Court: Chevron can subpeona Americans' email data in Ecuador case | Hacker News Reader

Court: Chevron can subpeona Americans' email data in Ecuador case

motherjones.com

100 pointsLibertatea26 comments

I'm finding this article unsurprisingly hard to reconcile with the actual opinion, which concerns something like 30 specific named accounts and no others, as part of civil discovery during an ongoing court case. At the very least, it seems like the headline is egregiously overblown.

The conclusion that we'd be better off without Techdirt (the MoJo story Techdirt hijacks is somewhat better and at least includes a link to the order) continues to be hard to avoid.

The headline and article both accurately report that 9 years worth of meta data of american citizens is to be handed over to Chevron.

You don't appear to be disputing this so what are you struggling to "reconcile" and what is so "egregious"?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_(law)

The headline is deliberately written to convey the impression that Chevron is dragnetting the American population. I'm not interested in the nerdy argument we could have about whether that's true; I'm confident that it is.

The dragnet interpretation really seems to be your own. The headline simply says "Americans'". There are no superfluous adjectives such as "massive" or "unprecedented scale" which could be intentionally vague.

Deliberately is a strong claim. Do you have some internal Mother Jones memo? Since you love to give the status quo the benefit of textual evidence, perhaps you could do the same for this article, and reiterate what you consider to be factually incorrect?

You also dismissed this article because document discovery is a normal procedure. The article discusses how the discovery burden is different for citizens and non-citizens, and how the wrong burden was applied as relates to the first amendment. Do you think it is not important for courts to correctly protect your rights as a citizen through the discovery process? Why would you so pithly dismiss the article otherwise?

My comment referred to the Techdirt story to which this thread was originally attached, as you might have discerned from the fact that it refers to Techdirt.

Looks like an editor replaced the TechDirt link with the MoJo story, fwiw.

Overall HN is pretty disappointing on civil-liberties topics, though. Lots of linkbait posts and kneejerk-outrage comments posted without doing any research, which is unfortunate because it's actually an important issue.

The Mother Jones article is far better than the TechDirt one, and specifically includes helpful commentary. While Mother Jones decries the subpoenas as "unprecedented" the reality seems to be that courts have not acted uniformly in this area:

"But he notes that while anonymous speech made by Americans is protected under the Constitution, 'courts have been inconsistent in applying that protection against civil subpoenas aimed at identifying anonymous internet users.' In the case Dendrite International, Inc. v. Doe No. 3, for example, an appellate court held that a company was not allowed to unmask users who had criticized the company on a Yahoo message board."

What the article makes out to be an "unprecedented overreach" is actually a fairly subtle balancing of several different concerns. The first, and overriding, concern is that a litigant has the right to any evidence that might prove his case. Balanced against that is the concern that discovery could "chill" protected anonymous speech. Implicated in that second point is two issues: 1) most of the subjects of the subpoena do not seem to be Americans who can raise the 1st Amendment issue in the first place; and 2) 1st amendment concerns are weakened by the fact that any "chilling effect" would be the result of actions by a non-state actor (Chevron) who isn't bound by the 1st amendment.

The fact that we hate Chevron shouldn't blind us to the facts of the case. Chevron is fighting a $19 billion judgment against them. They have a colorable claim that they are the victims of an extortion scheme. It is the judge's job to figure out how to get them the evidence they need to prove their claim while not trampling on any Americans' rights in the process. They have a right to get that evidence to the extent that it is possible.

> most of the subjects of the subpoena do not seem to be Americans who can raise the 1st Amendment issue in the first place

Yes, that's why we non-US people love the US.

The U.S. has been more liberal than nearly any other developed country in extending rights and privileges to outsiders.

E.g. map of countries that have birthright citizenship: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Jus_soli_world.png.

Birthright citizenship in the U.S. is hardly about a desire to "extend rights and privileges to outsiders". The 1866 law was voted during the Reconstruction after the Civil War, to guarantee civil rights for Blacks [1]. It was later introduced in the Constitution to make it more robust against repeal [2]. Republicans have talked of repealing the amendment precisely because it is used (abused) by "outsiders" [3]. I'd like to see better examples to support the assertion that the U.S. has been more liberal towards outsiders than nearly any other developed country.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_Rights_Act_of_1866

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteenth_Amendment_to_the_Uni...

[3] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/08...

Regardless of the initial motivations for the 14th amendment, it was interpreted very early as extending a broad birthright citizenship: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Wong_Kim_Ark. And the fact is that the US has abided by it and extended citizenship to people born on U.S. soil in a way France or Germany or any of the other countries who get snooty about U.S. foreign policy never have. Those countries are quite content to have large number of people born on their soil that can't claim the privileges of citizenship (though their attitude is better now than it was in the 1970's or 1980's).

