I disagree -- the third party doctrine that allows for governments to avoid serving/addressing warrants to the people whose data is actually being subpoenaed directly leads to things like the FISA warrant-rubber-stamp courts in the US. If the data stored on third-party servers on behalf of someone is not considered "papers and effects" of that person then it is entirely justified to subpoena every email stored on mail.google.com because it's just morally equivalent to a subpoena for "all of Foomatic's business records between 2020-2025".
It seems bonkers to me that things that are essentially implementation details (such as the way that MTAs work and the lack of crypto-obfuscation in email) should allow for a legal interpretation of the 4th amendment that effectively neuters it. Letters sent via snail-mail are handled by several third parties in a very analogous way to emails but (mostly due to historical reasons, such as the fact that letters existed during the drafting of the bill of rights) we do not apply the third-party doctrine to letters.
Of course, the US government has spent decades chipping away at the privacy of snail mail, so eventually we may end up in a world where snail mail and email are treated the same way (just not in a good way).
Both can be true at the same time.
A free state should not be able to sniff after people for made up reasons.
> if there is a valid warrant or subpoena
This is Gestapo all over again.
The fact that he is a white Irishman is legally irrelevant and enforcing immigration law in a race-neutral way is pretty un-Gestapo-like behavior.
Don't forget that the paperwork costs a lot, if one has children, can get close to $10k.
Look at Spain -- instead of deporting "illegals", they just made them "legals" (those without a criminal record). Easy, problem solved.
This happened at the Target I shop at:
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jan/13/ice-immigrat...
Two teenagers just doing their jobs, dogpiled by roughly four adult men, beaten up and released hours later. One of them was just dropped off at the Walmart down the street, the other they released at the federal building they’re working out of.
I am confused here. If the law grants ICE (or whatever is the umbrella agency that ICE operates under) the power to detain to determine legality of the status, ICE does it, and then releases people back, the law works as intended, no?
I am confused what is the difference between this, and police who can detain a “tall man in black short and red hat” and 10 hours later (or whenever) release back due to new information, or mistake in ID?
I understand that we absolutely have to strive to zero of such cases, but operations at scale (like law enforcement) have zero chance to have no mistakes.
So even using valid papers on you is not enough. We’re beyond a “papers please” situation. It is up to their mood.
Just a handful of examples from last year. As a resident of Minneapolis I can assure you it is much, much worse than these few examples.
Are you not familiar with Liam Conejo Ramos? Or Kilmar Abrego Garcia? Just two other high profile cases, but this is far more prevalent than any reporting has outlined. Three of Liam’s classmates were also “mistakenly” shipped to Texas and returned. At least one of his classmates, a documented asylum seeker like the rest, is still in Dilley.
Regardless, there is a huge gap between “literally everyone” and individuals who are not a slum dunk citizens, but have questionable status.
Regardless, I think this kind of sensationalism desensitizes the public to the point when no one cares.
Edit: the more I read about it, the more I am convinced he is not a "literally everyone" case.
He was in the US for 20 years, and had no green card. He has work authorization, which means he probably got it as part of the i485 application to get a green card due to his marriage. Other publications report that he came to the US on a tourist waiver visa program, and overstayed. So, what was his status all these years?
No wonder the trust in media is all time low -- this article did a sloppy job to paint a specific picture, and this picture has a bunch of holes in it.
Correct. The methods, the scale, and the targets do. Refusing to ever show any identification or proof of orders at all when that definitionally makes them a secret police does. Repeatedly violating federal court orders does (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46965333). Repeatedly violating habeas corpus rights does. Assaulting people in the streets merely for witnessing does. Let us not forget that a woman was violently shoved backward to the ground while she was backing up in the lead-up to the killing of Alex Pretti, and the government's immediate response was repeated shameless lies and hiding or destroying evidence, just like they did with the killing of Renee Nicole Good, just like they did with the killing of Geraldo Lunas Campos, just like they did with Alberto Castañeda Mondragón, ... The list doesn't end.
