Court: Chevron Can Seize Americans' Email Data

[Judi Lynn]

Court: Chevron Can Seize Americans' Email Data

In an almost unprecedented decision, a federal judge has allowed Chevron to subpoena Americans' private email data—and said the First Amendment doesn't apply.

—By Dana Liebelson

| Mon Jul. 22, 2013 3:00 AM PDT

Thanks to disclosures made by Edward Snowden, Americans have learned that their email records are not necessarily safe from the National Security Agency—but a new ruling shows that they're not safe from big oil companies, either.

Last month, a federal court granted Chevron access to nine years of email metadata—which includes names, time stamps, and detailed location data and login info, but not content—belonging to activists, lawyers, and journalists who criticized the company for drilling in Ecuador and leaving behind a trail of toxic sludge and leaky pipelines. Since 1993, when the litigation began, Chevron has lost multiple appeals and has been ordered to pay plaintiffs from native communities about $19 billion to cover the cost of environmental damage. Chevron alleges that it is the victim of a mass extortion conspiracy, which is why the company is asking Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, which owns Hotmail, to cough up the email data. When Lewis Kaplan, a federal judge in New York, granted the Microsoft subpoena last month, he ruled it didn't violate the First Amendment because Americans weren't among the people targeted.

Now Mother Jones has learned that the targeted accounts do include Americans—a revelation that calls the validity of the subpoena into question. The First Amendment protects the right to speak anonymously, and in cases involving Americans, courts have often quashed subpoenas seeking to discover the identities and locations of anonymous internet users. Earlier this year, a different federal judge quashed Chevron's attempts to seize documents from Amazon Watch, one of the company's most vocal critics. That judge said the subpoena was a violation of the group's First Amendment rights. In this case, though, that same protection has not been extended to activists, journalists, and lawyers' email metadata.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) represents 40 of the targeted users—some of whom are members of the legal teams who represented the plaintiffs—and Nate Cardozo, an attorney for EFF, says that of the three targeted Hotmail users, at least one is American. Cardozo says that of the Yahoo and Gmail users, "many" are American.

More:
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/07/chevron-ecuador-american-email-legal-activists-journalists

[Sanity Claws]

1. Doesn't this destroy attorney-client privilege?

Attorney-client privilege does not depend on whether the inquiry is from the government or private enterprise.

[djean111]

3. There is no more privilege (right) of any kind left, really.

And, who knows?, just posting this OP or commenting in this thread may put people on a list.
The message is - shut up, do not complain about or even mention much of anything - there are now concrete consequences.
Bloodless coup. Just pissiness that the coup was publicized by Snowden, to those who didn't already know.

[geckosfeet]

2. Interesting - selective application of the bill of rights. Deeper down the rabbit hole we go.

Yeah yeah yeah I know, dirty Ecuadoran peasants who don't speak out golden language, lets just treat them like cattle and extort their land from them.

But if their email crosses into US territory, onto US owned server space, doesn't that mean the communication is covered by the first amendment - (recently uncovered NSA eavesdropping intrusions aside) ? When does the first amendment apply - what is the legal precedent? Only for US citizens then?

Well isn't that just convenient as hell for American imperialism.

[JackInGreen]

4. Ok...at this point can we get to the part

where we start putting CEO, CIO, and CFO heads on poles on the private roads leading to their corperate headquarters? Or do we need to wait for them to start doing even more than this? What happens when Chevron, or Shell, or whoever (microsoft...Xe?) start going farther into violently enforcing their policies and prerogatives (without using cops or local gov as a cats paw). Can we start to move on the men that justice cannot and willfully WILL NOT touch?

[byeya]

7. + +

[NoMoreWarNow]

5. WTF??? What on earth do activist emails have to do with Chevron's pollution?

this is just so sick.

[byeya]

6. The social contract(when it existed) meant that the capitalists were free to start and run

businesses but had to pay to fair wages to us proles and leave us with our Constitutional rights; in exchange, the proles would refrain from hanging the capitalists from lamp posts. The social contract has been broken many times over.

Samual Gompers of the AFL made an error when he unilaterally foreswore violence on the part of members in unions in the AFL.

Remember the Molly Maguires, Blair Mountain, WV, and the Hawks Nest Mountain murder of workers!

[caseymoz]

23. Not knowing the history

I wonder if that's partially because the mortality rate of those engaging in violence was so high. The bee that stings dies, and painfully, whether its anger was just or not.

Apparently, we're being goaded down that direction, but what's the alternative? They're engaging in unilateral war where their offensive is the only legal one. The wealthy class can hear us, they just ignore us with one excuse or another.

[bemildred]

8. So, can the activists seize Chevron's email data too?

Or can we infer that the judge does not see the company and the activists as equal before the eyes of the law?

[Theyletmeeatcake2]

17. Only when a corporation gets

The death sentence will all things be equal...a lot of nasty stuff is covered up by the veil of corporate law...a private individual can lose everything whereas a corporation has limited liabilities...not fair but what can you do when the pollies have been bought and not even for a good price...what is that old joke about "we've established what you are Madame ,we're just haggling over the price!"

[bemildred]

21. The corporation is, in it's essence, a mechanism to escape accountability for ones investments.

Which is just another way to say escape accountability for doing things you could be sued or prosecuted for successfully, if you were a real person.

And yet they want also to claim that these intentional non-persons have the rights of persons when it suits their interests.

