Mike Masnick at Techdirt reported it first: the United States Attorney's Office for the Northern District of Texas issued a federal grand jury subpoena to Twitter, seeking the identifying information for five Twitter accounts, including @popehat.
I'm 98.5% confident that this related to the federal prosecution of one Justin Shafer, who is charged with using computers to harass an FBI agent and his family. You can read about Shafer's background in Mike's post. You can read the complaint against him here.
Twitter sent me the subpoena. I searched twitter for interactions with the other accounts named in the subpoena — @dawg8u, @abtnatural, @associatesmind, and @PogoWasRight, and saw interaction on only two issues — the Shafer prosecution and the prosecution of John Rivello, accused of giving Kurt Eichenwald a seizure by sending a graphic file. I pulled up the dockets from PACER and noted that the AUSA who signed the subpoena is the same AUSA on the Shafer case, and there you go. As far as I can tell, the Assistant U.S. Attorney prosecuting Shafer subpoenaed Twitter to get this group of users' identities because, in a thread about the Rivello case, Shafer tweeted a smiley face at us in response to someone mentioning the same agent Shafer is accused of stalking.
I don't know whether the U.S. Attorney's Office's theory is that we're confederates, or who know about Shafer's activities, or that we're his sock puppets, or what.
I have three comments about this.
First, it's an odd use of resources to send a grand jury subpoena to discover my identity, when it's so public.
Second, though I'm public and thus don't care about my identity being revealed, some of the other Twitter users subject to the subpoena are not. I understand at least one of them may challenge the subpoena. That's good. The Department of Justice has no rational need to piece the anonymity of the other Twitter users. This is part of a pattern of the Department of Justice seeking to uncover anonymous internet users for no good reason, as we saw when the Department of Justice subpoenaed Reason Magazine to discover the identities of some commenters who made rude (but absolutely not true-threat) comments about a judge. It's disturbing that the government would seek to strip Twitter users of anonymity just because a defendant sent them a smiley face unsolicited.
Third, when I read the subpoena yesterday, I was suddenly gripped with exactly the sort of impulses that I urge clients to resist: the overpowering urge to do something and talk to someone to straighten it all out. I was tempted to email the AUSA and introduce myself, and to argue that it's ridiculous that he subpoenaed my identity, and ask what the hell he wants. That, of course, would be extremely stupid, even though I've done nothing wrong — perhaps especially because I've done nothing wrong. Fortunately, just as I plead with clients to resist this urge to reach out to the government, I resisted it myself. But I must admit it is powerful.
Copyright 2017 by the named Popehat author. https://www.popehat.com/2017/10/24/in-which-my-identity-is-sought-by-federal-grand-jury-subpoena/
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