Speaking to Sam Menefee-Libbey, a spokesperson for legal support group Dead City Legal Posse, Sputnik Radio's By Any Means Necessary gets down to the nitty gritty of the DOJ's "clear abuse of government authority."
"What we have here is a Justice Department, led by Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, trying to create a database of dissenters," Menefee-Libbey told By Any Means Necessary host Eugene Puryear. "It's truly Orwellian — it's horrifying."
According to a Monday blog post from DreamHost, the government entity's request called for the handover of more than 1.3 million visitor IP addresses — including contact information, email content and photos of thousands of people — in order to identify protest-goers who attended the inauguration day demonstration. Even if you just visited the site out of curiosity, Big Brother wanted your information.
"We have something there that definitely indicates that the government is willing to punish folks for just inquiring into a dissenting activity, not to mention actually engaging in dissenting activity," noted Menefee-Libbey.
Menefee-Libbey, noting the massive surveillance programs revealed by Edward Snowden, said it's more than likely the government already has the information it wants. This latest request is just "an attempt to get private corporations that have control over this information to provide it willingly to the US attorney's office using incredibly biased [methods]."
Inauguration Day protests in the nation's capital saw 230 demonstrators arrested on felony rioting charges. With nearly 200 cases still open, Menefee-Libbey called the response a "dramatic escalation in state repression."
"I have talked to a number of defense attorneys that had never heard of prosecution under felony riot statues before this year," he said. "It is a dramatic escalation in state repression that has roots in a decades-long tradition of racist police brutality and criminalization of communities of color and it's incredibly important for us to understand that things like the prosecution against J20 defendants… [is] part of a long term struggle."
As Chris Ghazarian, DreamHost's general counsel, prepares to fight the request Friday, time will tell how the current administration will try to collect mass data on anti-Trump activists in the future.
