Trump seeks even more private data

[marmar]

Trump’s immigration crackdown feeds on private data. It’s just getting started
Private data might include anything from school enrollment information to physical locations and residenial address

By Nicholas Liu
Reporter
Published March 12, 2026 6:30AM (EDT)


(Salon) In October 2025, a 67-year-old retiree from Philadelphia sent an email to the Department of Homeland Security pleading for basic decency in how they carried out a high-profile asylum case. Within five hours, Google informed him, via email, that DHS had issued a subpoena for the company to turn over personal information connected to his accounts. Not long afterward, federal agents appeared on his doorstep to question him in person. Neither judge nor grand jury ruled that a crime may have been committed; the government simply issued a unilateral administrative subpoena to Google to unmask the critic’s identity.

In order to accelerate their mass arrest and deportation mandates, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Border Patrol, and other government agencies have supported their on-the-ground operations — raids, prisons and counter-protest measures — with warrantless subpoenas, the exploitation of a largely unregulated commercial data broker industry, and an aggressive dismantling of federal privacy firewalls, all designed to track down immigrants and citizen critics who defend them on social media. The federal government may rely on what large technology companies and financial institutions have already hoarded, a faster approach than building a sprawling data mining network on their own, but one still limited by the discrepancy between state capacity and the volume of their ambitions — for now.

Over the last several weeks, investigative reports confirmed that DHS has been issuing hundreds of subpoenas per month to companies like Google, Meta and Reddit, and that those companies have complied with at least some of those requests for information. According to the reports and people who spoke to Salon for this article, the Trump administration has devoted particular effort in tracking down accounts that monitor ICE raids or are otherwise critical of the agency, as well as thousands of immigrants whom the administration might want to build a case for arresting and deporting, regardless of legal status.

....(snip)....

Nevertheless, critics have said that tech companies — operating under the pressure of tight federal deadlines and an apparent keenness to curry favor with the Trump administration in return for regulatory benefits — should not even let the process get so far by offering little resistance against potentially thousands of legally flimsy subpoenas. According to Meta, the company produced full or partial data for just over 88 percent of more than 81,000 government data requests issued from January to June 2025. ......................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2026/03/12/trumps-immigration-crackdown-feeds-on-private-data-its-just-getting-started/

[GreenWave]

1. Fuck him with a prickly pear. He starts wars to hide his private crimes.