacker News-for-politicians variant would fare, if political managers at various levels in the chain could post under a pseudonym to bring high level attention to some broken or un-oiled cog. Not necessarily for civilians to find out but for other political operatives to learn about and pull whatever levers they can pull to resolve issues internally. My understanding is that the government (at least the US Fed) is very top->down information wise, and e.g. a town clerk in Kansas has no available way to interact with INS even when they need to for their job. Let's say one day you stumble upon some nuclear centrifuge in the middle of a field. Who do you even call and how do you do it in such a way that you don't end up on the no-fly list for the rest of your life?

sarak12070 5y ago

Look 20 years younger than your age Naturally http://healthwithbeauty.xyz/2021/06/05/how-to-look-20-years-younger-in-30-days/ http://healthwithbeauty.xyz/2021/06/05/how-to-look-20-years-... creepy animals that exist I am sure you don't know about these animals https://www.interestingnews.club/2021/06/creepy-animals-that-exist.html https://www.interestingnews.club/2021/06/creepy-animals-that... Hong Kong parking space sells for $1.3M, sets new world record https://www.interestingnews.club/2021/06/hong-kong-parking-space-sells-for-13m.html https://www.interestingnews.club/2021/06/hong-kong-parking-s...

PragmaticPulp 5y ago

I'm glad they withdrew this. That said, it does appear that the subpoena was more selective than I initially thought, given the headlines. From the other USA Today article: > The subpoena, issued in April, demands the production of records containing IP addresses and other identifying information "for computers and other electronic devices" that accessed the story during a 35-minute time frame starting at 8:03 p.m. on the day of the shooting. A 35-minute window could still produce a large number of readers, but I assume they had some other information that would have immediately narrowed it down or otherwise confirmed their suspicions.

dredmorbius 5y ago

In an age where newspapers were bought at news stands for cash, identity of the reader was entirely anonymous. In an age where printed periodicals were delivered by subscription, the subscriber information was available (and yes, often tracked by local and federal law enforcement), but not the specifics of what articles were read. Today, with Web-based document delivery and Javascript instrumentation, the specifics of who reads what articles, time on page, sections read, interactions, shares, and more, are available not just to the publishere but advertisers, any entities hacking into or accessing their systems, app developers, and more. And, yes, law enforcement, whether under warrant, subpoena, or ... other methods.

qualudeheart 5y ago
You can get around that if you search for link urls in archive sites. Someone usually will have archived the article there. If you feel a bit more ambitious you could make a bot that runs on a vps somewhere and automatically scrapes news articles.
- TooCleverByHalf 5y ago
  Sure. But that's not the point.
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  Tor seems to work reasonably well, except that many mainstream media sites block, throttle, or CAPTCHA it.
  - pabs3 5y ago
    Combine Tor Browser with the archive.org/archive.is sites?
    - dredmorbius 5y ago
      Internet Archive / Wayback Machine works. Archive.is runs Tor through a Cloudfront captcha which fails consistently in my experience.

morpheos137 5y ago

I am confused how reading a news story in a certain window of time could serve as evidence or probable cause or reasonable suspicion of anything. Seems utterly bizarre.

arp242 5y ago
My guess is that they have some sort of photo, screenshot, or video that happens to show that a suspect had this page open on a computer or mobile phone, and that they can reliably date the time of this photo or video. Depending on details, it may not be an unreasonable request. The question is more one of trust: do we trust the FBI that it's a reasonable request? This is why all the stuff like the activities the Snowden leaks demonstrated or Trump's idiotic harassment of the press through the DOJ are so harmful far beyond the direct harm they did: they justifiable and seriously erode trust, and then there is a serious case like this and "trust us" no longer carries any value. A sad state of affairs where everyone loses.
- morpheos137 5y ago
  Still even if they had such a screen shot I don't get how reading a news article about a sex offender would be incrimnating even if you were a sex offender yourself. That said...https://www.cbsnews.com/news/luka-magnotta-wanted-for-canada-dismember-slay-caught-while-reading-about-himself-at-online-cafe/ https://www.cbsnews.com/news/luka-magnotta-wanted-for-canada...
  - arp242 5y ago
    > Still even if they had such a screen shot I don't get how reading a news article about a sex offender would be incrimnating even if you were a sex offender yourself. What? Absolutely no one said or even implied any such thing. Photos of in child sex abuse cases are routinely scrutinized in great detail to reveal clues about the location, time, and anything else that might lead to the individuals in the case. Interpol has an entire website dedicated to help identify objects in pictures[1], asking members of the public to help identify everyday things like T-shirts. Actually, one of the top results pictures right now is "do you recognise this newspaper?" No one is suggesting that "wearing this t-shirt" or "having this newspaper" is incriminating in and of itself. Finding these people from vague online pictures where they intend to remain anonymous is tricky business, and sometimes with a bunch of these clues combined with some other information they can identify offenders and/or victims. Of course there are trade-offs involved in all of this, and it's important we have robust public conversations discussing those; as I mentioned in my previous comment, the lack of trust here is a big issue. But much of this entire thread is ... disappointing. I wish people would keep cooler heads (as well as, you know, actually read the article before commenting). [1]: https://www.europol.europa.eu/stopchildabuse https://www.europol.europa.eu/stopchildabuse

