Perverse Reading Habits of U.S. Attorneys: Shredding Privacy, Except for Torturers

From the Las Vegas Review Journal:
US Attorney subpoenas Las Vegas Review-Journal for info about posters to a web-page story.

“On May 26 the Review-Journal published an article about an ongoing federal tax evasion trial. The primary defendant, Las Vegan Robert Kahre, stands accused of tax fraud for using the rather inventive argument that he could pay people in U.S. minted gold and silver coins based on their precious metal value but for tax purposes use their face value, which is many times less.

The story was posted on our Web site. When last I checked nearly 100 comments were appended to it, running the gamut from the lucid to the ludicrous.

This past week the newspaper was served with a grand jury subpoena from the U.S. attorney’s office demanding that we turn over all records pertaining to those postings, including “full name, date of birth, physical address, gender, ZIP code, password prompts, security questions, telephone numbers and other identifiers … the IP address,” et (kitchen sink) cetera.”

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Apparently, anyone who comments on an article that includes criticism of the IRS automatically forfeits all their privacy rights.

Considering this story, and the piece on Leon Panetta asking a federal judge to hush up the identifies of CIA agents who carried out “extreme interrogation” — the only people entitled to privacy any more are torturers following government orders.