It's like deja-vu all over again...

It seemed like just another headline where prosecutors at the Justice Department were trying to obtain confidential information from Google regarding their users, that was till I read the article for a second time...

Take a look at the article for yourselves (link here), these quotes in particular stand out...

The Justice Department's lawsuit, filed April 22 and not disclosed until this article, was sparked by Google's decision to rebuff the FBI's legal demands for confidential user data. It centers on the bureau's controversial use of so-called National Security Letters (NSL), a secret electronic data-gathering technique that does not need a judge's approval and recently was declared unconstitutional in an unrelated court case.

This part is of particular interest to me...

The use of NSLs is controversial because they gag the recipient: If you receive one, it's illegal to tell anyone. They're only supposed to be used in national security investigations, not routine criminal probes, and there's no upper limit on the amount of data a single NSL can demand.

So once they send out one of these requests, the people that they send them to are prohibited from telling anyone about them!  Let's not forget, as we mentioned last week, asshat assistant state attorney William "Special K" Kostrzewski sent just such a subpoena to the company that hosts our domain name in order to find out our identity when we were blogging anonymously.  Once again, take a look at this email sent to me by the good folks over at GKG.net who host our domain name when I asked them to send me over a copy of the subpoena...

No shit!  The state attorneys office told them not to tell me anything about the subpoena!  WTF?!  Once again, from the justice department story...

The FBI has been abusing its power and the letters have sought information to which the FBI was not entitled. Without the gag orders issued on recipients of the letters, it is doubtful that the FBI would have been able to abuse the NSL power the way that it did. So the combination of free reign for FBI to write its own warrants without judicial review, combined with the never-ending gag orders are the ingredients of a perfect storm of abuse potential.

Much like the federal National Security Letters, the subpoena that Prosecutor Kostrzewski used to obtain my identity was done without judicial review as well.  

Google effectively put the FBI on notice on March 5 that it would only divulge what the law requires. In a statement on its Web site at the time, the company said that "the FBI can't use NSLs to obtain anything else from Google, such as Gmail content, search queries, YouTube videos, or user IP addresses."

Thank god for Google's stance against the government.  Essentially what the prosecutor who was trying to figure out my identity did was obtain my IP address from GKG.net then used that to figure out my identity, in my opinion both the subpoena he issued and the subsequent use of my IP address was all done illegally.  Once again from the article...

Another possibility, said EFF's Cohn, is that Google is "fighting to give notice" to their subscribers. That would mean arguing that the NSL gag orders are unconstitutional, which the Second Circuit Court of Appeals said was the case in a mixed ruling (PDF).

So there you have it, not only was the subpoena that the state attorneys office in our opinion, illegal, but the demand they made on the domain name host could have possibly been unconstitutional?!

It's disgusting but it's just another example of how those in law enforcement, whether it's a jerkoff cop (or police chief) abusing state and federal databases or an assclown prosecutor abusing his subpoena powers to uncover the identity of an anonymous blogger whose criticizing him online are violating our constitutional rights day in day out with relative impunity.

Now, if that shit wasn't enough, we've gotten back the results of a public information request over at the City of South Miami relating to the federal NCIC database.  You're never going to believe who our favorite chief has been busy looking up in his spare time!