On the 23rd of August, the Dept of "Injustice" had to abandon their attempt to obtain IP address logs of all 1.3 million visitors to DisruptJ20.org from Dreamhost due to resistance by Dreamhost's lawyers. The next day, as the court heard the case, Dreamhost received a powerful DNS attack that made many of their sites unreachable.

Prosecutors were forced by the refusal of Dreamhost to "voluntarily" turn over the data to modify their search warrant and "motion to compel." Originally prosecutors wanted IP address logs of all 1.3 million visitors to the site, but Dreamhost challenged this request and put forth all resistance possible short of defying the court outright. On the 23rd, DOJ folded and removed the IP logs from the warrant, but the next day Dreamhost received a powerful DNS attack that made many of their sites unreachable. Cooincidence or not?

This information was removed from the warrant:

Any unpublished media, including both text and photographs that may appear in blog posts that were drafted but never made public.

Any HTTP access and error logs, meaning visitors’ IP addresses are largely safe.

At this point it looks like prosecutors will still get some data from Dreamhost but will NOT be getting the IP addresses of all who ever visited the site as they originally wanted. This is a severe loss for the Department of Injustice, and there are suspicions the DDOS is vengeance for this defeat. The fact that this warrant was ever filed is still a good reminder to always use Tor for any potentially "hot" work over any network, however.

https://www.dreamhost.com/blog/a-win-for-the-web/

https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/22/dreamhost-vs-justice-department-exclud...