• Home
  • News
  • Fortune 500
  • Tech
  • Finance
  • Leadership
  • Lifestyle
  • Rankings
  • Multimedia
TechDonald Trump

Government Drops Its Demand for IP Addresses of Visitors to an Anti-Trump Website

By
David Meyer
David Meyer
Down Arrow Button Icon
By
David Meyer
David Meyer
Down Arrow Button Icon
August 23, 2017, 4:51 AM ET

The website-hosting service DreamHost has welcomed the Department of Justice’s decision to narrow its demand for information about visitors to an anti-Donald Trump website. However, the company said it will still fight the government over the case.

The site in question, DisruptJ20.org, was used to coordinate Washington, D.C. protests on January 20, the day of Trump’s inauguration. A couple hundred people were charged after rioting took place, and last week DreamHost—whose systems host the website—revealed that the Justice Department was trying to get at data that could be used to identify the site’s visitors.

One of the main things that led DreamHost to fight back was the fact that the DOJ wanted it to hand over a list of all the IP addresses that identify the computers used to access DisruptJ20.org. That’s around 1.3 million IP addresses in total, and DreamHost’s lawyers said the request was too broad.

On Tuesday, the Justice Department filed a brief in which it said it had previously not grasped “the extent of visitor data maintained by DreamHost that extends beyond the government’s singular focus in this case of investigating the planning, organization, and participation in the January 20, 2017 riot.”

Get Data Sheet, Fortune’s technology newsletter.

“The government has no interest in records relating to the 1.3 million IP addresses,” the brief stated. So now the government is not only shedding this aspect of its request; it also claims it will set aside and seal any information DreamHost hands over that is outside the scope of its warrant. However, it still wants information about the protest organizers’ identities and private messages, among other things.

DreamHost characterized the DOJ’s decision as a victory. “We see this as a huge win for internet privacy, and we absolutely appreciate the DOJ’s willingness to look at and reconsider both the scope and the depth of their original request for records. That’s all we asked them to do in the first place, honestly,” DreamHost wrote in a blog post.

However, the service said it still finds aspects of the Justice Department’s demand to be “problematic” under the first and fourth amendments, which respectively protect free speech and guard against unreasonable searches and seizures. It will argue its case in a hearing on Thursday.

“Before it was more or less a dragnet and a witch hunt and now it’s just a witch hunt,” Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) attorney Mark Rumold, whose digital rights organization has been supporting DreamHost in its fight, told Gizmodo. “It’s substantially narrower but they’re still after a substantial amount of content.”

About the Author
By David Meyer
LinkedIn icon
See full bioRight Arrow Button Icon

Latest in Tech

InnovationBrainstorm Design
Should form always follow function? Architect Ole Scheeren isn’t sure: ‘We think of buildings as living organisms’
By Christina PantinDecember 4, 2025
4 hours ago
satellite
AIData centers
Google’s plan to put data centers in the sky faces thousands of (little) problems: space junk
By Mojtaba Akhavan-TaftiDecember 3, 2025
14 hours ago
Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Meta Platforms Inc., during the Meta Connect event in Menlo Park, California, US, on Wednesday, Sept. 25, 2024.
AIMeta
Inside Silicon Valley’s ‘soup wars’: Why Mark Zuckerberg and OpenAI are hand-delivering soup to poach talent
By Eva RoytburgDecember 3, 2025
14 hours ago
Greg Abbott and Sundar Pichai sit next to each other at a red table.
AITech Bubble
Bank of America predicts an ‘air pocket,’ not an AI bubble, fueled by mountains of debt piling up from the data center rush
By Sasha RogelbergDecember 3, 2025
15 hours ago
Alex Karp smiles on stage
Big TechPalantir Technologies
Alex Karp credits his dyslexia for Palantir’s $415 billion success: ‘There is no playbook a dyslexic can master … therefore we learn to think freely’
By Lily Mae LazarusDecember 3, 2025
15 hours ago
Isaacman
PoliticsNASA
Billionaire spacewalker pleads his case to lead NASA, again, in Senate hearing
By Marcia Dunn and The Associated PressDecember 3, 2025
15 hours ago

Most Popular

placeholder alt text
North America
Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez Bezos commit $102.5 million to organizations combating homelessness across the U.S.: ‘This is just the beginning’
By Sydney LakeDecember 2, 2025
2 days ago
placeholder alt text
Economy
Ford workers told their CEO 'none of the young people want to work here.' So Jim Farley took a page out of the founder's playbook
By Sasha RogelbergNovember 28, 2025
6 days ago
placeholder alt text
North America
Anonymous $50 million donation helps cover the next 50 years of tuition for medical lab science students at University of Washington
By The Associated PressDecember 2, 2025
2 days ago
placeholder alt text
C-Suite
MacKenzie Scott's $19 billion donations have turned philanthropy on its head—why her style of giving actually works
By Sydney LakeDecember 2, 2025
2 days ago
placeholder alt text
Innovation
Google CEO Sundar Pichai says we’re just a decade away from a new normal of extraterrestrial data centers
By Sasha RogelbergDecember 1, 2025
3 days ago
placeholder alt text
Economy
Scott Bessent calls the Giving Pledge well-intentioned but ‘very amorphous,’ growing from ‘a panic among the billionaire class’
By Nick LichtenbergDecember 3, 2025
16 hours ago
Rankings
  • 100 Best Companies
  • Fortune 500
  • Global 500
  • Fortune 500 Europe
  • Most Powerful Women
  • Future 50
  • World’s Most Admired Companies
  • See All Rankings
Sections
  • Finance
  • Leadership
  • Success
  • Tech
  • Asia
  • Europe
  • Environment
  • Fortune Crypto
  • Health
  • Retail
  • Lifestyle
  • Politics
  • Newsletters
  • Magazine
  • Features
  • Commentary
  • Mpw
  • CEO Initiative
  • Conferences
  • Personal Finance
  • Education
Customer Support
  • Frequently Asked Questions
  • Customer Service Portal
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms Of Use
  • Single Issues For Purchase
  • International Print
Commercial Services
  • Advertising
  • Fortune Brand Studio
  • Fortune Analytics
  • Fortune Conferences
  • Business Development
About Us
  • About Us
  • Editorial Calendar
  • Press Center
  • Work At Fortune
  • Diversity And Inclusion
  • Terms And Conditions
  • Site Map

© 2025 Fortune Media IP Limited. All Rights Reserved. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy | CA Notice at Collection and Privacy Notice | Do Not Sell/Share My Personal Information
FORTUNE is a trademark of Fortune Media IP Limited, registered in the U.S. and other countries. FORTUNE may receive compensation for some links to products and services on this website. Offers may be subject to change without notice.