(www.theguardian.com)
They have a toy, they’re increasingly abusing it, then trying to dodge from it being taken away.
The thing is nobody has to comply with 1509 summons, DHS has to go to court to enforce it. A lot of the fault is on a company that complies without just ignoring it.
You're not wrong, but companies such as Google make business decisions, not moral decisions. It's far easier and cheaper for them to comply, while there is basically no incentive for them to fight the summons. Especially given the current administration's proven record of taking retaliation against anyone who stands in their way.
If you want companies to behave in the interest of the general public, you need to create an incentive structure that supports that.
Of course then it's up to judge to determine if the request was valid or not.
And lose time and money, which they also likely don't have?
And as this is something that has already happened there isn't much else the person in question can do. Third parties always have option to just disclose information to whoever asks it, at most you can hold them accountable for it later if it was unlawful. And what accountability exactly means depends on what laws exists. If you want some real accountability for the people/companies involved in these kinds of decisions then get Congress to pass such laws (however impossible it might be).
"In Fort’s case, Google did not comply with the summons for any of the accounts. The company responded to the DHS by saying it had not offered evidence of how it was related to a customs investigation."
> companies such as Google make business decisions, not moral decisions
The world is more complicated than that; they make both kinds of decisions and many decisions aren't clearly in one basket or the other. Humans don't biologically change to amoral creatures when they pull into the office parking lot (despite theories to the contrary or attempts to encourage it), nor are they absolved of human responsibility when doing things for which they are paid.
Not sure what this means. I think you meant to write "fiduciary duty": the company's board have an affirmative legal obligation to act in the interest of stockholders, regardless of moral impact.
That's quite a statement.
> I think you meant to write "fiduciary duty"
No, our responsibilities go far beyond fiduciary duties. You can see what Google did in this case, for example, or Apple's extraordinary investment in engineering for privacy a "human right", per Apple - far more than its users grasp or could understand.
> the company's board have an affirmative legal obligation to act in the interest of stockholders, regardless of moral impact.
That's a theory of the ~1980s that people who suffer from its consequences still seem to latch onto - perhaps it's simplicity is appealing, maybe its algorithmic decision-making appeals to the IT world - but not true.
Even now, when such things are at historical extremes, corporations take into account other issues. Not long ago, DEI and ESG were widely accepted and practiced.
It's entirely possible to still satisfy those requirements by building a sustainable and moral company. The shareholders get to vote, if they don't like it they'll make that clear.
I think you don't understand what this phrase means. In a publicly-traded company, "the interest of the shareholders" does not mean "whatever the shareholders want"; it means "whatever is best for the company." That means money.
It may be possible to be both profitable and moral; but if it isn't, the fiduciary duty obligates corporate officers to choose the profitable path rather than the moral one.
The easy way of looking at this is that there beyond complying with the law, there is no general obligation for companies to behave morally, but there is a general obligation to behave profitably. So it's not hard to see why they make they choices they do.
> It's entirely possible to still satisfy those requirements by building a sustainable and moral company.
It is, but it's a lot easier to be not sustainable and not moral.
What is that based on? I'd say there are certainly obligations for both.
The fact that some ignore those obligations - either obligation, for example when corrupt management stuffs its own pockets - doesn't make them less.
Citation needed.
From the space between the lines in the article, it seems pretty clear that Google denied the request, and its employees were the source for the claim being reported at all. Yes, they absolutely could be evil in principle. They appear to have been good in practice.
And in times of extremis like this, maybe it's important to call out those little victories and find allies where you can. Even if you happen to be a HN Apple stan.
Ehhh, seems to me a cloud provider that wants to back up my documents, communications, photos, passkeys etc has a very strong business case for ensuring the data is as safe with them as they would be in my own home.
This isn't uncommon - this is how NY deals with any compelling case involving their infringing gun control statutes. If a defendant has money and no other meaningful charges, they tend to just dismiss and moot the issue rather than risk a finding of unconstitutionality.
Become your own tiny infra
> The DHS also sought and obtained six months of phone records for Fort from T-Mobile, which included records for more than 10,000 calls and text messages. Fort was not notified the government was seeking the records until mid-July, when government lawyers produced them to her lawyers. Fort’s lawyers wrote in a filing this week they were “stunned” to see the government had unilaterally been able to obtain a log of her communications after a judge had warned them about obtaining records about a journalist.
...
> In Fort’s case, Google did not comply with the summons for any of the accounts. The company responded to the DHS by saying it had not offered evidence of how it was related to a customs investigation.
> A Google spokesperson said the company reviews each request for data it gets to ensure it is legal and pushes back when it is too broad or doesn’t follow the correct process.
What part of GP's quote from the article gets you to "private companies are part of the judicial branch"? The judicial branch wasn't involved there, only the executive. All of us, private individuals or organizations, have the right to challenge any requests by the executive branch (and by the same token, unless forbidden by law we can also just voluntarily go along with its requests). The judicial branch can then rule on who is right. If the executive wants to force it then it can go to the judicial branch up front and get an actual for real warrant. If it wants to bypass judicial review, then it doesn't have the same legal force either.
