When I mentioned above that Pam Bondi and the Trumpenreich wanted to turn the entire US counterterrorism apparatus on anyone who criticized the regime's fascist agenda on social media, I was not exaggerating in the slightest. Over the past week, evidence has emerged that the Department of Homeland Security has been using bullshit administrative orders to subpoena posts and identifying personal information about critics of the ICE Gestapo online.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/dhs-orders-tech-giants-to-unmask-anti-ice-accounts/ (archive: https://archive.ph/QW78b )
DHS Orders Tech Giants to Unmask Anti-ICE Accounts
"The agency has fired off hundreds of subpoenas demanding names, email addresses, and phone numbers tied to anti-ICE social media accounts, the New York Times reported Friday.
Unlike traditional warrants, administrative subpoenas do not require approval from a judge before they are issued. Instead of seeking court authorization first, DHS can sign and send the demands directly to tech companies—a power civil liberties advocates say is now being deployed far more aggressively.
Google, Meta, Reddit, and Discord received subpoenas targeting anonymous accounts that posted about ICE activity, the Times reported."
If you've been reading my writing about the fascist Trumpenreich's ethnic cleansing project, you will by now be quite familiar with the regime's use of administrative orders, issued by fake "judges" who actually work for DHS directly and are subject to virtually no relevant oversight; especially from a Trump mass deportation machine that purposely purged (and didn't replace) most of its oversight employees almost immediately after the Swine Emperor returned to office. These orders are literally DHS, saying they authorize DHS, to violate the US constitution, because DHS says so. Furthermore, if you've been reading the NSPM-7 stories in this thread, you will also be familiar with the rampant use of right wing "newspeak" to describe Americans exercising their legally protected civil rights.
"In court filings, department lawyers have argued that the subpoenas are intended to help “investigate threats to its own officers or impediments to their officers,” and to keep ICE agents safe in the field."
Again, please keep in mind that these are lawyers working for a Trumpenreich administration that calls protest an insurrection, filming ICE officers doxing, and both of those things fucking terrorism; often in official (and actionable) government documents and memos. By "impediments" they mean "telling your neighbors not to go outside because ICE is in the area disappearing brown people" and by "threats" they mean accurately calling ICE Gestapo goons nazi slavecatchers on social media.
As ridiculous as that is, this Daily Beast article is *still* doing nasty work to cover up Big Tech's collaboration with a fascist regime targeting the protected speech of Americans. As this Boing Boing post about how this played out for one user makes clear, big tech companies like Meta are only making the barest pretense of protecting users constitutional rights, and practically speaking they are simply turning your data over when DHS says they want it.
"A neighborhood Facebook page called Montco Community Watch had been doing what neighborhood pages do — posting tips about ICE sightings near specific streets and landmarks in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, in English and Spanish, for its roughly 10,000 followers. In September, DHS served Meta with an administrative subpoena for the names, email addresses, and postal codes of whoever ran it. Meta notified the account owners on October 3 with a form letter: "If we do not receive a copy of documentation that you have filed in court challenging this legal process within ten (10) days, we will respond to the requesting agency with information."
That's the deal DHS is now offering Americans who post about immigration enforcement: find a lawyer and get to federal court in 10 days, or your social media platform will identify you to the government. The New York Times reports that DHS has sent hundreds of these administrative subpoenas to Google, Meta, Reddit, and Discord in recent months, targeting accounts that criticize ICE or note where its agents are operating. Google, Meta, and Reddit have all turned over at least some user data."
Naturally, many will dismiss these stories; either because thus far the regime is only wants to identify social media users, or because in their mind this story is "only" about immigration. The reality however is these quasi-legal maneuverings to expose Gestapo critics are of a piece with Stephen Miller's ravings about criminalizing the left, and the regime's attempts to make antifascism the same as terrorism, legally speaking. In other words: all of this is NSPM-7. Which means the Trumpenreich Gestapo police state isn't "coming" for us all anymore; it's already here.
#Fascism #ICE #Gestapo #PoliceState #Trump #DHS #Dictatorship #MassSurveillance #SocialMedia #BigTech