Google broke its promise to me – now ICE has my data | Hacker News Reader

Google broke its promise to me – now ICE has my data

eff.org

1,711 pointsBrajeshwar765 comments

The First Amendment applies to everyone on US soil, not just citizens. That’s settled law. The government can revoke visas for legitimate immigration violations, but it’s not allowed to use immigration machinery as a pretext to punish political expression. That’s exactly what they are doing. It looks like the courts will eventually put an end to this [0] but it won’t reverse the damage that’s already been done.

I’m generally receptive to point the finger at Google’s intentions but in their defense, administrative subpoenas frequently include non disclosure orders. Google’s own transparency policies have always carved out (industry standard) exceptions for cases where they’re legally prohibited from notifying.

[0] https://evrimagaci.org/gpt/judge-rebukes-trump-over-student-...

> administrative subpoenas frequently include non disclosure orders

Which Google definitely knows are not enforceable.

When you're a huge company trying to do business in the US (or any country, for that matter) you have to think very, very carefully before you make an enemy of the government. Google could refuse to go along with this stuff and find itself the subject of a big, expensive anti-trust probe.

Or more simply, a target of a temper tantrum that suddenly declares them a national risk and orders everyone in the government to stop doing business with them.

Or a tax action where the government sues them for for billions by ruling assumptions Google made are incorrect.

That's my point, though. The levers the government has to move businesses are endless.

Not just temper tantrums. This has been happening since the patriot act. Even during Obama’s term where there were obviously no temper tantrums - telco’s were strong armed into sharing call data with the government.

So while the current presidents language is more colorful and entertaining the policy is at least a couple of decades old.

I think it could easily be argued that the reverse is true. Even Donald Trump would think twice about taking on Google. He might bluster about them on Truth Social, sure, but America is a corporatocracy and I'd put my money on Google.

Yes, I know there are examples where he is trying to screw with big corps like Anthropic. But Anthropic is not Google.

I don't think that's true at all. Google would lose billions going head-to-head with Trump and he knows it.

Technically incorrect, Supreme Court precedent has held that aliens are entitled to lesser First Amendment protections while seeking to enter the United States. You could be on US Soil (i.e. entering customs at an airport) and those protections don't apply.

The person in question said he was in Geneva when he received the email from Google. Therefore is a non-US citizen residing outside the country entitled to 1A protections for something they said or did while in the US? I'm not expressing an opinion but I wouldn't take that statement as legal advice.

Yes, someone in customs at an airport can be treated as functionally “at the border” with reduced protections.

But you are conflating seeking entry with being present inside the country. That’s the legal line, and the Supreme Court has stated it clearly. “once an alien enters the country, the legal circumstance changes, for the Due Process Clause applies to all ‘persons’ within the United States, including aliens, whether their presence here is lawful, unlawful, temporary, or permanent.” [0]

As for the First Amendment specifically the Supreme court has reversed the deportation order of an Australian labor activist due to alleged Communist Party affiliation, concluding that “freedom of speech and of the press is accorded aliens residing in this country” [1]

The Geneva detail doesn’t apply. He was on US soil as a lawful visa holder when he attended the protest. It’s a question of where he was when the government action targeted his protected expression not where he was when Google emailed him.

His departure doesn’t retroactively strip the constitutional protections that applied when the conduct occurred.

[0] https://law.onecle.com/ussc/533/533us693.html

[1] Bridges v. Wixon https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/aliens/

> Yes, someone in customs at an airport can be treated as functionally “at the border” with reduced protections. But you are conflating seeking entry with being present inside the country. That’s the legal line, and the Supreme Court has stated it clearly.

At least in terms of being "at the border", United States v. Martinez-Fuerte would appear to disagree.

That legal line you mention is both figuratively and literally not at the border; protections are weakened up to 100 miles away.