Here, it asked T-Mobile and Google for a bunch of stuff on a journalist. T-Mobile said sure. Google said no, come back with a warrant.
>I don’t remember that part of the Constitution.
Might want to reread if it's been awhile for you.
No, unless you're arguing that the government should be barred from even making voluntary requests at all? I'm not sure I'd agree with that either though, there's plenty of times where a government request really is just an honest "request" for pure info, like a poll or survey or something on how a program is working and any feedback participants want to give. Though of course it's also easy to see how things like 3rd party doctrine have expanded in effect over time and gotten badly abused, particularly in combination with other levers government has. Perhaps that doctrine should be abolished and the government shouldn't be able to make "voluntary requests" for anything that'd touch on a criminal or civil investigation (so they'd still be able to ask for surveys and the like), but that'd require some careful consideration. Or maybe there are some reasonable limits in terms of data automatically and unavoidably collected (like cellular location) vs data voluntarily shared.
Regardless however, if the government wants to compel somebody to comply, well that's literally what a warrant (or court order) is for right? If the government chooses not to involve a judge in a request for data that'd require a warrant to force, then yeah of course the private party they're asking gets to decide whether to voluntarily go along with that or not. That's the trade.
IMHO the third-party doctrine is an area where legislators ought to be passing laws to broaden constitutional protections, in suitably nuanced way, to keep up with the times. In the modern age, people reveal a great deal of information about themselves to third parties in the course of carrying out mundane tasks.
The idea that fourth amendment protections apply to physical mail, but not to e-mail [1] doesn't really make much sense.
Unfortunately this is the sort of thing change that really needs to come from legislators, and the legislative process isn't very effective at the moment.
[1] except for the 0.1% of people who self-host their own e-mail server in their own home
This is assuming the first pass is before a judge. They're circumventing this by going straight to the companies, as noted by the following blurbs:
> This time, DHS utilized a different method that didn’t require approval from a judge, only a sign-off from a DHS official.
and
> It also instructed the recipients of the summons to keep it secret.
In most cases, a company's legal team will attempt to validate the legality of a request because, if they just acquiesce, it becomes a legal problem for them to turn over data without that validation of legality - which can have financial repercussions.
In those cases, the government most often will not (and cannot) step in to save them from the financial blowback (i.e.: the government got what it wanted; it's not their problem, now).
If they suspect the request isn't legal, they can refuse it, and then it can be escalated to a judge.
Are you suggesting that every request should go through a judge before it gets sent to a company? That would be great, but even then, different judges interpret laws differently, so a company will still do a legal review before deciding whether or not to comply.
I've seen this somewhere before and I can't quite put my finger on where I saw it.
At the end of the day this sort of wastefulness eventually attracts attention.
To cover 70.5 million seniors [1]. $17k per senior.
“Per person personal health care spending for the 65 and older population was $22,356 in 2020, over 5 times higher than spending per child ($4,217) and almost 2.5 times the spending per working-age person ($9,154)” [2].
80 million under 19 [3] at that rate comes to about $400bn. And most efficiency estimates would take at least a third off that when we eliminate redundant billing processes.
Given 6% of children lack health insurance, we could cover them for about $24bn. Less than Trump’s war in Iran has cost [4].
[1] https://data.cms.gov/summary-statistics-on-beneficiary-enrol...
[2] https://www.cms.gov/data-research/statistics-trends-and-repo...
[3] https://www.cms.gov/data-research/statistics-trends-and-repo...
If you have to spy on these particular groups then you know you’re doing something wrong.
There may be other uses for an anonymous US company though.
Do they not get that we live under an authoritarian regime? The regime doesn't care about the law. They have been installing their own people at every level of government for years, taking over parts of the government, and granting themselves new powers. When eventually every powerful person in government is part of the regime, it won't matter what the law says. This isn't hyperbole, this is how they have been operating for 1.5 years.
This is what the beginning looks like. The end looks like Germany 1942.
19 USC 1509 – dealing with customs imports
"In any investigation or inquiry conducted for the purpose of ascertaining the correctness of any entry, for determining the liability of any person for duty, fees and taxes due or duties, fees and taxes which may be due the United States, for determining liability for fines and penalties, or for insuring compliance with the laws of the United States administered by the United States Customs Service, the Secretary (but no delegate of the Secretary below the rank of district director or special agent in charge) may ... summon, upon reasonable notice ... any other person he may deem proper".
And of course, one could argue that it's important to just double check and determine (note it doesn't say suspect, just determine) if someone has entered the country legally, ever, and paid all import taxes, ever. In order to do that, you'd need to see a lot of records. And of course the result can be "nope, they're all good". You don't need to have a good-faith suspicion of these things, just that you have a need to determine these things.
How many laws like this are on the books? In the same way that LLMs are fantastic at finding bugs, what other bugs are in the U.S. Code or similar that LLMs could find? We've been living in a world for a long time where things like this wouldn't be exploited, or maybe even noticed, but now it feels like these vulns are being hoarded and used like software exploits.
