14 DAY TRIAL // Several Amazon buyers who connected to the service to buy books could be invited to the police station for investigations after the federal prosecutors demanded private details about their activity on the Amazon website. However, the prosecutors decided today to cancel the request after a judge considered that it may infringe the users' right to refuse disclosing the books they read, Reuters reported today.
"The subpoena is troubling because it permits the government to peek into the reading habits of specific individuals without their knowledge or permission. 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," Judge Stephen Crocker wrote in a statement according to the same source mentioned above.
The entire case started some time ago when a Madison official was accused of fraud, tax evasion and money laundering after the sold used books on Amazon. Because he managed to sell lots of books, the prosecutors issued a subpoena to get information about approximately 24,000 transactions. The firm agreed to provide information about the transactions, but it refused to reveal the identity of the users who have bought books.
"The (subpoena's) chilling effect on expressive e-commerce would frost keyboards across America," Judge Stephen Crocker said in June according to Reuters. "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," he added one week ago.
However, some prosecutors explained that they are looking to analyze the transactions and not to get information about the books the users read. "We didn't care about the content of what anybody read. We just wanted to know what these business transactions were. These were simply business records we were seeking to prove the case of fraud and tax crimes against Mr. D'Angelo," prosecutor Vaudreuil told Reuters.