Basically they are issuing (administrative) subpoenas. When they go to court (at the expense of the account holder) they back down so they don't get ruled against / told to stop issuing these subpoenas.
Noted in the article, when this happened in 2017 twitter denied the governments request. Now Meta, etc are rolling over for the government.
I just recently played “The Last of Us” for the first time, and I feel like the US is going full steam ahead towards establishing that FEDRA service they had. Or at least, turn ICE/DHS into the same damn thing.
This went from #2 on the front page to the bottom of page 2 very quickly. It's unfortunate.
twitter, Tiktok, threads, facebook, instagram -> they're all maga now. it's more of a policy directive than a request.
What is not owned/subjugated to the current admin? reddit, bluesky, lemmy, mastodon. People use reddit quite a bit but nowhere near as much as the maga ones.
I don't even know which is worse: if these people control social media and influence society to their nefarious ends, or if they don't and america starts resisting and real conflicts arise from that. No good ends left.
During the past months I have written enough online and now I am sure I will be unwanted at the US borders. I wait for the Dem POTUS to revert the situation and welcome the now "criminals" as heroes. I will miss the coming Olympic Games though.
Extraordinarily troubling. This recent case was especially dystopian.
https://newrepublic.com/post/206088/homeland-security-67-yea...
The letter written by Jon was about as benign and constructive as possible. There was not even the possibility of pretense in this case, but nonetheless his gmail got subpoenaed. The privacy community seems extraordinarily bad at dealing with nuance, so I want to lay this out specifically. This is a new threshold which has been crossed. No matter what angry commenters online will tell you, it was never previously so easy to to subpoena this sort of information.
If you have not already started cleaning up your online presence and thinking critically about your online OPSEC, the hour is getting very late.
Reminder that the most reliable way to prevent the rise of the far right is to implement robust safety nets and low inequality, to reduce status anxiety and grievance. Support for such measures (eg welfare, healthcare, unionization, redistribution etc) is usually low among Americans.
It makes one wonder how long until dang is forced to turn over logs of who responds in certain ways to certain messages on HN, and who upvotes prohibited thought.
1st and 4th amendment are just wallpaper I guess.
The bigger issue is their purpose; how do they intend to use the names they are collecting.
This is such an entirely predictable outcome that people were warning about ever since the Patriot Act days and the creation of DHS.
Unfortunate, but the inevitable consequence of granting the kinds of powers that DHS was given.
The Trump administration has demanded fealty to Trump, the man, not the office holder. Any Executive Branch employee who refuses to issue a subpoena that the Trump administration wants issued will lose their job in seconds.
The subpoenas are intended as part of the database the Trump administration is building identifying American citizens with anti-Trump views.
There can be only one reason for such a database: to punish and terrorize the citizenry of this county.
Joinmastodon.org
Imagine organizing an anti-government movement on the platform of a guy who sponsored said government.
This is the point where most of the public would probably acknowledge that digital privacy is worth seeking. If you're in a fascist or communist state, announcing your political opinions online without anonymity is generally not advisable.
MAGA should oppose this, for their own sake. When Democrats sweep the floor in the midterms and then the presidency in 2028, because Trump wanted to pretend that the Epstein Files were "fake news", this will be precedent for them to send MAGA to gulags for being pro-Nazi.
How long before they come for Hacker News ?
Folks, it is now time to delete anything you posted here that might be construed as remotely critical of ICE or Trump.
A court order will not help you if ICE have already shot you dead.
oh boy, ICE will mess up with the mid-term selection and make sure Trump get another 4 years.
It's the NYT, so I'm sure their general attitude is "good corporate citizens will do it", but how is the proper response not "fuck you, make me"?
And don't kid yourself about deleting stuff preemptively. It's all backed up in the NSA's Bumblehive data center, Cedar Valley, Utah. All that has to happen is to tie some "handle" to a real person, and said real person will end up in a FEMA camp in an old KMart outside of a small town in the midwest.
I'm old enough to remember that time the Obama administration requested Edward Snowdens private SSL keys from Lavabit, because it would have opened up every email from every single user. So the owner nuked everything and was held in contempt of court. He was forbidden from talking about it for months too. Don't give too much unprecedented power to the government. It doesn't matter who the president is. They've all done some net-evil that feeds power to the next guy, and the next guy, until it's too late.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/03/lavabit-ladar-...