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"It is in many ways a victory," Raymond O. Aghaian, a lawyer for DreamHost, said of the ruling. "The court was having a lot of difficulty trying to balance the government's right to investigate and prosecute a wrongful activity and the First Amendment rights of innocent parties caught up in the middle."

The Justice Department did not return requests for comment.

The ruling came on an already tumultuous day for DreamHost. The company — which hosts more than 1.5 million websites, blogs and apps — spent much of Thursday battling a distributed denial of service, or DDoS, attack that hobbled parts of its network for hours.

DreamHost's tussle with federal prosecutors began on July 12 with a search warrant seeking proof of criminal activity as the government built a case against about 200 people arrested during Inauguration Day protests.

DreamHost responded with a legal challenge, arguing that 1.3 million IP addresses could be subject to search and that prosecutors would be able to identify political dissidents of the Trump administration. The Justice Department came back with a narrowed request, asking for data from a limited date range and excluding unpublished draft content and nearly all IP addresses.

Thursday's ruling also requires the government to submit to Judge Morin a list of all the data it is requesting and a justification for why it should be included under the warrant.

Mr. Aghaian said the scope of the Justice Department's search now extended only to emails passing through DisruptJ20.org and related mailing lists. But he warned that the ruling on Thursday could still have a chilling effect on political speech.

The American Civil Liberties Union said on Twitter that despite DreamHost's "strong pushback" against the Justice Department, the warrant still threatened First Amendment rights. "We're watching," the group wrote.

As for the cyberattack against DreamHost, which began Thursday morning, the company said it had restored all services by late afternoon.

The assault began soon after DreamHost began hosting the website Punished Stormer, which is the newest manifestation of the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer. The website has spent the past week bouncing from host to host, with GoDaddy, Google and several others refusing it access after the violence at a white nationalist protest in Charlottesville, Va., this month.

DreamHost also hosts websites for the white nationalist groups Northwest Front and National Vanguard. Years ago, the company hosted The Daily Stormer as well, though DreamHost told The New York Times that it later asked the website to leave after it violated the terms of service.

Early Thursday, a user on the social media network Gab id entifying himself as Andrew Anglin, the founder of The Daily Stormer, wrote that he had "stopped registering random names because just going on and off was stupid and pointless."

"We think that Dreamhost, where Punished Stormer is, will hold," he wrote.

Several hours later, though, the user posted again, saying that DreamHost had told him in an email that it had barred him as a result of the DDoS attack.

"So much for 'freedom of speech,'" he wrote.

DreamHost said that The Daily Stormer had gone under the radar on Wednesday to use the company's automated sign-up form to register for a similar domain name — an eva sive tactic that is forbidden by DreamHost.

"That alone was reason enough for us to disable this account, and we did so today," the company said in an email. "Unfortunately, determined internet vigilantes weren't willing to wait for us to take that action."

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Source: DreamHost Ordered to Release Some Trump Protest Website Data to U.S.