My brother was born just a few months after we immigrated to the U.S., and he was a U.S. citizen right off the bat, as much a citizen as anyone else and eligible to run for President. That wouldn't have been true in any Western European country.

To me, that suggests a pretty liberal attitude towards outsiders, i.e. making it tremendously easier to transition from being an "outsider" to no longer being an outsider.

To me the origin of birthright citizenship in the U.S. as a means of guaranteeing civil rights to Black people is more significant than having the Supreme Court interpret the text of the amendment in the rather obvious way. On the other hand, it's true that senators acknowledged the consequence the law would have on children of foreigners [1], so that speaks for extending rights to outsiders. In any case, I'd like to see other examples supporting (or contradicting) the view that the U.S. is particularly nice to outsiders. It's rather average on the issue of citizenship through marriage I think. It's obviously not very nice on issues of privacy (NSA scandal) as well as some basic human rights (Guantanamo).

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteenth_Amendment_to_the_Uni...

The reason is "Chevron alleges that it is the victim of a mass extortion conspiracy." Ok...seems a bit ridiculous to me.

I'm no lawyer, but is this significant in relation to the constitutionality of the NSA spying? "(The Judge) ruled it didn't violate the First Amendment because Americans weren't among the people targeted."

It's a little relevant, because the point that non-Americans cannot complain about violations of the First Amendment, because they don't have First Amendment rights, is relevant to both situations.

Aside from that it's not very relevant. Courts have much broader powers to subpoena information than the police. They can get pretty much anyone to turn over any information, or testify about anything, with certain narrow protections (e.g. 5th amendment, certain common law privileges like spousal privilege or attorney-client privilege, etc), as long as the information is relevant to an ongoing litigation.[1]

See: http://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcp/rule_45.

[1] That is, incidentally, the key constraint on the power. Courts' subpoena power can reach deeply but within a narrow scope. That's why the "fishing expedition" question raised in the article is so relevant. It's not wrong for a judge to rule that a defendant can access peoples' e-mails. It is wrong if that allows the defendant to go on a fishing expedition with regards to people who have no connection to the litigation.

i'm pretty sure this article is just wrong about what the judge ruled. what does the first amendment have to do with anything?

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6033603 for discussion about the case when it first happened.

Does anyone know what the evidence of the "mass extortion conspiracy" Chevron provided in order to get the judge to accept the subpoena?

Thank you. This would seem to be the central question about this. If Chevron in fact has evidence that the "facts" presented in the Equidorian trial were false, then they have pretty good reason to go after somebody for fraud and extortion.

Otherwise, if the allegations in Equidor were undeniable, then their case is, what? That somebody "coerced" the judiciary there to look at what was actually happening, and this is somehow unfair to Chevron???

If the premises of the Equidorian case were in fact false, then they have basis to after the "liars". Otherwise, this would seem to be a fishing expedition, the point of which is to harass the whistle-blowers to make an example of them. "Dis is what happens when youz mess wid us, M.....F.....s!".

IF there is no evidence of falsehood, that is, if the case against Chevron in Equador is true, the irony of using RICO to harass the whistle-blowers is oh so rich.

I don't find this particularly surprising and that's sort of unfortunate. Chevron has large ties in global communications networks. They have a huge stake in Reliance Industries who are responsible for undersea cable communications throughout the world. It's possible this court case was simply a formality.

Huh? What does this have to do with communications networks? Chevron is embroiled in a legal battle with several people in Ecuador and the US, itself having nothing at all to do with communications secrecy, and has identified some of their email accounts. It has asked for information about those accounts as part of discovery.

I was only commenting that I'm not surprised when Chevron is involved in issues regarding access to communications since they have very large ties to some of the world's largest communications networks. I wasn't commenting specifically about the court case or the judge's decision but about the fact that it just doesn't surprise me that this would happen, and I think that's unfortunate.

And again the only thing everybody is shocked about is that Chevron can get email metadata of Americans!

This stuff should be protected under secrecy of correspondence for all the people. Besides, it's the metadata of lawyers of the opposing party - they themselves are responsible for protecting it - they can't talk to anybody about what their clients told them and Chevron can just get it like that?!

Its shocking for americans because they're american. Much like the NSA scandal is shocking for europeans because they're europeans.

I think you're applying a causation without correlation here. Under what conditions/preconditions should things be protected under "secrecy of correspondence for all the people"?

Note I don't necessarily disagree, but there are multiple competing interests here and I don't always think that the idea of secret communication overrides societal benefits to being able to view things that aren't attempted to be secret.

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