Most people in the USA live within 100 miles of the border. That 100 miles limit was chosen for a purpose, to weaken protections for most US citizens.

the 100 mile limit was chosen because its ~2 hour drive at 60mph, assuming some stop lights and on-ramps.

someone jumps the fence or is smuggled in via truck, etc., then CBP has maybe a couple hours to track them.

So glibly handing over your rights, and even going out of your way to defend it.

It’s a little more annoying coming from the country that goes on and on about its freedom.

this is a bot

If only the US would follow its laws or constitution

If only the US would follow its laws or constitution

It's not specific to US, those aren't enforced in most EU countries (eg. it's quite obvious in France).

To condone what happens to him, you must first condone that your government lists and identifies people attending opponent meetings.

Whether the government waits for him to leave the country to violate his rights feels like a small detail in this issue.

Also, if you intend to claim that us foreigners are free targets for any abhorent behaviour of your government, maybe you should rename your bill of rights a bill of privileges.

Whoa! I’d slow down with the hypotheses, considering we have one side of the story.

What we do know is that the US, like all other countries, has wide legal latitude on not allowing foreigners into the country. You can be denied entry for no more than a Facebook like of the wrong post.

The EFF letter tends to line up with this guy’s story, though.

Also, since google complied without giving him the ability to challenge the request, we will never have another version. In that context, it feels fair to accept the only version we have.

The events he was likely targeted for happened on a campus in the US.

The policy of applying US immigration enforcement actions against legal visa holders who have attended specific legal (US based) protests has been publicly reported and confirmed by many government officials and is unrelated to anyone trying to enter the country.

Senior ICE officials have testified under oath in federal court that analysts were moved from counterterrorism, global trade, and cybercrime work to this group focused specifically on writing reports about people involved in student protests.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/09/politics/ice-homeland-securit...

https://time.com/7272060/international-students-targeted-tru...

https://www.wbur.org/news/2025/07/10/ice-lawsuit-deportation...

Yes? Why would a government allow people who aren't citizens to come in and protest on its soil about its actions? I think that's the definition of forgein interference.

> Yes? Why would a government allow people who aren't citizens to come in and protest on its soil about its actions?

Because the definition of what a "protest" is is very arbitrary and can be defined to suit your political agenda.

In the US, the bill of rights and specifically the first amendment unambiguously applies to anyone who is lawfully present in the country, citizen or not.

Yes, and this person had left the US, needed permission to reenter, and thus the Secretary of State had the power to deny entry because it "wasn't in the interest of the country".

A parent post said:

> The policy of applying US immigration enforcement actions against legal visa holders who have attended specific legal (US based) protests has been publicly reported and confirmed by many government officials and is unrelated to anyone trying to enter the country.

So in this context, the GP asked “Why would a government allow people who aren't citizens to come in and protest on its soil about its actions?” and that was the question I’m answering. The answer is: because preventing someone who is already in the country lawfully from protesting violates the constitution.

? hypotheses?

The previous comment makes it clear that this situation cannot be operationalized without having lists of people who attended events.

Now sure how you comment a continuation of the conversation?

Very big of you to hold off on judgement until judgement is irrelevant and you have the benefit of 20/20 hindsight.

It has nothing to do with condoning. It has everything to do with stating what the law is And what is or is what is not required to comply. And what is and what is not permitted under the Constitution. Whether you like it or not has nothing to do with anything.

'Technically incorrect' on a matter of U.S. constitutionality, says the poster talking about capital-'s' soil. Right.

> ... it’s not allowed to use immigration machinery as a pretext to punish political expression. That’s exactly what they are doing.

I agree: this is exactly what the administration is doing.

> I’m generally receptive to point the finger at Google’s intentions but in their defense, administrative subpoenas frequently include non disclosure orders.

