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Comment by fiatmoney | Hacker News Reader

There's also a delightful two-step whereby the government can

1) require the disclosure or retention of data for some regulatory purpose (taxing, telecom regs, "just because", etc.), and then

2) require warrantless access to the data, since after all it was turned over to a third party.

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Some kinds of data have to be recorded, eg for certain sorts of financial transactions in excess of a certain amount. But you could operate an anonymous email service or some other sort of service where you don't retain any records. Government entities have been aware of/monitored 4chan for years, for example, but I've never heard of any attempt to compel Moot to engage in harvesting or storage of data (by compel I mean via litigation or legislation, not some politician saying 'there oughta be a law' on the nightly news).

By all means correct me if I'm wrong.

In this line of argument, the host that houses the servers is also a third party. So, there's no need to contact the opperator, when they could just access the machines.

I think the logical absurdity of this argument shows when you start saying that the server room is a "third party".

I say a third party is who ever that is involved, but isn't monetarily involved with a 2nd party (which is the party you paid to do the task).

That doesn't mean some Federal agents haven't paid him a visit and told him to log IPs or else they might start "investigating" the site. If they want to the Feds could easily come up with grounds for seizing the sites hardware. I suspect moot "volunteers" information related to serious crimes.

It is notable that some 4chan competitors have gone out of their way to say they don't log IPs and have distributed their infrastructure.

I feel that sort of underlines my point, in that nobody seems to consider that a legally risky thing to do.

Point well taken, but it's a bit of a red herring, isn't it? The government isn't forcing Google to sift through your email, or forcing Facebook to figure out who your friends are, or forcing Apple to track your movements via GPS. I think there is a lot of room in Smith to treat that data differently than data the government requires you to disclose.

>"require the disclosure or retention of data for some regulatory purpose (taxing, telecom regs, "just because", etc.)"

Even better, they may require retention and/or disclosure for "consumer protection".

There is that too. But I'd say their public complaints about securing the data better is pretty clear evidence they want to bias the system outside of legislative channels as well.

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