So, in other words, the corporations have the rights of citizens without any of those nasty responsibilities that go with that.

[Conium]

9. Equador is an OPEC member.

A possible explanation for the ruling, as well as NSA involvement?

[bemildred]

10. It is desperation, nothing less.

Fishing for something they can use to allege conspiracy, as though one were not allowed to conspire against Chevron, as though Chevron had some sort of sovereign existence and all the rights of a nation and then some.

[Conium]

11. Fire Chevron CEO John Watson.

Tell Chevron's Board of Directors to FIRE CEO JOHN WATSON.
http://truecostofchevron.com/

[caseymoz]

20. That'll get you on a conspiracy list.

Just sayin'. All they'll probably do is put it in their "metadata" file.

[Berlum]

12. The Noose, Inc. tightens around America's throat

This thread could well be posted in GD also...

[dmr]

13. K&R

[gtar100]

14. Maybe if this Chevron person would just take responsibility for him/her self

and stop trying to dodge the consequences of his/her actions, they wouldn't be needing to go to a judge in the first place.

If the people who run corporations want to pretend that they're business entity is actually a human being, well they are doing a fine job of acting like the worst sort of people that exist.

[cantbeserious]

15. The Oligarchs And Corporations Own And Control The Courts

eom

[abelenkpe]

18. Own and control politicians too. Nt

[cantbeserious]

25. Agreed

eom

[Arctic Dave]

16. Nine years of data?

They have been warehousing all this data for a while.

[caseymoz]

22. (shock!) I thought they destroyed it after five years!

Just one of the many lies we've been told and are being told.

[madrchsod]

19. corporations are people

[zeemike]

24. So far not a single apologist has shown up

To tell us this is nothing new...

[spin]

26. Hopefully Walmart will not seize their critics email. (n/t)

[KoKo]

27. Revelation in the article: "..where user was every time logged in for past nine years.."

Now this is an incredible revelation.


"Chevron is seeking information including, but not limited to, the name associated with the account and where a user was every time he logged in—for the past nine years."


Article doesn't say if EFF can use this info to have the subpoena revoked by the judge or what. Hopefully this new info will stop this.

[bemildred]

28. I think they are trying a bit of subtle blackmail on the spooks.

It's going to be real mess if they ever try to make sense of these surveillance programs as law.

[Judi Lynn]

29. Court Gives Chevron Access To Nine Years Of Americans' Email Metadata

Court Gives Chevron Access To Nine Years Of Americans' Email Metadata
by Mike Masnick
Tue, Jul 23rd 2013 7:03am

from the seems-a-bit-extreme dept

For a few years now, we've been following a rather troubling legal fight between people in Ecuador and Chevron -- the oil giant that has been in a long-term legal battle with people in Ecuador over some of its actions in that country. A few years ago, we wrote about how Chevron was ordering a documentary filmmaker to turn over cut footage, claiming that it might exonerate the company (the filmmaker tried to hold it back, claiming it was protected under journalist shield rules). However, last fall, we noted something perhaps even more troubling. Chevron had issued subpoenas seeking various email info from Google, Yahoo and Microsoft going back years. As we noted at the time, they weren't seeking the content of the email, but the were seeking what many more people are now familiar with as "metadata." But, metadata can be quite revealing.

When we wrote about this case a year ago, it was under the context of one person, Kevin Heller, whose data was sought, and him successfully fighting back (with some help from the ACLU) getting Chevron to drop the request for his info. But, as for everyone else's info? Mother Jones alerts us to the news that a judge in NY recently said it was okay for Chevron to get all that metadata, in some cases going back nine years.

...a federal court granted Chevron access to nine years of email metadata—which includes names, time stamps, and detailed location data and login info, but not content—belonging to activists, lawyers, and journalists who criticized the company for drilling in Ecuador and leaving behind a trail of toxic sludge and leaky pipelines. Since 1993, when the litigation began, Chevron has lost multiple appeals and has been ordered to pay plaintiffs from native communities about $19 billion to cover the cost of environmental damage. Chevron alleges that it is the victim of a mass extortion conspiracy, which is why the company is asking Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft, which owns Hotmail, to cough up the email data. When Lewis Kaplan, a federal judge in New York, granted the Microsoft subpoena last month, he ruled it didn't violate the First Amendment because Americans weren't among the people targeted.

Leaving aside the fact that the court thinks it's okay to do this even if it's just "non-Americans" who have their privacy violated here, Mother Jones points out that this claim that it only targeted non-Americans isn't, in fact, true. Pesky details.

Now Mother Jones has learned that the targeted accounts do include Americans—a revelation that calls the validity of the subpoena into question. The First Amendment protects the right to speak anonymously, and in cases involving Americans, courts have often quashed subpoenas seeking to discover the identities and locations of anonymous internet users. Earlier this year, a different federal judge quashed Chevron's attempts to seize documents from Amazon Watch, one of the company's most vocal critics. That judge said the subpoena was a violation of the group's First Amendment rights. In this case, though, that same protection has not been extended to activists, journalists, and lawyers' email metadata.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) represents 40 of the targeted users—some of whom are members of the legal teams who represented the plaintiffs—and Nate Cardozo, an attorney for EFF, says that of the three targeted Hotmail users, at least one is American. Cardozo says that of the Yahoo and Gmail users, "many" are American.

More:
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130722/16172623890/court-give-chevron-access-to-nine-years-americans-email-metadata.shtml