Except immigration aren't allowed to put gag orders on administrative subpoenas [1]:

> First, any gag order in these subpoenas has no legal effect; you are free to publicize them and inform the target of the subpoena.

and

> The agency’s administrative subpoena power is limited, but ICE often uses the subpoenas to obtain more assistance than is legally required

This is the key problem. Companies like Google aren't making government agencies go to court to get a subpoena, they're not resisting that subpoena, they're not informing targets when they're legally allowed to and they're giving agencies more assistance than is legally required.

I don't think it's asking a lot to expect any platform to only provide the minimum legally required cooperation.

[1]: https://www.acluofnorthcarolina.org/app/uploads/drupal/sites...

> as a pretext to punish political expression

I sincerely don't understand why deportation is called a punishment in this discussion.

As in any country in the world, US immigration law operates on the principle that a foreigner is granted a PRIVILEGE to be in the US. Or this privilege is denied with no reason whatsoever. Just because it is a PRIVILEGE.

When someone is deported for participating in protests, they are still literally in a better position than the BILLIONS of people who want to be in the US but who are denied this privilege without any justification.

Why do we think this man was punished by the United States, at the same time thing that the BILLIONS of people the US arbitrarily bans from being in its territory were not punished? Compared to those billions, he rather have been granted the privilege of being on US territory (for a while).

Even assuming your incorrect framing of immigration as a privilege (You may as well say parents give their kids the privilege of going to play with their friends so grounding is not a punishment) consider the following.

It would be a privilege for me to give you a parachute for free. If you jump out of a plane with that privileged parachute, then it turns out to be a backpack with a sheet in it, what are your thoughts? Now you may not necessarily feel the word punishment fits in me giving you a backpack instead of a parachute, but you do see that I'd be the one in the wrong in that situation and that you are considerably worse off than before? I could wax lyrical about how thousands of people are in the air above the ground every day while jumping about, it doesn't change the fact that your position 3000ft in the air is a lot worse than those 2ft of the ground if you don't have the privilege of a free parachute you thought you had.

> I don't think it's asking a lot to expect any platform to only provide the minimum legally required cooperation.

It is asking a lot. They can do minimum legally required things for environment, users, communities, charities and so on. This would be considered very hostile behavior. And companies don't do that.

So why would they be doing minimum required cooperation with government just because some people do not like government or its actions.

Here’s a video of what this guy was involved in (to my best knowledge):

https://statements.cornell.edu/2024/20241019-career-fair-dis...

I’m a First Amendment absolutist and AFAIK foreign students can protest, but this video shows to me it probably crosses the line into something else. Exactly what, I have no opinion.

Yeah, masks and intentionally antagonizing police doesn't scream peaceful protest

It sounds like you're trying to shift the legal goalposts of "peaceful" into something more like "inoffensive" or "respectful" or "polite".

For example, you have a First Amendment right to "peacefully" hurl the most awful insults you can think of at a police officer.

If that police officer feels "antagonized"--or even if your goal was to hurt their feelings--that does not permit them to abuse the special power of their workplace to attack you. If they try anyway, now that's a real crime.

P.S.: Supposing you went beyond rude, like violating a noise-ordinance with a megaphone, or "littering" with pamphlets, or trespassing to chain yourself to a tree... The First Amendment bars authorities from going: "Ah hah! Now I can sneak in some punches for that shit you said earlier!"

No, that's simply not allowed to be part of it. There is no crime where "saying stuff that pissed the policeman off" is an enhancing factor. It's difficult, but that's why we pay them the big bucks for a job that's safer than landscaping or bartending or delivering food.

In practice this abuse of authority occurs because we live in an imperfect world... But it's still evil, and we shouldn't accept it or endorse it.

While the rest of your comment is sound, the police do not make "big bucks" by any stretch of the imagination and there's a serious citation needed for the job being less dangerous than the ones you listed. I am pretty sure I have never read multiple news articles like "landscaper shot while sitting in vehicle filling paperwork" or "armed man commits suicide by bartender".

