• by Wendy Davis , Staff Writer @wendyndavis, November 28, 2007

In a sweeping ruling, a federal court in Wisconsin said that the government isn't entitled to view Amazon's records of book purchasers to investigate whether an online seller has evaded taxes.

"It is an unsettling and un-American scenario to envision federal agents nosing through the reading lists of law-abiding citizens while hunting for evidence against somebody else," wrote federal magistrate Stephen Crocker.

In the case, prosecutors had sought to subpoena Amazon records of sales by former Madison official Robert D'Angelo, under investigation for tax evasion and mail/wire fraud. Prosecutors initially sought all of Amazon's records relating to D'Angelo -- a vendor who sold around 24,000 used books via Amazon. Eventually, that request was whittled down to 120 book buyers.

Instead, Crocker ordered that Amazon contact some of D'Angelo's purchasers and ask them if they wanted to volunteer as witnesses. In his broadly worded decision, Crocker wrote that letting the government snoop on people's reading lists wouldn't just damage consumers' privacy, but also their willingness to shop online.

"If word were to spread over the Net -- and it would -- that the FBI and the IRS had demanded and received Amazon's list of customers and their personal purchases, the chilling effect on expressive e-commerce would frost keyboards across America. Fiery rhetoric quickly would follow and the nuances of the subpoena (as actually written and served) would be lost as the cyberdebate roiled itself to a furious boil," he wrote. "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, now and perhaps forever."

With this case, at least two federal courts have now ruled that consumers' privacy interests trump government's attempts to blanketly subpoena information that many Web users consider private. Last year, a federal district court judge in California nixed the government's attempt to seek Google's records about search queries. The court held that even though the government wasn't requesting individual users' names, the queries themselves could have contained information to reveal the identities of the searchers.