It's very weird of you to just ignore all of that.
Like, I realize I'm the rambling anarchist up in here, but show me ANY government ever that didn't Murder and Pillage, two things that we all hate when perpetrated by individuals. There's no amount of democracy that can be injected into a hierarchy responsible for controlling hundreds of millions of people that will inhibit authoritarianism, the best people can hope for (and what many white/middle class citizens thought they had for the last few decades) is not being the target of that authoritarianism.
Cat's out of the bag now and we're doing that thing we do every few decades where we weaponize the State against the citizens.
But tech companies should be complying with subpoenas from governments in countries they would like to operate in. I don't like what is happening in the US either, but to me this feels like a problem with the electorate. Maybe it's possible for Google to provide some of these services without actually having access to the data under subpoena, but I don't know enough about what services they were using or how they work.
There's the "three" boxes of liberty that are meant to give a framework for how humans in a society are to introduce consequences to state actors who abuse rights: the soap box, the ballot box, and the jury box.
So we need to start using at least those three to prevent human rights abuses with regard to search warrants.
Right, exactly -- a free state should not do that, yet the system is working as intended, therefore we do not live in a free state. It's time to accept that.
The only option is to not elect someone that doesn't respect rule of law. And since I know some enlightened "centrist" will play the both sides game: What's 1 thing any previous president has done equivalent to violating posse comitatus.
Writing a rule that says the government can't do this is just the government writing a rule it can simply remove it ignore when inconvenient.
If this wasn't the intention they would have changed it by now.
I have some bad news for you about magistrates.
It absolutely is a privacy problem. If that information was in your house, the 4th amendment would apply and they'd have to show up with a real judicial warrant, so you'd know what was happening.
Even if that's the "system working as intended" (intended by who exactly? I'm sure Peter Thiel loves it), anyone who cares at all about their own privacy should be using providers outside of US jurisdiction, because the US government does not, in practice, protect its citizens against unreasonable search and seizure as described in the Constitution.
Yeah no. This was always bad and is often abused by law enforcement (& people pretending to be law enforcement)
https://gizmodo.com/fake-cops-stole-user-data-from-meta-and-...
In good times they were still a blatant form of government abuse however the majority were completely unaffected and so didn't get riled up about it.
Similar to how a vigorous defense of freedom of speech is somehow consistently less popular among constituents of whichever party happens to be in power, as well as when applied to "objectionable" political views.
How is that not also a privacy problem?
Government agencies are prone to abuse.
The cloud has such a long legacy of being the safe easy convenient place that you just don't have to think about. Nations have somewhat kept their fingers out of the cookie jar.
But now it's just wanton unchecked madness, with no real process, with no judicial review. Google giving in to ICE so quickly is absolutely existentially destructive to Google's business model, of the cloud being a default place you can put your stuff & rely on.
The cloud never deserved this reputation, and there was a certain freight train of inevitability that was coming crashing in from the future, that nations would make the cloud untenable & hostile a space. That felt inevitable. But this is so much harder worser faster dumber than could be expected.
> I know we instinctively want to frame this as a privacy problem
> In "good" times this made investigations run smoothly.
Or as Jefferson put it
The time to guard against corruption and tyranny, is before they shall have gotten hold of us. It is better to keep the wolf out of the fold, than to trust to drawing his teeth and talons after he shall have entered.
> but the real problem we need congress to act
Jefferson himself writes a lot about this tbh. It is why we have a system of checks and balances. Where the government treats itself adversarially. But this is also frustrating and makes things slow. So... power creeps.
So the real problem we need to solve is educating the populous. They need to understand these complexities and nuances. If they do not, they will unknowingly trade their freedom to quench their fears.
And this is why it is a privacy problem. Because we the people should always treat our government adversarially. Even in the "good times". Especially in the "good times". The founders of the US constitution wrote extensively about this, much like the privacy advocates write today. I think they would be more likely to take the position of "why collect this information in the first place?" than "under what conditions should this information be collected?". Both are important questions, but the latter should only come after the former. Both are about privacy. Privacy of what is created vs privacy of what is accessed.