I have numerous friends and acquaintances in this career field. Policing is a dangerous job, just not for everyone all the time on the whole. The barrier to entry is low and highly competitive but the selection process is a suboptimal filter. The pay isn't great compared to so many other things, but it's similar to the military in that qualified people show up and get trained to do the job which leads to an entire career, just without all the big downsides of military life. All these things combined is why bad apples can get into positions of authority and commit abuses.

>Policing is a dangerous job, just not for everyone all the time on the whole

Actually, it doesn't even make the top 25[0]. So no, not really all that dangerous. Being around police, especially with a high melanin content is definitely more dangerous than being police.

To channel George Carlin: "It's not that I don't like the police, I just feel better when they're not around."

[0] https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/2023/03/02/most-dangero...

Policing is not a particularly dangerous job, police are people with fragile egos.

Cops are violent towards their intimate partners at a rate many many many times typical. Something like 25-40% of cops are abusers.

Sources: Johnson, L.B. (1991). On the front lines: Police stress and family well-being. Hearing before the Select Committee on Children, Youth, and Families House of Representatives: 102 Congress First Session May 20 (p. 32-48). Washington DC: US Government Printing Office.

Neidig, P.H., Russell, H.E. & Seng, A.F. (1992). Interspousal aggression in law enforcement families: A preliminary investigation. Police Studies, Vol. 15 (1), p. 30-38.

Feltgen, J. (October, 1996). Domestic violence: When the abuser is a police officer. The Police Chief, p. 42-49.

Lott, L.D. (November, 1995). Deadly secrets: Violence in the police family. FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin, p. 12-16.

Oehme, K., et al. (2011). Protecting Lives, Careers, and Public Confidence: Florida's efforts to prevent officer-involved domestic violence. Family Court Review 84, 85.

The irony is rich - since we are in a topic that discusses the governments actions against people who showed up at protests.

That’s peaceful. What do you expect, politeness?

> Yeah, masks and intentionally antagonizing police doesn't scream peaceful protest

They wear masks in case their political opponents take exception to their actions and hunt them down later and hurt their families.

(This seems like an extremely dubious justification to me, but I've been told on HN that this is the reason that ICE wear masks, so why wouldn't it apply here...?)

They wear masks to make it more difficult to arrest them (something which doesn't really apply to ICE).

The video shows them get past security / push past security, then protest / disrupt the career fair.

Your framing had me expecting a degree of mayhem and violence that was absent here.

The police would've been justified in arresting everyone present the second they broke through the door with the explicit intent of disrupting the career fair. This is exactly the kind of mayhem and violence that the police exist in order to deter; if the police were unwilling or unable to arrest the protesters, the event organizers should have done so.

They pushed past the police cordon, nothing was broken physically / no property damage was caused.

The link itself describes it as a disruption of the career fair.

If this person was on a visa, this is enough of an excuse to start looking at the fine print to see how I can get this person's visa revoked.

But that is not what is happening, and they have stated that they were at the event for a short period of time, quite possibly at the portion that didn’t occur inside the event.

The willingness to assume one version of events, and then go down that path to award consequences, is premature.

Yeah! Just like at the United States Capitol.

Okay, but is being present at a protest where others push through a barrier enough for the first amendment to no longer apply or do we know he was one of the people doing the barrier breaking? The original post implies he bailed out after only 5 minutes - quite possibly because he wasn't on board with the (relatively mild) escalation. At this point, we don't know. But if he did cross that line, he should be criminally prosecuted like the students with American citizenship (if they even are...) and not presumed guilty being punished via the immigration system without any kind of trial.

Can we charge all Jan 6ers with the murder or manslaughter of the congressional security police officers?

There's the case of the getaway driver in a bank robbery that resulted in murder also getting murder, and that is basically what the two poster up is advocating for.

Does the government need a reason to revoke a persons visa? First amendment or not, that is the real question. If no reason is needed then whether the first amendment applies or not is moot.

There seems to be broad discretion that the government has in revoking visas.

