It must be hard to be a computer network professional. You’re responsible to maintain security, you have little or no control over what people send and receive from the computers you maintain, and you may be the only person with the technical knowledge and access to identify the source and availability of electronically stored information. I imagine these folks hate subpoenas, especially if they have nothing to do with their employer’s business.

In Tener v. Cremer,[FOOTNOTE 1] the plaintiff sought to compel a non-party, New York University, to respond to a subpoena that might enable the plaintiff to identify the source of a posting on “Vitals.com,” an internet opinion website that advertises itself as the place “where doctors are examined.” This appears to be one of many internet sites that solicit opinions that others may use in making consumer decisions, and the plaintiff in Tener was a board certified physician who wanted to sue the author of allegedly defamatory remarks.

The Vitals.com posting was anonymous,[FOOTNOTE 2] but the plaintiff had learned of an Internet Protocol (IP) address[FOOTNOTE 3] associated with the offending message. This IP address did not identify the author’s computer, but did lead to the server for the entire computer network maintained by NYU. Relying on this clue, the plaintiff subpoenaed the university, seeking to identify all persons using the NYU server who had accessed the internet on the date of the offensive posting, and to identify which of those computers had connected to the Vitals.com site.

It apparently was not easy for the university to comply with the plaintiff’s requests. Although only NYU personnel could obtain access to the system, the “network address translation portal” used by NYU essentially acted as a switchboard, and through this “portal,” many thousands of persons had access to outside websites. When NYU did not produce information satisfactory to the plaintiff, she moved to hold the university in contempt of court.

The university responded with an affidavit by its chief information security officer, who noted that the date of the allegedly offending comment was nearly a full year prior to the service of the subpoena, and that computers used to visit outside websites are identified in the NYU system only by a ” … text file that is automatically written over every 30 days.”

via Obtaining Disclosure of ESI From Non-Parties.