Sessions is watching us.

The Justice Department is trying to force an internet hosting company to turn over information about everyone who visited a website used to organize protests during President Trump’s inauguration, setting off a new fight over surveillance and privacy limits.

What?? On what grounds? It’s not as if people brought guns or drove cars into the crowd.

Federal investigators last month persuaded a judge to issue a search warrant to the company, Dreamhost, demanding that it turn over data identifying all the computers that visited its customer’s website and what each visitor viewed or uploaded.

The company says that would result in the disclosure of a large volume of information about people who had nothing to do with the protests. Over 1.3 million requests were made to view pages on the website in the six days after inauguration alone, it said.

Dreamhost is fighting the warrant as unconstitutionally broad.

“In essence, the search warrant not only aims to identify the political dissidents of the current administration, but attempts to identify and understand what content each of these dissidents viewed on the website,” two lawyers for Dreamhost, Raymond Aghaian and Chris Ghazarian, wrote in a court motion opposing the demand.

Obama set some bad precedents in this area.

The fight, which came to light on Monday when Dreamhost published a blog post entitled “We Fight For the Users,” centers on a search warrant for information about a website, disruptj20.org, which served as a clearinghouse for activists seeking to mobilize resistance to Mr. Trump’s inauguration on Jan. 20.

The website featured maps to organize blockades of intersections arranged around various themes — like feminism, gay rights, racial justice, climate change, immigrant rights, antiwar, and labor — and tips for legal observers. It offered printable protest signs, many critical of Mr. Trump, and afterward it posted pictures of protests.

There was, the Times says, a minority faction at the protest that did do the usual anarchist-Antifa thing.

Rioting by a small group of anarchists has become common at broader left-wing demonstrations for the past generation, such as during anti-free trade protests outside World Trade Organization talks in Seattle in 1999.

During the Trump inauguration, such protesters broke the windows of shops and bus stop shelters, set a limousine on fire and threw rocks at police in riot gear, who fired tear gas at crowds. One masked man sucker-punched Richard Spencer, a prominent white nationalist, as he was being interviewed; a video of that assault was widely shared on the internet.

Therefore, the feds need to spy on all 1.3 million people who visited the web site.

Several civil rights groups criticized the Justice Department as going too far.

“People should be free to exercise their legitimate free-expression rights and explore new points of view without worrying that any digital footprints they leave could land them in a government database later,” said Sarah St. Vincent, a Human Rights Watch researcher and advocate who focuses on national security, surveillance and domestic law enforcement. “That could have a real chilling effect on web-based free speech.”

I daresay that’s the plan.