[0] You mentioned banking, so a recent example might be the changes in when transactions of a certain level trigger a bank report. The number has changed over time, usually decreasing. It's with good intention, to catch people skirting the laws. You'll never get 100% of people so if this is the excuse it an be a race to reporting all transactions. Maybe you're fine with Mr Rogers having that data, but Hitler? You have to balance these things and it isn't so easy as the environment moves. You solve a major part of the problem with the first move but then the Overton window changes as you've now become accustomed to a different rate of that kind of fraud (and/or as adversaries have adapted to it). A cat and mouse game always presents a slippery slope and unless you consider these implicit conditions it'll be a race to the bottom.
Please never make the mistake to confuse something being legal for something being fair or ethical.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2026/02/03/hom...
edit: It appears that this outcome is an outlier and most admin warrants are honored. It is unfortunate to see the Washington Post decline in reliability like this.
In case you haven't been paying attention, Bezos has been all the way up Trump's ass for years now, and this is not in any way a coincidence.
But I don't think this matters much for this case, as DHS is not investigating financial crimes. This is about what discretion Google has to comply with administrative warrants, which is not settled law and isn't clearly spelled out in their own policy.
0: https://support.google.com/googlepay/answer/7160765?hl=en
Unfortunately, KYC is used for much more than just financial crimes, and the precedent to comply is much more firmly established.
As with all things though, these agencies should not be self-regulated without civilian and judicial oversight.
I don't think I've ever seen my taxes go down in any tangible way from all the supposed taxpayer saving initiatives over the years.
Somehow we broke the "cheap, fast, good" metric and we don't even get "good" nor "cheap".
I'd prefer good and what i'm paying regardless over some false "savings"
These times never existed.
Laws are supposed to be crafted to be as applied by anyone, anywhere and at any time. This is why lawyers and politicians are supposed to have foresight and be prudent.
You look at prior events and see them as justified due to the people involved and situations.
If the US government can, for example investigate Richard Spencer or some other extremist figure based on a web post, then they can do the same for someone else on the other end of the spectrum.
But even more terrifying is that they can do the same for someone not in the extremes.
When my friends on the left held power and used it to quash the speech of my friends on the right, I spoke up.
When my friends on the right are doing the same, I also speak up.
The sad irony is that those not in power protest only when it is not their side.
> But even more terrifying is that they can do the same for someone not in the extremes.
This isn't a valid principle. It suggests that we should oppose laws against murder, because if the government can imprison a murderer, it can imprison someone who saved a life. Even more terrifying is that it can imprison someone who saved a dog's life or didn't save or kill any lives.
Except this is both impossible and a bad idea, which is why we have judges, juries, elections, and every other part of the system intended to constrain the blind application of the law.
That’s why Al franken resigned for a dumb photo, meanwhile republicans protect pedophile traffickers.
Most people are in a bubble and are unaware of what their tribe is doing.
I may be wrong but I think there have been Republicans who have resigned for extra-marital sex.
While we are screaming about the current POTS and his relation with Jeffery, we gave Bill Clinton a platform to speak during the 2024 Convention. When I bring that up, I get told "It's important that we beat Trump."
The Epstein was arrested in 2019, the files have been in the hands of both Democrats and Republicans. Neither group really looks like they want to prosecute anyone further; only use accusations that their opponents are in there to galvanize their base.
I'm not convinced that people really liked Bill Clinton while he was president.
You have said very little that addresses anything I said, except to appeal to some vague sense of "both sidesism" which is so far away from our current predicament that the only applications I see are (1) to say "I told you so", which isn't productive and widely misses the mark with me (2) normalize the current situation and/or absolve blame by shifting it onto the other side.
Investigative agencies are going to be able to investigate people. So supposing that the "US government can ... investigate Richard Spencer ... based on a web post" isn't a compelling argument unless your goal is to completely reject the concept of government. This can certainly be a consistent position (I've held it in the past), but it's not a common one.