Think like this: in the US you can fire someone for almost any reason, except if it's one of certain forbidden reasons.

Similarly, the US government can revoke someone's visa, but they can't revoke someone's visa because of speech protected by the first amendment.

This makes sense but then the outcome of this is all theatrical. What will happen in future is that people have their visas revoked without any comments or reason given. There is no legal requirement to list a reason. It will end up the same as employment law, where people can discriminate and break the law as long as they don't tell the applicant they are doing so.

Yes, of course this won't have any practical effect, unless people are writing everything down, which I, however, think they often are.

No the government can't just revoke a visa because Trump doesn't like your face, the reasons must be based in law and there is the pesky thing called due process that needs to be followed. I am honestly flabbergasted that people think the government can just do willy billy.

Yes, a visa can be revoked just that easily.

It's a guest pass.

When getting a visa you're basically asked to agree to America's terms of service. Violations can be found pretty easily in the fine print if someone is really looking.

From there it's the same administrative work to revoke and deport as it is to say ban someone from Twitch for saying the wrong thing.

They can revoke your visa for supporting terrorist organizations. And they make the list of terrorist organizations, so...

And you have a problem with that? Why?

Because adding an organization to that list is (effectively) entirely at the whim of the current administration. They could add your Scrabble club if they wanted to.

There is no such thing as "settled law" in the US. The Supreme Court can always throw away precedent at any time they choose.

"Settled law" isn't a matter of opinion and it doesn't mean it can't be reversed or overturned. It means the potential legal ambiguity at question has been adjudicated by the Supreme Court (or lower courts without higher court intervention), and that ruling is the operative interpretation that governs how every court below applies the law.

> The government can revoke visas for legitimate immigration violations, but it’s not allowed to use immigration machinery as a pretext to punish political expression.

What is the punishment though? According to the article (written by the same person whose data was subpoenaed) they are still around, alive, safe and sound in geneva, not even formally accused of anything.

So far there is only evidence of an investigation.

And pro-pal movements arr usually pro-terrorism, so it make sense to investigate.

Does this administration care to much about the law? A judge can rule something but they mostly keep doing the same thing.

Not to mention the supreme court that is willing to let this happen.

> Does this administration care to much about the law?

As a European my opinion of Trump could not be any lower, but it is my understanding that they have complied with all court orders to date (with some being contested all the way to the Supreme Court). They are certainly testing the authority limits of various courts and congressional processes, but they have complied with all legal processes to date.

Notable exception: the TikTok ban.

There’s discussions in a (thankfully banned) sub thread pulling this into question so I just wanted to add sources:

> The short-form video-hosting service TikTok was under a de jure nationwide ban in the United States from January 19, 2025, until January 22, 2026, due to the US government's concerns over potential user data collection and influence operations by the government of the People's Republic of China. However, the ban was not enforced. The ban took effect after ByteDance, the China-based parent company of TikTok, refused to sell the service before the deadline of the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act (PAFACA). Prior to the ban, individual states, cities, universities, and government-affiliated devices had restricted TikTok.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efforts_to_ban_TikTok_in_the_U...

and:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protecting_Americans_from_Fore...

Amy Howe, Supreme Court upholds TikTok ban, SCOTUSblog (Jan. 17, 2025, 12:00 AM), https://www.scotusblog.com/2025/01/supreme-court-upholds-tik...

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/24pdf/24-656_ca7d.pdf

The executive branch explicitly defied an act of Congress which was upheld by the Supreme Court. First Biden for one day, then Trump II as he took office and continued not to enforce the ban.

I don't think this is accurate. According to the New York Times¹ (among numerous other sources), the government has defied court orders at least a small double-digit number of times.

"At least 35 times since August, federal judges have ordered the administration to explain why it should not be punished for violating their orders in immigration cases."

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/23/us/politics/judges-contem...

