Huh? Reason.com got requests from law enforcement asking for email addresses and other private information. Reddit.com got requests from law enforcement asking for email addresses and other private information. Do you really not see the parallel, even if the Reason.com case is much more egregious for the fact of the gag order?
For one, a grand jury is made up of citizens, not members of law enforcement. (Notwithstanding the well-known belief that a "grand jury would 'indict a ham sandwich,' if that's what [the prosecutor] wanted.")
"Asking for information" includes things like a county police department sending a letter on department letterhead asking for information. It also includes the US government through Herbert Yardley asking all of the telegraph companies for their message traffic. There is no legal compulsion behind those requests.
jedberg's original comment confirms that this refers to simply asking, in the hopes that the recipient will pass data over voluntarily."It's really easy to make a request for information, and in most cases, the person you're asking will just willingly give it up even though they don't legally have to, either because they want to be helpful or because they don't know about their legal rights.
A federal grand jury subpoena, on the other hand, has teeth behind it. A recipient is legally obligated to respond to the subpoena, either with the requested information or with a legal challenge.
So no, these are not the same things. Reason.com received an order by a grand jury, not a request by law enforcement.
It makes sense to do this, but I can already hear the cries of parallel construction from my bunker 20 floors below sea level.
Keeping signup IP's forever and IP's for 90 days seems like a pretty long time to me.
It was a point about game theory, not about law.
Today (literally, today), the Supreme Court took a first shot at narrowing the third party doctrine with respect to hotel room records in Los Angeles. [2] The ruling was largely about the procedure a hotel may use to quash (ask a court to reject) the subpoena, but it shows a willingness to cut back on the third party doctrine. The GPS tracker case also had some commentary suggesting a limit to the third party doctrine, but it was ultimately decided based on the physical intrusion of the device.
[1] Alternet's very negative take on the issue: http://www.alternet.org/8-ways-police-can-spy-you-without-wa...
[2] http://www.politico.com/story/2015/06/hotel-guest-list-priva...
The hotel case you mentioned doesn't seem to involve that; in this case, the hotel is opposing the request, so there's an adversarial posture between the third-party data holder and the government over handing over the data.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pen_register#Pen_Register_Act
So it's reasonable to speak of the third party doctrine being applied to compelled data disclosures, not just voluntary ones.
But having been on the other side of the coin, investigating computer crime, I can tell you why it happens. It's really easy to make a request for information, and in most cases, the person you're asking will just willingly give it up even though they don't legally have to, either because they want to be helpful or because they don't know about their legal rights. Even if the evidence can't be used to build a case against the person in court, it can still be used to lead down a path towards finding the person and gathering evidence that is admissible.