QUILLBLOG

Amazon wins privacy battle

From the Associated Press:

Federal prosecutors have withdrawn a subpoena seeking the identities of thousands of people who bought used books through online retailer Amazon.com Inc., newly unsealed court records show.

The withdrawal came after a judge ruled the customers have a First Amendment right to keep their reading habits from the government.

As good as this news is, you can safely assume this is just the tip of the iceberg, and that millions of customer records are sitting in some government warehouse, like the one at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, just waiting to be pored over.

You have to love the language used by the judge in this case, however:

“The (subpoena’s) chilling effect on expressive e-commerce would frost keyboards across America,” U.S. Magistrate Judge Stephen Crocker wrote in a June ruling.

“Well-founded or not, rumors of an Orwellian federal criminal investigation into the reading habits of Amazon’s customers could frighten countless potential customers into canceling planned online book purchases,” the judge wrote in a ruling he unsealed last week.

Frosted keyboards? “Orwellian”? Since when are bloggers allowed to make judicial rulings?

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