DHS Demanded Google Surrender Data on Canadian's Activity, Location Over Anti-ICE Posts

Source: Wired

The Department of Homeland Security tried to obtain a Canadian man’s location information, activity logs, and other identifying information from Google after he criticized the Trump administration online following the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis early this year.

Lawyers for the man, who has not been named, are alarmed in part because they say that the man has not entered the United States in more than a decade. “I don’t know what the government knows about our client’s residence, but it’s clear that the government isn’t stopping to find out,” says Michael Perloff, a senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of the District of Columbia who is representing the man in a lawsuit against Markwayne Mullin, the secretary of DHS, over the summons. The lawsuit alleges that DHS violated the customs law that gives the agency the power to request records from businesses and other parties.

Perloff argues that the government is using the fact that big tech companies are based in the US to request information it would not otherwise be able to get. “It’s using that geographic fact to get information that otherwise would be totally outside of its jurisdiction,” he says. “I mean, we’re talking about the physical movements of a person who lives in Canada.”

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The demand for the man’s location data was included in a request DHS issued to Google called a customs summons, which is supposed to be used to investigate issues related to importing goods and collecting customs duties.

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Read more: https://www.wired.com/story/dhs-demanded-google-surrender-data-on-canadians-activity-location-over-anti-ice-posts/

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Much more at the link. DHS has been doing this a lot to unmask critics.

And Trump's first administration did this, too. But then there was an effective inspector general who looked at what was going on after pre-Musk Twitter sued in 2017 because of what DHS was doing. The Office of the Inspector General found that even then, about 1 out of every 5 summonses issued by the DHS violated its own policies. It's probably much worse now.