GOOGLE FULFILLED AN Immigration and Customs Enforcement subpoena that demanded a wide array of personal data on a student activist and journalist, including his credit card and bank account numbers, according to a copy of an ICE subpoena obtained by The Intercept.

Amandla Thomas-Johnson had attended a protest targeting companies that supplied weapons to Israel at a Cornell University job fair in 2024 for all of five minutes, but the action got him banned from campus. When President Donald Trump assumed office and issued a series of executive orders targeting students who protested in support of Palestinians, Thomas-Johnson and his friend Momodou Taal went into hiding.

Google informed Thomas-Johnson via a brief email in April that it had already shared his metadata with the Department of Homeland Security, as The Intercept previously reported. But the full extent of the information the agency sought — including usernames, addresses, itemized list of services, including any IP masking services, telephone or instrument numbers, subscriber numbers or identities, and credit card and bank account numbers — was not previously known.

“I’d already seen the subpoena request that Google and Meta had sent to Momodou [Taal], and I knew that he had gotten in touch with a lawyer and the lawyer successfully challenged that,” Thomas-Johnson said. “I was quite surprised to see that I didn’t have that opportunity.”

  • village604@adultswim.fan
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    3 hours ago

    A subpoena is a legal, written order to compel an individual to give testimony on a particular subject at a specific time and place, or to provide documents or other tangible objects.

    Subpoenas are court orders.

    • njm1314@lemmy.world
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      2 hours ago

      You’re missing his point and I think probably on purpose. A court of law did not issue this. It was administratively issued by ICE. A bureaucrat wrote it. Not judge of the Judiciary branch.