According to The New York Times, DHS has sent hundreds of administrative subpoenas to Google, Reddit, Discord and Meta over the past few months.

DHS asked for their names and other identifying details from tech companies, according to The New York Times.

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has reportedly been asking tech companies for information on accounts posting anti-ICE sentiments. According to The New York Times, DHS has sent hundreds of administrative subpoenas to Google, Reddit, Discord and Meta over the past few months.

Homeland Security asked the companies for names, email addresses, telephone numbers and any other identifying detail for accounts that have criticized the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency or have reported the location of its agents.

Google, Meta and Reddit have complied with some of the requests

  • IcePee@lemmy.beru.co
    14·
    11 hours ago

    While we may feel smug in our federated social media, I wonder how far those protections even go. I guess it really depends where our instance is, and who they host with.

    • VitoRobles@lemmy.todayEnglish
      10·
      11 hours ago

      I contribute to open source by helping to write documentation. I’m not a coder. I work in marketing and data science.

      I have seen open-source people fold for little reasons. Like a small sum of money, to false promises, to minor threats like legalese BS or threatening takedown. I heard of one project that took down everything the moment a small business sent them an email warning about trademark infringement. They didn’t even contest it - they just disappeared to avoid even a bit of a lawsuit.

      If you follow local news in the US, there have been a lot of politicians (mostly democratic ones) who have sued because of harassment campaigns and even death threats to their family and friends.

      My take is that most people who volunteer aren’t going to risk their livelihood. Nor should we expect them to.

      The best they can do is build enough layers of obscurity, trust that their providers will also protect their identity, and keep themselves safe.

      • orclev@lemmy.world
        3·
        7 hours ago

        In a truly healthy open source project there are many maintainers from a diverse set of countries such that no one person can stop the project, at best they could stop one fork, but others would still exist. Unfortunately far far too many projects have a single maintainer. The open source world has a severe problem with an unacceptable bus factor on many foundational projects. It’s hard enough finding one person to maintain some of these things, finding more is a significant problem.