Ex-employee of auditor’s office wants identities of commenters on Web stories revealed

From The Medina Gazette An ex-employee of the Medina County Auditor’s Office has served subpoenas in a federal lawsuit seeking to identify her former co-workers who may have left comments on stories posted on The Gazette’s website about her feud with Auditor Mike Kovack.

In a motion to block the subpoenas, which were issued earlier this month, attorneys for the county argued the information sought in the subpoenas could create a security threat in the office.

“Disclosing the Auditor’s Office IP addresses — without any limitation on its use or any security efforts taken to protect that information — makes their network extremely susceptible to security and hacking concerns,” attorneys Kimberly Vanover Riley and Brian Spiess wrote in a motion filed in U.S. District Court in Cleveland. “IP” is a shortened version of the term “Internet Protocol,” which identifies a computer location and network.

The county’s attorneys told the court they would willing to provide the auditor’s office IP addresses but not in a document that would be open to the public. Instead, they suggested having the judge determine if the addresses matched those on The Gazette’s website.

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