“All” might be a stretch but the idea that they just do what they want regardless of what the courts say is just incorrect propaganda. And continuing to find creative ways to defy court orders is something every administration does. And my opinion of the administration is low also, I just don’t like the propaganda and have never understood why we need to make up things about them when there’s so much to dislike that isn’t fictional.

Wasn't the tarrifs thing one of the things he did illegaly and thats why they are now getting paid back?

Whats with the documents he put in his toilet?

Destroying the east wing. Its too late now right but shouldn't he followed some procedure?

I probably have plenty other examples but thats probablyh enough to get more insight. For me these cases feel like a mix of certain other parts should have steped in but have been ignored by trump and instead of doing their job, they don't because they all are either afraid or just behind trump. If this is the case, it might not be illegal but whats the right word then?

For the tarrifs, it feels like it should be clear that the way they did it was illegal but the law is just slow and because again the other parts aren't complaining, its not as illegal as it should be?

Nope, the original tariffs were under IEEPA, then Supreme Court ruled they didn't have authority to use IEEPA, so they had to drop those tariffs and start working on refunds. It'd only have been illegal if they kept the tariffs after the ruling.

Lot of propaganda & emotions around this straightforward chain of events.

Under this reasoning, it's not illegal to just take things from stores (stores hate this one simple trick). If you're caught and your specific actions are then adjudicated to be illegal, at that point you can just start making a plan to bring the items back (even if some are used/damaged/etc) and everything is fine.

In reality of course, the actions were illegal the whole time. The big festering problem is that there is no actual punishment for government agents who break the law.

Definitely some problems in the current system, broad and creeping executive overreach extending back decades now.

Pretty sure stealing from stores is already illegal, not sure I understand your analogy... lots of case law / precedent there.

The existence of case law / precedent does not affect whether something is "already illegal", but rather only how strongly one can predict if something is illegal. The original tariffs were illegal from day 1.

The point of the analogy was exactly to point at something with a lot of case law where this dynamic is crystal clear (although if Trump starts petty shoplifting after he's done looting our government, it's even odds whether this corrupt "court" will find some way to excuse it. Anything for the cause, of course)

So the USA was under

Wikipedia on IEEPA: "An Act with respect to the powers of the President in time of war or national emergency. "?

I mean thats very wishi washi. So are we both aligned that it looks like missuse? Because if its only about a word definition of no its not illegal what he did but a clear missconduct than it feels like word play.

I do agree it was a weak case, I think SCOTUS ruled correctly.

None of those are examples of violating a court order, in fact the first is an example of following one. The second happened when he was out of office. The third is ongoing.

I definitely did not say he doesn’t get ruled against by the courts.

This is far from reality. In truth the Trump administration has been ignoring court orders time and time again. Don't repeat lies.

> That does not end the Court’s concerns, however. Attached to this order is an appendix that identifies 96 court orders that ICE has violated in 74 cases. The extent of ICE’s noncompliance is almost certainly substantially understated. This list is confined to orders issued since January 1, 2026, and the list was hurriedly compiled by extraordinarily busy judges. Undoubtedly, mistakes were made, and orders that should have appeared on this list were omitted. This list should give pause to anyone—no matter his or her political beliefs—who cares about the rule of law. ICE has likely violated more court orders in January 2026 than some federal agencies have violated in their entire existence.

https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.mnd.230...

I am not a lawyer, but I think the Trump administration is not complying with:

0. "DOJ acknowledges violating dozens of recent court orders in New Jersey" [0]

1. In Minnesota, judges reported 94 court-order violations in January and, separately, one judge identified 210 orders in 143 cases where ICE had not complied. [1]

[0] https://www.politico.com/news/2026/02/18/trump-ice-immigrati...

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/23/us/politics/judges-contem...

> It looks like the courts will eventually put an end to this

If that is to happen, who would enforce the rulings? The DOJ is not neutral and will likely abide to the wishes of the Administration

I wouldn’t say “would likely abide”, I would say “will abide” based on their actions. They are nothing but an extension of the Trump administration at this point.

