Google, Meta, and Reddit Flooded With US Government Subpoenas

The Trump administrations big government crackdown on internet thought crimes continue after Reddit and others receive subpoenas.

One of the attributes of the Trump administration is that the administration loves to bloat the ever living fuck out of government. This while cracking down on the rights of ordinary American citizens. I mean, it is a Republican administration, so you can basically expect the administration to be corrupt beyond anyone’s wildest imaginations. One thing is for sure, though, the Trump administration is delivering that in spades (and I’m convinced even that is an understatement).

A major key component of this effort to flood the swamp is to actively crack down on any and all dissent that the administration can find. Whether that is through disappearing people right off the city streets, arresting political opponents, or just straight up murdering people altogether, the Trump administration doesn’t appear to have any limit to how far he is willing to go to crack down on anyone daring to question the regime.

In the digital landscape, there is precious little that differentiates the regimes actions on people daring to criticize the administration. After all, the regime did deport people for things that were said on social media. This along with efforts to doxx Wikipedians for thought crimes and building a massive 24/7 social media government surveillance machine as the government scours the web for anyone daring to criticize the government and cracking down on them wherever possible. In fact, Canadians are doing what they can to fight back against this by pressuring Canadian companies to drop deals used in the oppression of the American people.

While the efforts to fight against tyranny are noble, that isn’t necessarily slowing down the Trump crackdown. The regime is actively moving ahead in their search to crack down on political dissent wherever it can find it. One of the tools they are using are subpoenas and they are flooding the platforms with them in an effort to obtain the identities of people daring to speak out against the regime. This includes Google, Reddit, and Meta (owner of Facebook). From PC Gamer:

In recent months, the US Department of Homeland Security has issued hundreds of administrative subpoenas to Google, Reddit, Discord, and Meta to obtain the identifying information of individuals behind accounts that track or criticize Immigration and Customs Enforcement operations, according to New York Times reporting.

According to four federal officials and tech industry workers who spoke on condition of anonymity, the issued subpoenas requested that the companies provide names, email addresses, telephone numbers, and other data that could be used to identify Americans who publicly decry ICE and or identified the locations of its agents.

Of the subpoenaed platforms—which can choose whether or not to supply the requested information—Google, Meta, and Reddit have complied with some of the requests. Some of the account holders in question were informed that the DHS had requested their information, and were given 10 to 14 days to challenge the subpoena in court.

“When we receive a subpoena, our review process is designed to protect user privacy while meeting our legal obligations,” a Google spokesperson told the New York Times. “We inform users when their accounts have been subpoenaed, unless under legal order not to or in an exceptional circumstance. We review every legal demand and push back against those that are overbroad.”

As the article notes, this is coming at a time when these very same platforms are demanding users fork over even more personal information for the alleged purpose of age verification. While some of these platforms have claimed that the data is never collected nor stored, some of those claims have turned out to be false as those claims start to get rolled back. This means that it can very easily be open season for the US government to swoop in and harvest that data looking for people who have dared to say something bad about the government. It’s a frightening prospect to say the least.

I remember a time only a couple years ago when the prospect of the US having a thought police and going around and disappearing people for saying something negative about the government was a far fetched conspiracy theory that only an idiot would believe. That is no longer the case and it is a very real thing that is at play here. Since there is no such thing as functioning checks and balances anymore, it doesn’t appear that there is anything even remotely slowing down the governments trajectory here.

Drew Wilson on Mastodon, Twitter and Facebook.