## Facts

- A New Hampshire police detective conducted an undercover Internet chat-room investigation involving a user suspected of attempting to entice a fourteen-year-old boy.
- To identify the user, law enforcement obtained a New Hampshire state subpoena to an Internet Service Provider (ISP), MindSpring, seeking billing and user records tied to a specific IP address at a specified time.
- MindSpring produced subscriber/account information including the subscriber’s name, address, credit card number, email address, and phone numbers, and confirmed the account’s connection to the identified IP address at the relevant time.
- The subpoena was later conceded by the government to be invalid under state law, including because it was not issued by a neutral authority.
- Federal authorities used the ISP subscriber information to help establish probable cause for a federal search warrant of the defendant’s residence.
- The defendant moved to suppress (1) the ISP records and (2) evidence seized from his home as derivative evidence, arguing the ISP disclosure violated the Fourth Amendment.

## Issues

1. Whether a defendant has a reasonable expectation of privacy under the Fourth Amendment in ISP-held subscriber information (identity and billing/account data) such that government acquisition of that information constitutes a search.
2. If acquisition of the ISP information was unconstitutional, whether evidence seized pursuant to a warrant relying on that information must be suppressed as fruit of the poisonous tree.

## Decision

- The court denied the motion to suppress.
- The court held the defendant lacked a reasonable expectation of privacy in subscriber information maintained by the ISP.
- Because obtaining the ISP records was not a Fourth Amendment search, the subsequent warrant and residential search were not tainted, and derivative suppression did not apply.

## Legal Principles

- Fourth Amendment protection turns on whether the defendant had a legitimate expectation of privacy in the information obtained, not solely on whether a subpoena was technically valid under state law.
- Under the third-party doctrine, information voluntarily conveyed to a third party for business purposes (e.g., billing and service provision) generally carries no reasonable expectation of privacy.
- ISP subscriber/account data (such as name, address, phone numbers, billing identifiers, and IP-association at a time) is treated like analogous telephone-company and bank business records, and is not protected by the Fourth Amendment as “content.”
- Absent an underlying Fourth Amendment violation, the fruit-of-the-poisonous-tree doctrine does not require suppression of evidence obtained via a later warrant.

## Conclusion

The court concluded that ISP subscriber information is not subject to Fourth Amendment privacy protection because it is voluntarily conveyed to and maintained by a third-party service provider; therefore, even though the subpoena was invalid, the ISP records and the evidence seized under the resulting search warrant were admissible.


United States v. Hambrick, 55 F. Supp. 2d 504 (W.D. Va. 1999)