Feds lose bid for Amazon.com customer records
Federal prosecutors tried unsuccessfully to force Amazon.com to identify thousands of innocent customers who bought books online, then abandoned the idea after a judge rebuked them.
In an order that was sealed but has now become public, U.S. District Judge Stephen Crocker rejected the Justice Department's subpoena for details on Amazon's customers and their purchasing habits. Prosecutors had claimed the details would help them prove their case against a former Madison, Wisc., city official charged with tax evasion related to selling used books through Amazon.
"The subpoena is troubling because it permits the government to peek into the reading habits of specific individuals without their prior knowledge or permission," Crocker wrote in June. Amazon filed the lawsuit to quash the grand jury subpoena.
The case is reminiscent of last year's attempts by federal prosecutors to wrest sensitive search-related information from Google through a subpoena. A California judge eventually rejected the request for users' search queries (and allowed only an excerpt from Google's index of Web sites).
In both cases, the judges worried about public perception. California's Judge James Ware was concerned about the "perception by the public" that Google search terms are "subject to government scrutiny." In the Amazon case, Judge Crocker predicted that "rumors of an Orwellian federal criminal investigation into the reading habits of Amazon's customers could frighten countless potential customers into canceling planned online book purchases, now and perhaps forever."
Instead of giving the Bush administration what it wanted, Crocker split the difference, saying that Amazon could send letters to its customers asking them whether they voluntarily wanted to contact the Feds.
After losing the subpoena fight, Daniel Graber, the assistant U.S. Attorney in Madison, gave up and rescinded his request for the customer records.
The onetime Madison city official who's facing tax evasion, wire fraud, and money laundering charges is Robert D'Angelo. He was indicted in October on charges that he ran a sizable mail order business from his city office, using city computers, and city storage facilities. The business allegedly generated $238,000 in revenue through the sale of music CDs, costume jewelry, and--through Amazon--used books.
Initially, prosecutors demanded "virtually all" records from Amazon dealing with D'Angelo, including "the identities of thousands of customers who had bought used books" from him, according to court documents. Prosecutors subsequently narrowed the request to 120 book buyers, 30 per year for the four years under investigation--on the theory that FBI and IRS agents could then contact those 120 customers.
David Zapolsky, vice president of litigation for Amazon, told the Wisconsin State Journal that his employer tries to protect its customers' privacy rights from governmental fishing expeditions: "When we don 't know what the government wants the information for and we have a doubt whether it violates privacy or First Amendment rights, typically we will dialog with the government and try to understand what their perspective is or we'll make a motion and have a judge decide whether the government has any need for the information."
This subpoena, even more than the one directed at Google, highlights the tension between law enforcement's desire to assemble information--and the privacy rights of Americans who have that information stored by search engines or e-commerce sites.
If the Wisconsin subpoena had been directed at a credit card company or bank, the customer records would probably have been handed over without a fuss (and without any publicity). But booksellers and libraries have unique First Amendment protections under U.S. law that can shield them from some overzealous demands by police for personal information.
In an important 2002 case, the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that police could not serve a search warrant on Denver's Tattered Cover Book Store. Two years earlier, a judge denied the Drug Enforcement Administration's attempts to get sales records from a Borders bookstore as part of a grand jury investigation. And perhaps the most famous case came when independent counsel Kenneth Starr tried unsuccessfully to obtain Monica Lewinsky's purchase records from Kramerbooks, a popular neighborhood bookstore in Washington, D.C.
Declan McCullagh, CNET News' chief political correspondent, chronicles the intersection of politics and technology. He has covered politics, technology, and Washington, D.C., for more than a decade, which has turned him into an iconoclast and a skeptic of anyone who says, "We oughta have a new federal law against this." E-mail Declan. 
Knock Knock, Mr. Smith I see you have been reading several cook books that I really hate and the FBI really needs to know if you really cook that good?
Waste of tax payer dollars.
the government can request access to them.
http://ixquick.com/
It is overseas and they keep no records of searches. :-)
We're talking about online orders and physical shipments, and in that case the company has your name, shipping address, and credit card number. Ixquick.com isn't exactly going to help you conceal that when ordering from Amazon. :)
If the Feds are able to nab a child molester or terrorist by monitoring reading habits, emails, or website visits, great!
I know there will be tons of backlash from my comments. But only from the people who are so paranoid and delusional that they think they are going to be tossed in jail because they visit a porn site or read a communist/socialist text.
It's my personal intrests and I don't want some stranger digging into my past for their own purposes. I have nothing to hide, but that dosn't mean that I want it displayed for anyone to see.
So in your opinion, I should be able to look at all your personal information, correct? I'd like to know what you read and what music you listen to, oh, and I would love to be able to see what inappropriate websites you are subscribed to. Why? Oh, I don't know. I'm just curious. Or maybe I'm looking to hire you and want to know what you do on your off time. Or maybe, just maybe, I just don't like you and want to cause you some trouble. Or maybe, I don't like your wife and I REALLY want to cause some trouble.
Even by today's laws; it's easy to obtain this information: It's a simple matter of serving any bank you've done business with a subpoena for your charge card or debit card or checking account records and then tracing the transactions back to their point of sale and then getting supoena's for those details records.
Now, you might say, "Oh, gosh, you as an individual can't do that. Only the government can," or some such other inane remark. And you would be not entirely correct but close enough for this discussion. But see to get the government involved, all I'd have to do by your argument is accuse you of having child pornography or being an agent of a terrorist plot. Ooh, they jump all over that stuff.
