Can Donald Trump&#39;s Tax Returns be obtained through a Freedom of Information Request? The IRS, which is part Federal Government clearly has copies of Donald Trump's Tax Returns. Can these be obtained through a Freedom of Information request, given the public's legitimate interest in the matter?
No, nor can I request a copy of your tax return. See 5 USC 552a. Record maintained on an individual are not subject to disclosure.
Can a city request deletion of all personal data that uses a certain domain for logins? Well, they can, but they have no legal backing to make it happen. Their chances of succeeding are about as good as me requesting a Ferrari, a Yacht and a Mansion. I can make that request. People will laugh. I will not get it. I'm a little worried that I shouldn't allow certain domains to be used as logins in the first place, especially ones that might be school related You have no way to know who owns what email address. And it's none of your business. Your only interest should be in whether the address is owned by the person that is creating the account. You probably already do that by sending a confirmation link to the email address when people sign up. I'd like to have some idea for future reference if there's any case where the GDPR would require me to comply with such a request The only way you have to comply with such a request is if the owner can prove their identity. As far as I understood, the &quot;Finnish city&quot; was three degrees away from that. They could not provide any proof they are who they said they are, they could not provide a finite list of accounts they claimed to own and they could not even provide proof they own those accounts. They literally just wrote an email with zero legal meaning. I want to figure out the right way to reply to emails like this one The correct way to handle this is have a feature on your website where the account owner can delete their own account. GDPR compliant. Then you make a text template explaining how to use that feature and reply with that template to every request, no matter how stupid (like this case) they are. If they cannot identify themselves to you by proving they have access to their &quot;own&quot; email, they have no business wasting your time. Legally, they could provide you with a different method of identification. In case of a Finnish school, that would probably need to be power of attorney from all children's legal guardians and a specific way to identify the accounts that is consistent with the data given (for example if they entered their full name and address on your website). You would probably in your rights to demand a certified translation if it's all in Finnish. Apart from the fact that you as a private US citizen have no real means to check the validity of all that paperwork, personally, if I saw hundreds of pages of certified translated paperwork, I would probably just comply. Not sure it it were actually enough, but it certainly gets an A+ for effort to delete data from a private website. But a real lawyer might give better advice with a real case on their hands. Is deleting the data actually more of a legal liability than not deleting it in some cases? (People shouldn't be able to delete other people's accounts.) Indeed. You should not delete people's data because a random punk on the internet sent you an email. You need to identify who the request is from and if they are allowed to make such a request. Whether you have a legal duty to actually keep data, is up to you or your lawyer to find out. It depends on your data and laws. It is perfectly legal to make a website with a textfield that deletes any data you enter after a second. Destruction of data you own is only a problem if you break other laws with it. For example the IRS might not be amused if you destroyed invoices and other proof of taxable income. &quot;Some dude claimed I must in an email&quot; is not going to fly with them. That said, again, please, identify who you deal with, find out if their claim is valid. Don't do stuff because random internet punks write you an email. Because the next mail you get, will be from a Nigerian Prince. Please wisen up before opening that one. People on the internet, through stupidity or malice, might not have your best interests at heart. Don't believe random emails.
The President wouldn't be in breach of Insider Trading Laws (Section 10b of the Securities Exchange Act) since he has no information resulting from a position of trust within Twitter (or as a trusted provider of services) and no ability to depress their stocks through intentionally fraudulent practices. [O]ne who fails to disclose material information prior to the consummation of a transaction commits fraud only when he is under a duty to do so. And the duty to disclose arises when one party has information “that the other [party] is entitled to know because of a fiduciary or other similar relation of trust and confidence between them.” The key word here is "insider". The President is not an insider, he's merely the user of a service. He certainly has material information, but not gleaned from a position of confidence or trust. anyone in possession of material inside information must either disclose it to the investing public, or, if he is disabled from disclosing it in order to protect a corporate confidence, or he chooses not to do so, must abstain from trading in or recommending the securities concerned while such inside information remains undisclosed. That being said, it's arguable (and I'm reasonably sure his political opponents would argue it until the cows come home) that his shorting their shares would be a material violation of the STOCK Act, specifically section 6 which requires the President to have disclosed his holdings of shorted stock to the public. It's also pretty arguable that his popularity on Twitter is a direct result of his office as President, and hence making money by publicly and messily leaving their service will result in a breach of accepted ethical standards and potential impeachment even if no specific law has been broken.
