Federal prosecutors went looking for the personal details of everyone who subscribed to three YouTube channels and a judge refused to let them.
Newly unsealed court records from the Justice Department’s prosecution of people who disrupted a church service in St. Paul, Minnesota show the government reaching for subscriber data that had little to do with the conduct it was investigating.
Journalists and commentators Don Lemon and Georgia Fort were charged as part of the disruption, though both allege they were there as reporters rather than participants.
On February 24, prosecutors filed five search warrants. Three of them asked YouTube to turn over the names, mailing addresses, residential addresses, business addresses, email addresses, telephone numbers, and IP addresses for every subscriber to channels run by Lemon, Fort, and activist William Kelly, whose channel goes by DaWoke Farmer.
The applications, sworn out by Homeland Security Investigations agent Timothy Gerber, went beyond the journalists and activists running the channels. They swept toward the audience, the ordinary people whose only link to the case was having clicked the channels’ subscribe button.
PERCEPTION RESET 