[Amorymeltzer]

It could be for non-public information, could it not? Private repositories are one obvious, but hidden email addresses and IPs could easily be targets. And maybe they want the public information but in an easy-to-manage format. When you've got the tools, it's probably easier to say "Give us every commit log entry for these ten users" rather than go search for it yourself.

[wongarsu]

> And maybe they want the public information but in an easy-to-manage format

Would there be any legal requirement to satisfy such a request? Why should a business expend resources to do something the police could do on their own?

[danso]

Various freedom of information laws acknowledge the importance of information being provided to the requester in a machine readable format, when that information originates from such a system. I'm not arguing that this applies to police asking a private entity for information, just that the courts/regulators are not ignorant about the difference between machine-readable data and "oh just do a search and copy-paste it from the website".

http://www.justice.gov/oip/blog/foia-post-2009-annual-foia-r...

http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2014/08/25/freedom-of-inf...

[ckuehl]

As an interesting example, Lavabit tried handing over their RSA private keys in an illegible printed font:

https://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2013/10/04/cheeky-lavabit-d...

[Lawtonfogle]

>Various freedom of information laws acknowledge the importance of information being provided to the requester in a machine readable format,

Such as an XML(ish) markup with accompanying code to describe presentation?

[tomjen3]

That's not much, I can easily come up with a format that is computer readable that will require you to write a parser for.