Corporate Access To Data is FAR More Chilling

NSA/Snowden/Metadata = blah blah blah. Seriously, I don't stay up for FIVE MINUTES at night worrying about that.

What I do worry about is THIS:

A federal judge has ruled to allow Chevron, through a subpoena to Microsoft, to collect the IP usage records and identity information for email accounts owned by over 100 environmental activists, journalists and attorneys.
The oil giant is demanding the records in an attempt to cull together a lawsuit which alleges that the company was the victim of a conspiracy in the $18.2 billion judgment against it fordumping 18.5 billion gallons of oil waste in the Ecuadorean Amazon, causing untold damage to the rainforest.

The "sweeping" subpoena was one of three issued to Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft.

Agh ... WHAT? I generally try pretty hard to understand the opposite side of any case, but this makes no sense to me. Why would a private company have a right to demand private information from other private companies? Even if it was a conspiracy, how does that have any relevance? To leave it to the EFF lawyers:

According to Judge Kaplan, none of the account holders could benefit from First Amendment protections since the account holders had “not shown that they were U.S. citizens.”

Now, let’s break this down. The account-holders in this case were proceeding anonymously, which the First Amendment permits. Because of this, Judge Kaplan was provided with no information about the account holders’ residency or places of birth. It is somewhat amazing then, that Judge Kaplan assumed that the account holders were not US citizens. As far as I know, a judge has never before made this assumption when presented with a First Amendment claim. We have to ask then: on what basis did Judge Kaplan reach out and make this assumption?

I would take 1000 government workers staring at every mail I ever sent over ONE of these private guys. Yikes.