DHS violates 1930s customs laws to get Canadian data from Google

It is unclear how many people are being targeted as part of these efforts. In February, The New York Times report that Google, Reddit, Discord, and Meta have received hundreds of administrative subpoenas in the past six months. In March, a group of US congressmembers he asked technology leaders to know how many requests their companies have received and how they have responded, but it is unclear whether they have been responded to. In April, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights nonprofit, the defendant DHS and Immigration and Customs Enforcement are seeking records of the number of subpoenas that agencies have issued.

Both the tech industry and civil rights advocates have been concerned about DHS’s use of executive subpoenas for years. THE WIRE he already found that agents issued customs subpoenas, including legal investigations on customs matters, more than 170,000 times between 2016 and mid-August 2022. The majority of the recipients of these requests were large technology companies and telecommunications companies.

In 2017, Twitter, now X, wrote a a case against DHS for what it says are illegal subpoenas demanding to know who was behind an anonymous account that criticized the Trump administration’s first administration policy. DHS later dropped its request, and the social network dropped its lawsuit in response, meaning a judge could not rule on whether the practice was illegal.

The incident caused it search and the DHS Office of Inspector General, which found that the unit within DHS that issued the request, the US Customs and Border Protection Office of Professional Responsibility, violated its rules in nearly one out of every five subpoenas the OIG reviewed.

“The saddest thing for me about all of this, as a national security attorney, is that if you abuse your authority like this, it undermines everything you do,” Duncan says.

“There was a long time when the United States government advised other countries how to protect their own people from being oppressed by other countries,” says Perloff. “And it’s scary to realize that other countries have to do this about us.”

This article appeared first wired.com.