At which point it comes down to accountability for how delegated powers are used - both in individual cases, and to stop patterns of abuse. For example I've long argued we need to neuter the concept of sovereign immunity, and start routinely compensating people who are harmed by the government but never convicted of breaking the law - one should indeed be able to "beat the ride". So I'm not waking up to this in 2025 clutching my pearls gasping "I can't believe the government can just do this". I've been following how the government operates unaccountably for quite some time, and I'm pointing out that the current regime is still a marked escalation.
This isn't to say I am pushing lame answers like "just vote Democrat" (I don't consider myself a Democrat). And I do agree that meaningful reform needs to be in general terms (eg aforementioned sovereign immunity example). But I also think that dismissing our current situation as some mere extension of what has been happening for a while is a terrible way of framing things.
Because otherwise, better than what we have now is an abysmal target and we should aim for better.
The difference now is the number of people feeling effected
It always been thus for people at the margins
It's worth pointing out that "criminals" are generally "people at the margins"... If for no other reason than to point out that pithy comments like this are often so vague as to be worthless, or even counter-productive!
It's also a good thing that antisocial behavior is often isolated to "the margins", so your statement can even be considered a good thing, by the same metric!
TL;DR: Twitterisms like this are stupid.
No, that's a distinction without a difference. I mean, it doesn't matter in the slightest if at some point in time certain powers weren't abused, if they're being abused now the situation cannot be tolerated.
Arguing about how it's possible not to abuse the system is a waste of time at best and a diversion at worst.
Hard disagree. The fact that a government agency "reviewed" its own subpoena before enforcing it does not follow the spirit of the Fourth Amendment, which is to prevent government overreach in taking your belongings and information.
In fact, to take your definition of what's not unreasonable to its logical conclusion, by definition any process an agency came up with would be acceptable, as long as they followed it.
I think a better definition of a reasonable search and seizure would be one where a subpoena goes before a judge, the target of the subpoena is notified and has the opportunity to fight it, and where there are significant consequences for government agents who lie or otherwise abuse the process of getting a subpoena.
>>no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation<<
that means there must be affirmation of probable cause to an overseeing body [i.e. judiciary]
administrative warrants are a process of "i know im right i dont need someone else to look things over"
Are you saying that by the existence of the fourth that unreasonable search/seizures are guaranteed to happen? It can't guarantee protection from them either.
ICE/DHS technically are just acting as marshals, merely ensuring that defendants appear at court proceedings and then enforcing court decisions (deportations).
I think it's a pretty big undersell to describe ICE as "marshals" too - they've got plenty of discretion in how they prioritize targeted people and who they detain. They are not just a neutral party executing court orders.
> I think it's a pretty big undersell to describe ICE as "marshals" too - they've got plenty of discretion in how they prioritize targeted people and who they detain. They are not just a neutral party executing court orders.
Yep. That's also a difference between theory and practice.
What exactly do you disagree with? Most immigration violations are a civil matter (USC section 8). There are criminal violations like human trafficking or illegal entry. But if you came into the US with a visa and then overstayed, you're not committing anything criminal.
And even illegal entry is a misdemeanor, the maximum punishment is at most 6 months in jail. So yeah, ICE and DHS _technically_ don't have more power than regular marshals for most immigration cases.
Which should scare you, btw. There are plenty of civil violations that can be similarly weaponized in future.
This person right here is the problem in our society. Things never and will never get isolated to "valid warrant".
Look around us, social after social media in order to "protect the kids", you must provide your personal information to them. Many people see nothing wrong with that and yet, service after service, business after business are being breached left and right.
Discord will mandate ID verification, just recently they have been breached.
Back to the article, if Google can do that for an immigrant, what make you think that Google won't do the same with your data as citizen whenever for whatever reason??
Don't agree with things you don't fully understand its consequences.
The US is just experiencing a little more of what the citizens of communist and fascist nations have experienced. Over time, that might lead to rapid societal change, or maybe it's too late.