The easy part is whether there is copyright protection: yes. It does not matter whether the quotes are in a newspaper, a personal blog, a hardbound book, or on TV; it doesn't matter if the interviewee is right-wing or left-wing or wingless. An interview is protected by copyright. The question is, who holds that right, and in what exact manner? The interview could be a collaborative work; it could be a joint work; it could be the property of the interviewer. In Taggart v. WMAQ, the court points out that for a work to be protected (sect. 101 of the copyright act), it must be ‘fixed’ in a tangible medium of expression ... or otherwise communicated for a period of more than transitory duration. which interviews are not (assuming the answers were not pre-written). See also Falwell v. Penthouse. The interviewer would own copyright to the compilation of quotes, see for example Quinto v. Legal Times of Washington Regardless of who owns the copyright in each of the quoted passages in the article, there can be no doubt that Quinto owns the copyright in his compilation of the quotations As to ownership of the quotes themselves, Suid v. Newsweek Magazine observes that The author of a factual work may not, without an assignment of copyright, claim copyright in statements made by others and reported in the work since the author may not claim originality as to those statements and Harper &amp; Row v. Nation Enterprises, 471 U.S. 539 likewise states that an author may not claim copyright in statements made by others and reported verbatim in the author's work What we get from this is that the interviewee cannot claim infringement by the interviewer (they could however claim some form of breach of contract, depending on what the parties agreed to in carrying out the interview), that the interviewer does own copyright of the interview, but not the specific quotes from the interviewee. This leaves unanswered a core question: can an interviewee claim control over their quotes and deny permission to reproduce the quotes? An alternative would be that the quotes are "data" which are in the public domain. I find the latter outcome extremely unlikely, but at any rate, I know of no case law on point.
Trump was an officer of the government, and Twitter wasn't. The First Amendment forbids the government and its agents from viewpoint discrimination, but private companies are not bound by it and can discriminate as much as they please. (There was a question as to whether such discrimination might affect whether the company enjoys a shield from liability under 47 USC 230, but even so they have the right to block and censor as they wish if they are willing to risk that liability.)
Foreign citizens are just as entitled to Fourth Amendment protections against search and seizure as American citizens are. The case you cited was, in fact, a South Korean citizen who successfully had evidence suppressed from an unjustified border search.
Yes, it triggers the GDPR obligations Considerations: Can you surely identify those residing in Europe? In that case you should ask them to sign up again and confirm the consent. A lot of mailing lists are doing just that. Did they previously give consent and you can document it? If so, then you can argue that you have the required consent. Do you have business in Europe? If not then I don't think they would bother to go after you. You could just walk away from the fine. What other personal informastion are you storing? If you know who reside in Europe then you already have more info than just the email. The email address itself wouldn't be much of a documentation issue, SAR or Portability task.
While there is an act that President Trump and his supporters are citing, titled the Presidential Records Act (PRA), to accuse House Speaker Pelosi of breaking federal law, it is important to understand what actions the law accounts for. The act mandates that the President of the United States preserve records and other laws governing the federal government. This serves as a form of checks and balances to prevent the president and his advisers from shielding documentary information from public view. The act is fairly new, as it was passed in 1981. It is important to realize that this law does not apply to print outs or widely circulated documents. Moreover, the copy of the State of the Union that she was given is not a governmental record. Therefore, House Speaker Pelosi did not violate the Presidential Records Act, nor any other federal law. However, it is open to debate whether Pelosi's action was appropriate, though I will not supply my opinion on that matter.