The Trump Administration Issues Subpoenas to Social Media Platforms Demanding That They Rat Out Protesters, Massively Expanding the Surveillance State

One of the grievances the Trump administration cites against previous administrations is the government seeking cooperation from social media companies to root out misinformation during the pandemic. This was supposedly about freedom of speech, though it turns out it was mostly about conservatives being in favor of Covid misinformation.

That free speech argument has since been thrown out the window, and now the Trump administration is demanding its own partnership with social media companies, this time to fork over information and participate in surveillance against anti-ICE protesters and critics of the administration.

The New York Times reports:

The Department of Homeland Security is expanding its efforts to identify Americans who oppose Immigration and Customs Enforcement by sending tech companies legal requests for the names, email addresses, telephone numbers and other identifying data behind social media accounts that track or criticize the agency.

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.

The most ominous part is the use of “administrative subpoenas“ to demand information. These are not real subpoenas, because at no point has the government had to demonstrate “probable cause” to an independent judge. Instead, the burden of proof is reversed and shifted onto the person being investigated, who has to go to the courts to block the subpoena.

The Trump administration is destroying the Fourth Amendment, intimidating tech companies into accepting that the federal government can compel information without ever going to a real court.

The Executive Watch is a project of the Institute for the Study of Modern Authoritarianism, and its flagship publication The UnPopulist, to track in an ongoing way the abuses of the power of the American presidency. It sorts these abuses into five categories: Personal Grift, Political Corruption, Presidential Retribution, Power Consolidation, and Policy Illegality. Click the category of interest to get an overview of all the abuses under it.

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