Legal Process
Unmasking an anonymous online poster is a two-step process. First, the plaintiff must issue a subpoena to the hosting website requesting the IP address of the poster. Most websites collect and temporarily store the IP addresses of visitors in a web server log, although no U.S. law requires that they retain this information for any particular length of time.
If the website provides the poster's IP address, the plaintiff must then subpoena the ISP that owns the address. This second subpoena requests the contact information associated with the account of the computer to which the IP address was assigned at the time the post was made.
Courts do not require the target of a subpoena to provide notice to the person whose identity is sought. The hosting website is unlikely to notify the defendant, as it generally will not have access to contact information; subpoenas for IP addresses are therefore seldom subjected to legal challenge. The ISP, however, may be required by law to notify its subscriber before revealing any personally identifiable information in connection with a subpoena.
A defendant who does receive notice may file a motion to quash, which asks the court to block the subpoena and prevent the ISP from complying. ISPs may also challenge Doe subpoenas on their customers' behalf, but they are not required to do so.
Read more about this topic: Doe Subpoena
Famous quotes containing the words legal and/or process:
“In the course of the actual attainment of selfish ends—an attainment conditioned in this way by universality—there is formed a system of complete interdependence, wherein the livelihood, happiness, and legal status of one man is interwoven with the livelihood, happiness, and rights of all. On this system, individual happiness, etc. depend, and only in this connected system are they actualized and secured.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“The American, if he has a spark of national feeling, will be humiliated by the very prospect of a foreigner’s visit to Congress—these, for the most part, illiterate hacks whose fancy vests are spotted with gravy, and whose speeches, hypocritical, unctuous, and slovenly, are spotted also with the gravy of political patronage, these persons are a reflection on the democratic process rather than of it; they expose it in its process rather than of it; they expose it in its underwear.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)