codezero 5y ago

It likely means they got this data more easily from a third party, like an analytics or ads provider.

malwarebytess 5y ago

They'll just send a NSL instead.

Scoundreller 5y ago
Don’t think that works for pedos. But if we’re not allowed to see the NSLs, then who knows what they contain.

grouphugs 5y ago

the nazis constantly obstruct the future they're imagining with their own bullshit, this shits hilarious

wolverine876 5y ago

Biden has now made it policy to protect journalists from certain means of investigation, but that can be reversed easily by the next president, by Biden if they want, and because the has no legal force, courts won't enforce it and it may be that the biggest risk taken by violators is to lose their job. Why isn't this made into a federal law? What constituency in Congress is opposed?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

mrmckizzle 5y ago

I must be missing something here. How does it help an investigation by fetching the meta data of those who read an article? Anyone could of read the article within that time period.

throwitaway12 5y ago

This is a disgusting over reach of power as usual by the American TLA's. Please remember to always use a VPN, Tor, or other similar technologies when using the internet to shield your self from basic infringements of your privacy like this.

mortdeus 5y ago

im just curious how they knew the person of interest read that article? Was he a person of interest in the lead up to the shootout, who got away, and they were just grasping at straws to discover a list of local area IPs correlated with known addresses he might have been hiding out at so they could obtain a search warrant? If that's the case, then honestly I don't think this is any worse than when they force say Google or Facebook to provide such data to government. I don't see why the USA Today should get any special privileges over any other tech company just because they are "media". If we want to have an argument about the Government abusing it's power to spy on us in general, that's one thing. But the USA Today is literally saying its more important they protect the illusion of their readers "privacy" (which we all know they don't care about your privacy are willing to sell all your personal info to the highest bidder, its in all their TOS) than it is to try and help the cops catch a child predator... I do agree that this does establish a troubling precedent, but i kinda thought Snowden already made it blatantly clear that the NSA and the CIA is already doing this. It seems to me that the FBI is basically just trying to play catch up, which we should be concerned about because they are supposedly the agency put in place to police us. Those other agencies are supposedly only supposed to police the world. (which i never understood why thats supposedly okay. Americans are the only people entitled to their privacy?)

mschuster91 5y ago
> I don't see why the USA Today should get any special privileges over any other tech company just because they are "media". Because freedom of press is (in all democracies) one of the highest ranking human rights.

giantg2 5y ago

They're just going to get it from they payment providers like Visa, Mastercard, etc. Maybe even ISPs. Just because they gave up on one avenue doesn't mean they won't use other methods to get what they want.

slumdev 5y ago

This is almost certainly a case of attempted parallel construction. Indulge my hypothetical: 1. A newspaper article is posted at 1PM. 2. A suspicious comment that contains nonpublic, incriminating information is posted on a message board at 1:15PM. That comment links to the USA Today article. The message board is outside of FBI jurisdiction. 3. The Feds already know the identity of the commenter through an illegal and/or unconstitutional means of data gathering. (Think of all the secret taps built into AT&T's networks, their Stingray devices, all of the unpublished vulnerabilities exploited every day by TLAs, etc.) 4. If the Feds can get the identities of everyone who read the article during the window immediately before and after that comment's submission, they may be able to use other information to narrow that list down to one or two suspects and use that to sway a judge to issue a search warrant. Because they already know who they're looking for, I wouldn't expect this "narrowing down" process to be particularly even-handed.

splithalf 5y ago

They need to be penalized. For every high profile incident like this, there are many more that never reach public scrutiny. The leadership needs to be made accountable.