Dear Attorney General Jeff Sessions:

We demand that you immediately withdraw the Justice Department’s warrant requiring the web-hosting platform DreamHost to turn over 1.3 million IP addresses, emails and message content for people who visited the disruptj20.org site. This warrant violates people’s First Amendment rights to free speech and assembly, which are essential to our democracy.

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    Tell the DoJ: Stop Criminalizing Trump Protesters

    Those of us who care about organizing for justice and holding the Trump administration accountable have a new obstacle ahead of us: The Justice Department has issued a sweeping warrant to collect personal information on everyone who visited an anti-Trump website. We can’t allow this to happen.

    To recap, Disrupt J20 is a group of activists who organized widespread actions against the inauguration of Donald Trump on January 20th. Now DreamHost, the web-hosting platform that disruptj20.org used, is in a legal battle with the DoJ over this search warrant. Complying with this warrant would mean handing Jeff Sessions “over 1.3 million visitor IP addresses — in addition to contact information, email content, and photos of thousands of people — in an effort to determine who simply visited the website.”1

    The Trump administration's crackdown on its political opponents is a clear violation of our First Amendment rights.

    We can't afford to be silent about this. Our rights to free speech and assembly are fundamental to a healthy democracy. And handing over this kind of personal information will further endanger vulnerable communities who have spoken out against the Trump administration's White supremacy, Islamophobia, transphobia and other forms of hate.

    Sessions and Trump are hell-bent on criminalizing opposition to their racist administration and chilling political speech. In the words of organizer Linda Sarsour, “If this isn’t fascism, I don’t know what is.”2

    Tell the Justice Department to back off and withdraw its search warrant for the personal information of Trump protesters.


    1. “The Justice Department Is Demanding Information on Visitors to an Anti-Trump Site,” The Verge, Aug. 14, 2017: https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/14/16145812/justice-department-disruptj20-trump-website-warrant

    2. Linda Sarsour, Facebook video: https://www.facebook.com/linda.sarsour/videos/10155792401760572/

    Original photo by Flickr user Alisdare Hickson