{"id":34432,"date":"2025-06-30T17:01:55","date_gmt":"2025-06-30T17:01:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/?p=34432"},"modified":"2025-06-30T17:01:55","modified_gmt":"2025-06-30T17:01:55","slug":"supreme-court-declines-to-take-up-coinbase-user-data-privacy-case","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/?p=34432","title":{"rendered":"Supreme Court Declines to Take Up Coinbase User Data Privacy Case"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to take up a long-running privacy case involving an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) request for data on thousands of Coinbase customers.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

In a Monday order, the justices denied a petition for a writ of certiorari \u2014 essentially, a green-light to appeal an appellate court\u2019s decision \u2014\u00a0from a Coinbase customer who said that the IRS\u2019s 2016 records grab violated his Fourth Amendment rights, which grant Americans protections from unreasonable searches and seizures by the government.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

The plaintiff, James \u201cJim\u201d Harper, initially filed suit<\/a> against the IRS in 2020, nearly a year after he and thousands of other Coinbase customers received letters from the IRS<\/a>, warning them that they potentially failed to report income and pay the resulting tax from crypto transactions, or that they did not report their transactions properly.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

In his suit, Harper claimed that the IRS\u2019 so-called \u201cJohn Doe summons\u201d \u2014\u00a0which the agency uses to sniff out potential tax violations by unknown individuals by forcing financial institutions to provide them with records and other information the agency can use to identify potential violators \u2014\u00a0against Coinbase was unconstitutional.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\u201cWhere once it lacked the authority to peek into a person\u2019s private papers even with the use of a subpoena, the Internal Revenue Service has now acquired the power to demand access to anyone\u2019s private information without any judicial process,\u201d Harper\u2019s lawyers wrote in their suit. \u201cIRS demands access even when a person has entered into a contract with a third party that promises to protect his private information from such intrusion.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

In 2021, a New Hampshire district court tossed out Harper\u2019s suit, siding with the IRS. Harper appealed, and in 2023, a different New Hampshire district court judge once again sided with the IRS and dismissed the case, writing: \u201cAs the Supreme Court recently reaffirmed, \u201c[t]o pursue unpaid taxes and the people who owe them, \u2018Congress has granted the Service broad latitude to issue summonses.\u2019The IRS\u2019s actions at issue in this case fall squarely within that broad latitude, and Harper is not entitled to protection or relief beyond the existing Congressionally and judicially imposed \u201csafeguards\u201d and checks on the IRS\u2019s powers.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Harper appealed again, and in 2024, a U.S. appeals court affirmed the lower court\u2019s decision to toss the case. In February, Harper filed a petition for a writ of certiorari with the Supreme Court, his last chance to get a different result in the long-running legal battle.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Since Harper\u2019s petition was filed in February, a slew of high-profile think tanks and companies including Coinbase and X filed amicus briefs in the case, arguing that the Supreme Court should take the case and review the so-called third-party doctrine, a legal principle dating back to a 1976 Supreme Court decision stating that individuals have no reasonable expectation of privacy for information voluntarily shared with a third party, meaning that government agencies can access such information without a warrant or probable cause without violating the Fourth Amendment.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

However, the Supreme Court was unmoved. It provided no additional information or justification for its Monday order denying Harper\u2019s petition, writing simply:<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

\u201cThe petition for a writ of certiorari is denied.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The U.S. Supreme Court has declined to take up a long-running privacy case involving an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) request for data on thousands of Coinbase customers. In a Monday order, the justices denied a petition for a writ of certiorari \u2014 essentially, a green-light to appeal an appellate court\u2019s decision \u2014\u00a0from a Coinbase customer […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"iawp_total_views":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[3,4,5],"class_list":["post-34432","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news","tag-crypto","tag-doge","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34432","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=34432"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34432\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34432"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34432"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dogewisperer.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34432"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}