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“ The subpoena, issued as part of an investigation seeking to identify a child sexual exploitation offender, was withdrawn after investigators found the person through other means, according to a notice the Justice Department sent to USA TODAY's attorneys Saturday.”
I’ve seen this before where a user got an email from Google legal about a subpoena against them, spent $7k successfully fighting it, but it didn’t matter because several other $BigCos didn’t even let the user know.
To what extent do Americans want to not help investigate crimes to defend corporations “protecting user privacy” (all while these corporations collect and keep the data to themselves and do as they please, including profiling and selling it to third parties).
I guess there is some greater good that your position intends to stand for, but what is that greater good?
Genuinely curious.
Answering this from the point of view of an informal request: If it's not a situation of active harm, then they have time to get their court order. If it is a situation of active harm, there should still be a process to ensure the request was valid after the fact. Police can and do lie to get access under false pretences. Without a valid followup process, you can't be assured their request is legit.
I don't understand how that reply works. Can you elaborate?
(The best way for me to reconcile those would be to interpret it as a snarky "you're realizing it's useless, they also realized that, so they withdrew it" but that doesn't answer the question of why they made the request in the first place. Or I could interpret it as "the quote below is why they withdrew it" but that's even further from answering the question of why they made the request in the first place. Is it supposed to mean "they withdrew it so we don't find out what they'd learn"? It's hard to see how withdrawing the request helps very much there. Overall, I'm lost.)
most likely the fbi was monitoring some website somewhere and the person of interest posted a link to or talked about the article and it was 35 min after the story was posted when the guy linked to it.
It could be a smoke and mirrors response to get people to say “well in that case...” but the article does answer the question.