Sony is aiming at hackers.
This is a rather disturbing turn of events. Federal Magistrate Joseph Spero has approved a request by Sony to subpoena the hacker GeoHot’s web host, as well as YouTube, Google, and Twitter, for identifying information on anyone who has accessed, commented, or viewed information relating to thehack. At best this is lazy on Sony’s part and irresponsible on Magistrate Spero’s, and at worst it is a deliberate and malicious wholesale violation of privacy.
The pretense for this wildly overreaching action is that Sony needs this information to prove the case should be tried in San Francisco, in federal court and close to Sony’s headquarters. Why? Because it’s in Sony’s terms of service. This after another judgenoted previously that by Sony’s standards, “the entire universe would be subject to [her] jurisdiction.”
