It’s unclear how many people have been targeted as part of these efforts. In February, The New York Times reported that Google, Reddit, Discord, and Meta had received hundreds of administrative subpoenas during the previous six months. In March, a group of US congressmembers asked tech leaders for data on how many requests their companies have received and how they’ve handled them, but it’s unclear whether they received a response. In April, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital-rights nonprofit, sued DHS and Immigration and Customs Enforcement in an effort to obtain records about how many subpoenas the agencies have sent.
Both tech companies and civil liberties advocates have been concerned about DHS’s use of administrative subpoenas for years. WIRED previously found that agents issued customs summons, including ones for legitimate investigations into customs issues, more than 170,000 times between 2016 and mid-August 2022. The most common recipients of those requests included big tech firms and telecommunications companies.
In 2017, Twitter, which is now X, filed a lawsuit against DHS over what it alleged was an illegal customs summons that demanded information about who was behind an anonymous account that was critical of the first Trump administration’s immigration policies. DHS later withdrew its request, and the social media platform dropped its lawsuit in response, meaning a judge was never able to rule on whether the practice was actually illegal.
That incident triggered an investigation by the DHS Office of the Inspector General, which found that the group within DHS that had issued the request, the US Customs and Border Protection’s Office of Professional Responsibility, violated its own policies in about one out of every five summonses that the OIG reviewed.
“The saddest thing for me about all of this, as a career national security law enforcement attorney, is that if you abuse your authority like this, it undermines all the legitimate stuff you do,” says Duncan.
“There was a long time where the United States government advised other countries on how to protect people within their territory from foreign oppression,” Perloff says. “And it is appalling to realize that now other countries may have to do that about us.”
This story originally appeared on wired.com.