Ultimately, Congress.

But the odds of getting the majority vote in the Republican-controlled House and 2/3 majority vote in the Republican-controlled Senate required to remove Trump from office are unlikely to be any better.

At least not until Republican primary voters start voting out pro-Trump Republicans in favor of candidates who don't pledge unwavering loyalty to a President who openly opposes institutions they (the voters) hold dear, like the free market, say, or the Pope.

Or just bite the bullet and vote for a Democrat they may agree with less, but trust more.

I think settled law may be that it applies to everyone in the US, but the settled reality is that none of the amendments apply to anyone, and more generally, there are no human rights in the US.

You are arguing with the ref that the rules say dogs can't play basketball while a dog dunks on you over and over in the background.

You think "not allowed to" is something this government will ever abide by?

The linked Google policy states:

>We won’t give notice when legally prohibited under the terms of the request.

The post states that his lawyer has reviewed the subpoena, but doesn't mention whether or not it contained a non-disclosure order. That's an important detail to address if the claim is that Google acted against its own policy.

Administrative subpoenas are tenuous at best, but in the absence of an actual court order, words from ICE attorneys or officers saying "You are ordered not to disclose the details of this subpoena" have no actual weight in law.

This exactly. It's like everyone is assuming whatever ICE ordered Google to do was completely lawful. Even if this administration was a tightly run ship, when an agency gets a massive funding increase and daily quotas to hit like ICE did, all bets are off and you should never give them the benefit of the doubt. Obviously when the DHS secretary is calling American protesters domestic terrorists, cosplaying as a cop, and spending $200M+ on ads that feature herself, then you definitely give maximum scrutiny to everything that agency is doing/did.

Cited elsewhere in this thread. [1]

> First, numerous other individuals have challenged recent administrative subpoenas in court after receiving notice, and the Department of Homeland Security has withdrawn those subpoenas before reaching a court decision.

They don't want a ruling against them.

> [The subpoena would have been quashed because] there are facial deficiencies in the subpoena, including that the subpoena is missing a “Title of Proceeding.”

[1]: https://www.eff.org/files/2026/04/13/eff_letter_re_google_no...

I’m really hoping this leads to criminal convictions once these clowns are voted out of office.

Congress needs to retroactively eliminate the presidential pardon, or (more realistically) states need to pass laws allowing them to prosecute members of the federal government (the federal government already did this to the states; the result would be symmetric, and likely survive legal challenges.)

The underlying problem is that the presidency is just a non-hereditary elected monarch. If you make a "CEO of the military", you have made a king. We need to get rid of or neuter the presidency.

The reason why we have this defective executive structure is because the Founders wanted separation of powers and thought Parliaments were inherently corrupt. In a Parliament, the executive is fundamentally a creature of the legislature and cannot disobey it. The Founders wanted an independent executive that couldn't be overruled by normal legislative actions, because the executive is supposed to be calling out the legislature when they do a tyranny. And since that executive executes the law, they also need control over the military. Congratulations, you have made a king.

Separation of powers failed the moment America got a party system: why would a Republican Congress check the power of a Republican President? Likewise, the process for removing a rogue President is laughably difficult to execute. In almost every party system in America, impeachment and conviction would require a complete collapse of party support for their own President. This rarely happens, because Congress is reliant on the Presidency to send votes downballot[0]. Voters do not reward political traitors for saving the voter's asses.

So in my mind, the only ways to fix this would be to either:

1. Replace the President and Vice President with an Executive Council (ala the EU Commission) where there is one member per department and every member is a separate elected position.

2. Make impeachment convictions a 50% majority matter.

3. Abolish the executive branch entirely and have Congress elect its own to do executive functions (i.e. become a Parliament).

I can see problems with all three, but they seem less problematic than just letting one guy run everything with term limits as the only check on their power.

