It is the responsibility of the party seeking the information with the Court's sanction to act ethically. It is patently ludicrous to expect a service provider to function as a check against abuse of process. To go one step further, it is also ludicrous that we have reached the point that overly broad subpoenas are considered de rigeur.

There is something very wrong when a former head of the Justice Department's computer crime unit publicly states that a service provider that receives an overly broad subpeona, as a result of litigation which

the provider is not a party to, bears the burden of trying to narrow the subpoena.

The way to deal overly broad subpoenas is for the courts to aggressively sanction those who abuse process to the point that attorneys stop viewing abuse of process as just another arrow in their quiver. In Texas a public service advertisement campaign discourages drinking and driving with the tag line "DUI - You can't afford it.". The same approach seems quite reasonable for dealing with the rampant abuse of process that goes on these days. It is about time a court put a stake

in the ground and put a stop to subpoenas that are so overly broad that they constitute abuse of process.

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