by GEF @ 7:28 AM MST
Is it time to drop Amazon.com ? You do know the Govt will try again right?
Feds withdraw subpoena seeking Amazon records
Judge says DOJ request would have ‘frost keyboards across America’
By Benjamin Pimentel, MarketWatch
Last Update: 5:33 PM ET Nov 27, 2007
The U.S. Attorney’s Office had asked for Amazon.com’s (AMZN: Amazon.com, Inc records in August 2006 as part of a grand jury probe of Robert B. D’Angelo who was being investigated for tax evasion and mail fraud in connection with his sale of about 24,000 books over four years through Amazon’s Web site to third-party buyers, according to court records, copies of which were provided by Amazon.com.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office withdrew the grand jury’s subpoena in July after Judge Stephen Crocker of the U.S. District Court in western Wisconsin, expressed concerns about the government move.
D’Angelo was indicted in October, and the judge unsealed documents related to the Amazon subpoena this month.
“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,” Crocker wrote in June.
Crocker added: “Fiery rhetoric quickly would follow and the nuances of the subpoena would be lost as the cyber debate roiled itself to a furious boil. One might ask whether this court should concern itself with blogger outrage disproportionate to the government’s actual
demand of Amazon. The logical answer is yes, it should.”
That’s because the government subpoena would send a disturbing message to book buyers, he added.
“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,” Crocker wrote. 
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Time to find an alternative way to buy books..
Underground here we come!
Underground
Pay Cash
Join NO book clubs
Frankly tho, we deliberately buy anti-Bush books – just recently purchased The Fall of the House of Bush by Craig Unger – it is worth buying it, any way you prefer.
We carried The Terror Presidency and Valerie Plame’s book as reading material on our recent flights to/in Mexico, as openly as possible.
I read John Dean’s book Broken Government on a recent flight (as did a lot of other people).
I won’t stop reading MY choice – never …!!
Well, there was a lot of underground literature in the 60’s, like “The Oracle” out of San Francisco. Of course it was significant for it’s left wing view points, but so were a lot of the underground comics.
A good place to buy books is abebooks.com where you can buy used copies for reasonable prices from multiple book sellers. Needless to mention the government could probably tap into their data base too, which to me would be even worse than Amazon.