“That information could be used to identify any individuals who used this site to exercise and express political speech protected under the Constitution’s First Amendment,” DreamHost wrote in its blog post.

It doesn’t matter whether the visitor is suspected of participating in a crime, or is even known to have attended the protests. If someone clicked anywhere on the site from anywhere in the world, the government wants to know.

DreamHost has so far refused to turn over this information, and for good reason: The indiscriminate “digital dragnet,” as the Electronic Frontier Foundation has called it, may well violate the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches and seizures.

That amendment requires the government to be specific about what it wants to seize, but nowhere does the DreamHost warrant justify a need for the logs of all visitors to the site.

Prosecutors aim to vacuum up millions of points of data about people’s political associations, sift through it all and only then decide what they want — a process that has been used in other criminal investigations. But given that the investigation into the riots has been active for months, it shouldn’t be hard for prosecutors to narrow their search. DreamHost also objects that the warrant fails to provide any protocol for how investigators would examine the sprawling data, or explain what would happen to personal information that is found to be of no use in the case.