Federal Prosecutors Seek Amazon.com Records; Judge Rejects Privacy Invasion
Natural News has an interesting story, “U.S. Government Sought Customer Book Purchasing Records from Amazon.com.” Recently unsealed court records reveal that, in 2006, federal prosecutors investigating a Madison, WI, official subpoenaed Amazon.com “for transaction records on anyone who had purchased books from him through Amazon Marketplace since 1999.” Those records would encompass 24,000 Amazon users.
“Amazon [...] has refused to identify any book buyers to the government, citing the buyers’ First Amendment right to maintain the privacy of their reading choices,” according to the November 2007 opinion (pdf) by Magistrate Judge Stephen Crocker. Judge Crocker concluded that, “(1) customers who bought used books from [the official] through Amazon do have a cognizable First Amendment right; (2) this court must consider this right when determining whether to require Amazon to comply with the grand jury subpoena [….]”
The U.S. government has a troubled history concerning Americans’ reading habits. For example, in the 1980s, the FBI established the “Library Awareness Program,” a system to obtain library records to monitor reading habits. Later, it was revealed that the FBI had investigated hundreds of Americans – librarians and others – because they protested the program.
Judge Crocker said that permitting the government to access these records would create a chilling effect on individuals:
The subpoena is troubling because it permits the government to peek into the reading habits of specific individuals without their prior knowledge or permission. […] [I]t is an unsettling and un-American scenario to envision federal agents nosing through the reading lists of law-abiding citizens while hunting for evidence against somebody else. In this era of public apprehension about the scope of the USA PATRIOT Act , the FBI’s (now-retired) “Carnivore” Internet search program , and more recent highly-publicized admissions about political litmus tests at the Department of Justice , rational book buyers would have a non-speculative basis to fear that federal prosecutors and law enforcement agents have a secondary political agenda that could come into play when an opportunity presented itself. Undoubtedly a measurable percentage of people who draw such conclusions would abandon online book purchases in order to avoid the possibility of ending up on some sort of perceived “enemies list.”
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