| This story is going to freak you out and piss you off. And it should. It's absolutely outrageous.
The folks at Room 8 have been fighting a subpoena from the Bronx DA for months now, though they've had to do it in silence as they were threatened with prosecution if they even revealed the document's existence. It seems that the Bronx DA was upset by the comments of someone posting anonymously on Room 8 and was hellbent to use the powers of his office to find out who they were and intimidate a small blog into compliance. The story reeks of malfeasance and abuse of power and it needs to be investigated by the Attorney General.
From the Times:
At the Uneasy Intersection of Bloggers and the Law
A grand jury subpoena sent by prosecutors in the Bronx earlier this year sought information to help identify people blogging anonymously on a Web site about New York politics called Room 8.
The subpoena carried a warning in capital letters that disclosing its very existence "could impede the investigation being conducted and thereby interfere with law enforcement" - implying that if the bloggers blabbed, they could be prosecuted.
"We were totally perplexed," said Ben Smith, who co-founded Room 8 with Gur Tsabar. (The site calls itself an "imaginary neighbor" to the press room - Room 9 - in City Hall in New York.) The two promptly began looking for a lawyer. "We knew enough to be scared."
The guys at Room 8 tell their side of the story:
We're relieved finally to be able to share with the Room Eight community the details of our battle to preserve the anonymity of a blogger and commenters in the face of a subpoena from a politician the blogger had criticized.
This January, we received a subpoena from the Bronx District Attorney, Robert Johnson, demanding identifying details of a Room Eight blogger who wrote under the name "Republican Dissident," as well as the authors of a dozen comments on his posts. Equally chilling, the subpoena contained a legend (above) implicitly threatening us with prosecution if we disclosed its existence.
Last week, we won our legal battle to preserve the blogger's and commenters' anonymity, but the story is a cautionary tale in how - whether deliberately or not -- a local prosecutor appears to have been able to intimidate an anonymous, small-scale local critic into silence.
...
The district attorney's office refused to offer any details of their investigation, leaving us with the concern that the crime they were investigating was the criticism itself, most of which involved linking - with harsh, at times mean, caricatures - to news stories and to publicly available documents, like a deed in Sandow's name to a house outside the Bronx.
We don't have any position on Republican Dissident's views or his style of expressing them. We do, however, feel very strongly that he has a right to do so without fear of exposure in an investigation that - as far as we know - appears to have concerned nothing beyond his online political speech.
So, basically, someone at Room 8 starts criticizing the Bronx DA as well as much of the power structure in the borough. This sets off the DA or people close to him. They then have a grand jury issue a criminal subpoena to Room 8 seeking the IP address of this critic and others. They also threaten to prosecute the admins at Room 8 if they even tell anyone that they've been served, all under the guise that they are protecting an actual criminal investigation.
Then, as someone close to the story emailed me last night, "The DA unceremoniously caved" last week. I guess there wasn't all that much to that investigation after all, especially after they were faced with the possibility of being sued.
This whole situation smells real, real bad and absolutely needs to be investigated. It appears that powerful people were using their offices and the force of law to silence critics exercising their right to free speech. At a bare minimum, Attorney General Andrew Cuomo should open inquiry into this matter post haste.
Again, Ben and Gur:
But not every blogger will be lucky enough to find pro bono counsel like ours, and few can afford to pay for lawyers. In the meantime, we hope District Attorney Johnson will be able to provide more detailed answers to the unanswered questions in this case: Who ordered this investigation of a political critic to be opened? Did it proceed through the usual channels - a complaint filed with the New York Police Department, for instance - or through the D.A.'s political operatives? The chilling threat to an important new form of speech demands that the D.A. take these questions seriously, or if he doesn't, that a credible outside investigator look into the matter.
Agreed. |
