In recent months, Google, Reddit, Discord and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, have received hundreds of administrative subpoenas from the Department of Homeland Security, according to four government officials and tech employees privy to the requests. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
Google, Meta and Reddit complied with some of the requests, the government officials said. In the subpoenas, the department asked the companies for identifying details of accounts that do not have a real person’s name attached and that have criticized ICE or pointed to the locations of ICE agents. The New York Times saw two subpoenas that were sent to Meta over the last six months.
The tech companies, which can choose whether or not to provide the information, have said they review government requests before complying. Some of the companies notified the people whom the government had requested data on and gave them 10 to 14 days to fight the subpoena in court.
European based social media is about to get competitive.
I am not a social media infrastructure expert though, not sure if there are legal or technical reasons why there haven’t been European social media competitors.
I doubt it. I suppose it’s a thing that US companies like Palantir already sell data to the EU, as a workaround to governments not being able to attain it themselves. The governments of Europe (utilizing Palantir) are in fact indirectly incentivized to keep users on said platforms that Palantir integrate with. So while I’m sure some fines will be thrown around, the government dragnet inches forward.
This has been the case for a while. They already are most likely using data from cell phones (all cellphones at a protest, etc.) to add people to lists in the Paragon software. I don’t see any reason at all to assume they aren’t doing something like that already. And they are almost certainly trying to doxx anyone posting anti-ICE sentiment online in any organized way. I really think threat model for any pro-LGBT, pro-trans or anti-ICE activists should be pretty high at this point.
Intelligence agencies like the NSA, which are focused on foreign targets, have wide open authorities to collect data by any means necessary. The controversy is what happens to American data caught up in the process.
Normally it is off limits for law enforcement to use anything collected by an intelligence agency and it cannot be used in court. Thus if ICE wants data to try and form some kind of criminal prosecution it has to get that data through means that are presentable in court, like a subpoenas.
Finally, intel agencies jealously guard their accesses and data to protect it from unauthorized disclosure. I doubt most people in ICE or CBP have access to sensitive intelligence. Also, anecdotally, the real national security community look down on the amateurs in DHS making everyone look bad….so they are unlikely to go out of their way to help.
They are already using illegally obtained cell phone data. Yes, courts are holding up in certain cases, but other courts (a truly huge number of them) are blatant kangaroo courts for this corrupt regime. Any activists who think they will be protected by “the rule of law" or “the courts" in the US are going to find out the hard way. We currently see a lot of activists who think this stuff isn’t important because the regime has only rounded up a (relatively) few innocent US citizens to make examples of (they have rounded up tens of thousands of completely innocent people who don’t have full citizenship yet) and only shot dead a (relatively) few innocent people in the streets. What these people are misunderstanding is that their digital paper trail will exist forever. Even if we subscribe to the (I think fallacious) idea that the government doesn’t have massive surveillance capabilities they are already deploying against US citizens who dare to speak out…the data from these people is already out there. It would be absolutely trivial for the government to just point AI at the data set and come up with names and addresses of people to round up. (This is already how they are rounding up immigrants. To think this regime would not use the powers against its own citizens is dangerously naïve.) The paper trail is the reason that any pro-freedom, pro-democracy, pro-rights activists in the US should already be considering extensive privacy and security measures.
Yes I’m a bit confused, I also thought they already had access to it all.
I understand some agency would have more power then others, but it’s been proven time after time, that the different government agencies do illegal sh* all the time.
So a bit confused by this one. It’s probably a scare tactic when I think about it.