“About a month after the judge’s ruling in late February, the government said it was withdrawing the request.
But officials hadn’t given up on getting the data.
Less than a month later, the DHS served Google with a different request for the YouTube information. This time, DHS utilized a different method that didn’t require approval from a judge, only a sign-off from a DHS official. It served Google an administrative summons citing an arcane provision of federal law – 19 USC 1509 – dealing with customs imports. The provision gives the DHS broad power to inspect records in order to determine whether duties and taxes are being correctly levied on imported items. It also instructed the recipients of the summons to keep it secret.”
With a gag order as a bonus! No judge required!
Granted someone does have to actually file a suit
FTFY
One has to wonder whether all Trump voters wanted this. I don't think so.
They voted for it. The GOP quite clearly spelled out the authoritarian desire well before the election.
They don't enjoy being kicked in the head, they agree that part is bad, but they experience joy knowing that people they don't like got kicked in the head.
A difficulty is coming up with a way to ensure your wealthiest donors don't get kicked in the head, they annoyingly may not accept that it's a fair price unlike voters - but you can often fiddle around this, we'll find a way. If that donor doesn't even live in the area affected by the policy, for example because he's a War Criminal who lives in a different country entirely, that's not a problem...
The incident in question involved Lemon and Fort participating in a anti-ICE protest that involved disrupting a church service, and then after getting arrested for disrupting the church service claiming that they were just journalists reporting on the protest and therefore their arrest was immoral and illegal.
I do actually think that pro-immigration-enforcement people want anti-immigration-enforcement people who participate in disruptive protests over the issue to get punished by the criminal justice system for this, in order to dissuade them from disrupting other people's private events; and further that they do not want "being a journalist" to be a mitigating factor for this kind of disruption. If you want the criminal justice system to treat disrupting other people's private events as a crime, even if they claim it's for a protest and that their status as journalists makes this ok, then you do in fact want the criminal justice system to investigate people who commit those acts of disruption.
The 4th amendment does not require a judge in the loop to decide if a search is unreasonable. This type of thinking leads to adding bureaucracy making law enforcement less efficient. Criminals benefit from having law enforcement's throughput minimized so they will campaign at every turn to make the government less and less efficient and require more and more procedures for an investigation so it all comes to a halt that way as long as they aren't most wanted 1-10 for a year they can get away with what they are doing.
It's dicey to say that because warrants are needed in the majority of places to search and individual.
By increasing efficiency and decreasing cost it allows for both higher quality, consistent, and wide spread law enforcement. I believe every part of the law enforcement and legal system needs to be systematically reevaluated finding ways to increase efficiency.
That is truly bananas. Whose AI? Trained on what data? We've had numerous studies show how AIs can be biased, and a police dept. is going to choose whatever AI "works best for them" — i.e., keeps most out of their way.
You can see Flock for examples here: despite requiring justification for searches, cops are entering things like "hehehe"[1]; the AI would similarly be given bad or falsified inputs.
> If there is an actual constitutional violation that that happens it can be resolved after the fact.
The entire point of the Constitution is to prevent exactly that. There is no resolution for violating someone's rights; you cannot merely go back in time and unviolate them. The point is to be free from unreasonable searches & seizures.
Your comments read like police have no ability to search without a warrant, which isn't true. If circumstances warrant it, a warrant from a judge is not required, and I'm sure a good number of people would argue that that's already true more often than it ought to be.
Part of the point of having a separate branch of government involved, too, is to prevent the first branch from just deciding "why, of course I'm right. What else would I be?", and to evaluate the facts separately (which the police cannot by definition do).
> I believe every part of the law enforcement and legal system needs to be systematically reevaluated finding ways to increase efficiency.
I'm all for increased efficiency, but AI is not that. "Slop, faster" is not the same "the correct action, while respecting the rights of the citizens, faster".
[1]: https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/tracking-alpr-c...
>We've had numerous studies show how AIs can be biased, and a police dept. is going to choose whatever AI "works best for them"
Violating the constitution means that evidence gets thrown out in court and the victims get financially rewarded. It is not in the police's interest to violate people's rights.
>the AI would similarly be given bad or falsified inputs.
And then those cops should be severely punished for intentionally violating people's constitutional rights.
>There is no resolution for violating someone's rights
There is already resolution for having your constitutional rights violated. You sue for damages and to have them stop violating your rights.
>no ability to search without a warrant, which isn't true. If circumstances warrant it
There are other situations where it doesn't warrant it which is what we are talking about here. Refer to TFA.
>Part of the point of having a separate branch of government involved, too
And I'm pointing out that this involvement is not needed by the constitution. Branches of government is an arbitrary degree of separation.
Victims get financially rewarded by the state and the officers involved receive no kind of punishment at all. It's not hard to see why incentives lead to this already being widespread, and that's just what we know about when it gets thrown out or overturned. There's a whole shady practice of parallel construction going on.