Re:Judge orders Google to comply with FBI's secret NSL demands
by venomsnake on Friday May 31, 2013 @06:33PM
(#5801676)
Another question - are there any protections from Sony using the information in other non case related activities -extortion letters similar to porn sites come to mind.
Re:Judge orders Google to comply with FBI's secret NSL demands
by rayiner on Friday May 31, 2013 @07:19PM
(#5801831)
A subpoena is a signed litigation document, which means it's either ordered by the court or issued by an attorney of record. Abuse of the subpoena can result in sanctions on both the attorney who signed it and his or her client. It can also run into various statutes (e.g. the 9th circuit allowed a suit to proceed against an attorney who issued an overbroad subpoena for e-mail under the CFAA under the theory it was equivalent to hacking the e-mail provider). Extortion is of course also illegal. Finally, witnesses can invoke the 5th to avoid producing information that might incriminate them in a subsequent criminal case.
As a general rule, there's "no money" in doing something like that. You run the risk of getting sanctioned, and if you use the information improperly in other litigation, it'll just get excluded as having been obtained via abuse of a subpoena.
The bigger worry is stuff like this, which doesn't happen under court supervision: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2012/08/administrative-subp....
That's the problem with talking about a "right to privacy" in Anglo American law: there really isn't one. There are various protections serving different purposes, but they're not unified into some overarching principle of a right not to disclose or have information disclosed. That's why the subpoena power is so much broader than the power of police to search: because the animating principle isn't "privacy" but rather the protection of criminal defendants. If it were about privacy it wouldn't make sense to e.g. treat witnesses, who can be compelled to testify, differently than defendants, who can't.
Now, I'm not arguing that this is the best possible way to do things. But it's the way we have been doing it for centuries (since the Middle Ages).