Mike Masnick writes:

For the last five years, we had to endure an endless, breathless parade of hyperbole regarding the so-called “censorship industrial complex.” We were told, repeatedly and at high volume, that the Biden administration flagging content for review by social media companies constituted a tyrannical overthrow of the First Amendment.

In the Missouri v. Biden (later Murthy v. Missouri) case, Judge Terry Doughty—in a ruling that seemed to consist entirely of Twitter threads pasted into a judicial ruling—declared that the White House sending angry emails to Facebook “arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.”

Never mind that the Supreme Court later reviewed the evidence and found that the platforms frequently ignored those emails, showing a lack of coercion, leading them to reverse the lower courts for lack of standing. To the “Twitter Files” crowd and the self-anointed “free speech absolutists,” the mere existence of government officials simply requesting private companies to look at terms of service violations was a sign of the end of the Republic.

So, surely, now that the Department of Homeland Security is issuing administrative subpoenas—legal demands that bypass judges entirely—to unmask the identities of anonymous political critics, these same warriors are storming the barricades, right?

Right? Riiiiight?

According to a disturbing new report from the New York Times, DHS is aggressively expanding its use of administrative subpoenas to demand the names, addresses, and phone numbers of social media users who simply criticize Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

In recent months, Google, Reddit, Discord and Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram, have received hundreds of administrative subpoenas from the Department of Homeland Security, according to four government officials and tech employees privy to the requests. They spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.

Google, Meta and Reddit complied with some of the requests, the government officials said. In the subpoenas, the department asked the companies for identifying details of accounts that do not have a real person’s name attached and that have criticized ICE or pointed to the locations of ICE agents. The New York Times saw two subpoenas that were sent to Meta over the last six months.

This is not a White House staffer emailing a company to say, “Hey, this post seems to violate your COVID misinformation policy, can you check it?” This is the federal government using the force of law—specifically a tool designed to bypass judicial review—to strip the anonymity from domestic political critics.

If Judge Doughty thought ignored emails were the “most massive attack on free speech in history,” I am curious what he would call the weaponization of the surveillance state to dox critics of law enforcement. Or… would he think it’s fine, because it’s coming from his team? [Continue reading…]