The DOJ wants to know if you liked this anti-Trump Facebook page

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The Department of Justice wants to know more about the people who liked an anti-Trump Facebook page before the president"s inauguration. 

Turns out the government issued three warrants to Facebook on Feb. 9, one of which the ACLU has called "overbroad" and all of which the group is now fighting in a Washington, D.C. court. 

Prosecutors charged around 200 inauguration protesters with rioting and destruction of property, and the DOJ alleges that a Facebook page now called "Resist This" incited a riot, according to the warrant. Resist This and DisruptJ20 have described themselves as groups that reject "all forms of domination and oppression, particularly those based on racism, poverty, gender & sexuality" that use "a diversity of tactics."

From the ACLU-DC"s press release on Thursday: 

The third search warrant was issued for the “DisruptJ20” Facebook page (now called “Resist This”), administered and moderated by Emmelia Talarico. Although the page is public, the warrant would require the disclosure of non-public lists of people who planned to attend political organizing events and even the names of people who simply liked, followed, reacted to, commented on, or otherwise engaged with the content on the Facebook page. During the three-month span the search warrant covers, approximately 6,000 Facebook users liked the page.

Talarico, who runs the "Resist This" Facebook page and has not been charged with an inauguration-related crime, wrote on Facebook that she discovered there was a warrant for the account"s info after reading a Buzzfeed article published on Sept. 13. 

"What"s happening is this is a crackdown on local organizers, right?" she said. "What scares me is they"re gonna use this information not for some case they"re working on, but to track local organizers."

The DOJ, as the Buzzfeed article describes, had recently relented on its demand that Facebook keep the warrants secret.

“We successfully fought in court to be able to notify the three people whose broad account information was requested by the government," a Facebook spokesperson said in an email. "We are grateful to the companies and civil society organizations that supported us in arguing for people’s ability to learn about and challenge overly broad search warrants.” 

The other two warrants seek "all information from the personal Facebook profiles of local DisruptJ20 activists Lacy MacAuley and Legba Carrefour from November 1, 2016 through February 9, 2017." That includes messages, photos, videos, comments and more. The DOJ also alleges that these two organizers incited a riot, according to the two warrants. They haven"t been charged with a crime related to inauguration protests, either.

"Today we stood up for privacy rights," MacAuley wrote on Facebook, referring to the challenge in court.

The DOJ has gone after inauguration protesters in a way that has disturbed many civil rights groups. 

The agency initially sought the IP addresses of anyone who had visited disruptj20.org, which amounted to 1.3 million addresses. That didn"t work out for the DOJ, but in August a court in the nation"s capital ordered DreamHost — a web-hosting company — to hand over information about the people who run the website. 

The Electronic Frontier Foundation at the time expressed some relief that the DOJ was no longer after more than a million IP addresses, but was still concerned that the agency was going after people who engaged in "activity at the heart of the First Amendment"s protection."

We"ll soon see if, like the demand for 1.3 million IP addresses, the federal government backs off another attempt at a broad collection of data.

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