Sonic.net Takes On Justice Department

October 10, 2011, 11:20 PM
Wine Country Internet Provider Takes On Justice Department
By SOMINI SENGUPTA

The Obama administration has found an unlikely adversary in wine country.

Taking advantage of a 25-year-old law that governs digital privacy, the Justice Department asked a small Northern California-based Internet service provider to cough up information about one of its customers, a self-described supporter of WikiLeaks.

Santa Rosa-based Sonic.net fought back. Dane Jasper, its co-founder, said in an interview Monday that the company went to court to challenge the order, which, like similar information requests, was sealed by a federal judge and not available to the public. It won a court order to share the request for information with its client, Jacob Appelbaum. The case was first reported in The Wall Street Journal.

Mr. Jasper said the court order remained sealed and that he could not reveal any details of the information it requests.

The Justice Department has filed similar requests for information on WikiLeaks supporters. They have been sealed by the courts and not available to the public under a provision of the 1986 Electronic Communications Privacy Act. Internet companies and civil liberties groups have lobbied to update and amend the law.

Last year, the government sought information about Mr. Appelbaum and other WikiLeaks supporters from Twitter, the microblogging site on which they had accounts. Twitter similarly turned to a federal court and won permission to share the information order with their clients. The government in that case wanted Twitter to reveal its users’ Internet Protocol addresses, which would have showed their physical locations, as well as to whom they sent direct messages on Twitter.

Sonic, founded in 1995, describes itself on its Web site as one of the first companies to bring high-speed Internet to California’s wine country.

Mr. Jasper recently asked its customers to lobby Congress against a proposed measure that would require Internet service providers to retain records of their customers’ online activities for a year. Sonic says it deletes customer logs after two weeks. “Storing logs longer presents an attractive nuisance, and would potentially make our customers the target of invasions of privacy,” Mr. Jasper said in an August blog post.