Now the government is involved and suddenly there are subpoenas abound because you've been accused of buying, let's keep it simple, child pornography. So suddenly your life is on the examination table and is being cut apart by rusty scalpels by people that probably know as little about law as you do. But it doesn't end there. Because now they have some leg room. They want to know what you DO with this porn. So they start serving subpoena's on people that are associated with you say your wife and your best friend and your dorm buddies from college simply because they are associated with you. These people are innocent; there has been no accusation of impropriety directed at them. But because they know you; they're suddenly looking down the barrel of gun belonging to a wholly corrupt government that is completely out of control.
This scenario wouldn't be so far fetched if this court order had been allowed to proceed.
Now, substitute me with the IRS who doesn't really want that information because they care if you have child pornography and couldn't give rat spunk less about terrorist plots. They want your financial records because they think that you made five dollars last year that you didn't report on your income tax return. And they really can't justify a subpoena with just that can they. But guess what? They're buddies with the justice department, in fact, they're so far up the justice department's butt they're looking at their collective tonsils. So what does the IRS do? They call in a few 'favours' and suddenly subpoenas abound because YOU have now been accused of supporting terrorists. And hey, since the justice department has the evidence and since they're all one big happy government, we can share that information with the IRS just to make sure that nothing else funny is going on. Again, by your argument, everyone around is now also under scrutiny despite the fact that they've done nothing wrong and have no reason to be in the government's eye site.
Now put yourself in your wife's position or your best friend's position or your dorm buddy's position.
I'm sure this all sounds hilariously funny and please by all means laugh, some of it was meant to be funny. But make no mistake that organizations like the IRS are ruthless. They will stop at nothing to get what they want and in the IRS' case that is to drain every single penny it possibly can from every citizen in this country by any means necessary and that includes deception, lies and false accusations. This scenario is probably a bit over the top but I've heard tell tales from a couple of my friends who are ex-IRS agents that scenarios not far from this are not uncommon.
And now, just to drive the point home, replace the IRS with the State of California who doesn't really want that information for those reasons either but simply because they think I bought a DVD out of state and didn't pay sales tax on it. Cust and paste the above and voila! Same scenario . . .
I'm sure that even the most feeble mind that thinks privacy is a joke can follow those scenarios to their logical conclusions.
During the Salem witch trials in the 1700s it took no more than an accusation of impropriety to land someone on the gallows, on the pyre or in the guillotine. That included accustations by association. I can see by your remark that you skipped those classes during your history lessons.
Our right to privacy is as singularly important to us as our right to freedom of speech. Both of these rights are being trampled on in today's America and people like you are making that possible using the whole 'if you have nothing to hide' argument. Just because I am not guilty, does not mean that I do not have a right to protect things I do not want viewed by the public, by the government or by anyone else that I choose to not show my life to.
You, my misinformed friend, and others like you, are going to be responsible for the demise of the US Constitution unless more judges started ruling as this judge did. And without the Constitution; the United States is nothing more than a group of rich idiots ruling a large body of citizens with iron fists.
But holey cr*p - the reason is that otherwise Amazon might lose money? That's the criterion for deciding intrusion of privacy and freedom of speech cases now - that a corporation might lose profit?
i'm just glad there's at least one patriot business left in this God forsaken country.
like someone said,this is worst than 1984.
Instead of a knee jerk response like "the govt shouldn't be allowed to do this ..." or "...its 1984 ..."
Think about the issue at hand.
There was a public figure who's being charged with tax evasion and use of public equipment for personal use/gain...
$230K per year on a side business buying and selling used items?
Hmmm. Something stinks...
Had the FBI first asked for the list of transactions by the mayor with the names and street addresses blocked out, then it probably would have gone through. (They are investigating the transactions of one individual.) Knowing the buyer's city and state would be important to see if there was something fishy going on. Such as laundering money or a bribe. (Sure I'll pay you $50,000 for that used copy of "The C reference manual mr mayor... ;-)
So where do you draw the line?
The cops are not looking for other information. However, how much screaming would they face if they had, plain as anything, evidence of kiddy porn or evidence that someone was planning another 9-11, and pulled it off?
And the Airline passenger database of all citizens that the government has been collecting. And the new national I.D.'s the government wants so bad. Fingerprints of every person who holds a CDL license to drive a truck. New modern passports that track every move. Driver licenses that broadcast your data like a radio signal via RFID. The list is endless and knows no bounds. It is also very invasive, authoritarian, and smacks of a government that has become so secretive, powerful, and war like, that it does not trust it's own citizens. Which is just what the writers of our U.S. Constitution were trying to avoid.
By Spying on their own people, kicking in doors in the middle of the night with no warrants, making people disappear, torturing people, arresting people and giving those arrested no trial or counsel or contact with their families, arresting American citizens and holding them in foreign countries to evade our own laws on the treatment of prisoners, and sending people to prisons in countries known for their brutal torture methods and treatment of P.O.W.'s.
Is anyone seeing the pattern here yet ?
So, yeah, I believe that the knee jerk response of the "the govt shouldn't be allowed to do this" is appropriate when set upon the background of what has been going on the last 8 years...
*Amazon - for the reason stated in this article.
*Google - because they too have fought to protect our privacy from an all too accusative government...
*Verizon - because they too fought the government when people with too much power demanded the names of citizens that were thought to have downloaded a song.
- New World Order is Here
- by mythicalpoet November 28, 2007 1:18 PM PST
- Friends,
- Like this Reply to this comment
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(18 Comments)This is the NewWorldOrder that 9/11 ushered in and it is only going to get worse no matter what candidate wins. 9/11 was a FALSE FLAG ATTACK. Wake up Americans! Do the research and you will find I am correct. Richard Gage's "How the Towers Fell" video will inform you of all you need to know. Search YouTube: 911: Eyewitness Says No 757. Bit by bit your rights are eroding away into nothingness--never to be recaptures. Ignorance is your undoing!