D.C. judge approves government warrant for data from anti-Trump website

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A District of Columbia Superior Court judge on Thursday approved a government warrant seeking data from an anti-Trump website related to Inauguration Day protests, but he added protections to safeguard "innocent users."

Chief Judge Robert Morin said DreamHost, a Los Angeles-based web-hosting company, must turn over data about visitors to the website disruptj20.org, which is a home to political activists who organised protests at the time of Donald Trump's inauguration as U.S. president in January.

Morin, who will oversee review of the data, said the government must explain what protocols it will use to make sure prosecutors do not seize the data of "innocent users."

The U.S. Justice Department said it sought the records connected to the site because of concerns that it helped facilitate the planning of protests on Inauguration Day, when more than 200 people were arrested for rioting and vandalising businesses in downtown Washington.

DreamHost resisted the request, saying the scope of the warrant was too broad and trampled on the rights of 1.3 million visitors to the site, many of whom were simply expressing their political views.

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VinylAudio is hosted by Dreamhost and this morning they had a DDOS which brought down our website for a few hours.

Anyone have any thoughts and comments on this?

DreamHost, one of the world’s largest web hosting companies, said a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) caused significant outages Thursday affecting customers of its web and email services.
The Los Angeles-based hosting provider said that an attack against part of its online infrastructure had resulted in connectivity issues affecting several aspects of its operations, ranging from its online customer support features to the hosting service used by over 1.5 million websites.

The attack targeted DreamHost’s Domain Name Servers (DNS) – digital directories that allow internet users to access specific websites without remembering their lengthy, numeric IP addresses – and was remedied about four hours after first being detected, according to the company.

DDoS attacks involve knocking websites offline by overloading their servers with illegitimate traffic and effectively rendering them inaccessible.

Low-level attacks are capable of briefly disabling websites lacking DDoS protection, but wide-scale attacks like the one conducted last year against Dyn, an American DNS provider, caused unprecedented outages affecting some of the world’s most popular websites, including Amazon and Netflix.

DreamHost customers, including the Cambridge Seventh-day Adventist Church in England and the Tale of Two Wastelands video gaming project, were among those who said their websites were unavailable Thursday due to the powerful DDoS attack.

The DDoS attack was confirmed by DreamHost as two of the company’s customers made headlines in their own right over their unrelated efforts to survive scrutiny: DisruptJ20, an anti-Trump protest site, and The Daily Stormer, a white supremacist website that remerged online this week with the help of DreamHost after being all but driven off the internet.

A federal judge earlier Thursday ordered DreamHost to provide information sought by federal prosecutors investigating the riots that erupted in Washington, D.C. during President Trump’s inauguration Jan. 20.

It was not clear if the DDoS attack was related to either website, and DreamHost did not immediately return an email Thursday seeking comment.

Excerpt from this Washington Times article.