[0] In general, there is a problem with Congressional and local elections not getting as much attention as they should be. I've found that mail-in ballots actually make it a lot easier to vote downballot. Even if I don't recognize the name off the top of my head, I can look them up and have a decent idea of what I'm voting for. If you have to do this in a ballot box, you aren't going to have a lot of time (there's a lot of people behind you) and will just skip the downballot races.

The article pointed this out as well, but notably did not state that Google had in fact received an administrative subpoena.

From the article

> In April 2025, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) sent Google an administrative subpoena requesting his data.

fta

> In September 2024, Amandla Thomas-Johnson was a Ph.D. candidate studying in the U.S. on a student visa when he briefly attended a pro-Palestinian protest. In April 2025, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) sent Google an administrative subpoena requesting his data.

According to the ACLU [1]:

> This document explains two key ways that recipients can resist immigration administrative subpoenas: First, any gag order in these subpoenas has no legal effect; you are free to publicize them and inform the target of the subpoena. Second, you do not have to comply with the subpoena at all, unless ICE goes to court—where you can raise a number of possible objections—and the court orders compliance.

[1]: https://www.acluofnorthcarolina.org/app/uploads/drupal/sites...

Is the ACLU offering to pay your legal bills or participate in your defense along with that legal advice that they're offering?

How is that relevant?

It's relevant if you follow their legal advice and the government decides to pursue a case against you.

Even if you're in the right, defending yourself in a legal proceeding is expensive. You need a checkbook that can back up your confidence in what they're telling you. And sure, Google has that money, but they're also fighting off half of congress trying to break up their business.

It's in their best interests to do whatever the DoJ asks of them.

The next question is, who likes paying legal fees?

EFF's letter offers more details and says that the subpoena did not contain a gag order: https://www.eff.org/files/2026/04/13/eff_letter_re_google_no...

Well it did contain a request to not notify according to that same letter. I suppose that brings up several questions.

1. Does that mean the same thing in the ToS?

2. How valid are these requests?

A gag order would be from a judge. There would be severe penalties if a party breaks a gag order. A request not to notify is just a request; it has zero legal standing and there would be zero repercussions to ignoring it.

I'm very curious about this.

Google knows users care about their privacy, and it made the promise in its terms precisely for that reason. People pay attention to this stuff, as the popularity of this story shows.

Therefore, it's generally not going to be in Google's interest to break its own terms.

So what's going on? Did a Google employee simply mess up? Is the reporting not accurate or missing key details, e.g. Google truly is legally prohibited? Or is there some evidence that the Trump administration was putting pressure on Google, e.g. threatening to withhold some contract if this particular person were notified, or if Google continued notifying users belonging to some particular category of subpoenas?

Because Google isn't breaking its own terms just for funsies. There's more to this story, but unfortunately it's not clear what.

> Google knows users care about their privacy, and it made the promise in its terms precisely for that reason. People pay attention to this stuff, as the popularity of this story shows.

Does it know? And do users really care? Popularity on HN isn't popularity everywhere.

I'd wager most people don't care enough to move away from Gmail.

But even if they did, unfortunately this isn't the only variable a business is solving for. Corporations will generally just pick between the least unprofitable of two evils, not the lesser of.

It's quite possible that google is more afraid of what will happen if they resist ICE than they are of bad publicity like this.

It's not just bad publicity. They may be sued

But yeah no matter the amount they lose in courts, it's inconsequential compared to angering this federal administration even a little bit

>Google knows users care about their privacy, and it made the promise in its terms precisely for that reason. People pay attention to this stuff, as the popularity of this story shows.

Do Google users care about their privacy? I'd expect not, given that Google is (and hasn't been shy about telling us about it) reading all their emails in order to provide more targeted advertisements.

And, as I mentioned, Google hasn't been shy about saying that's exactly what they do (prioritizing their ad revenue over their users' privacy), so I have to assume that Google users don't care about their privacy.

If they did care about their privacy, they'd self-host their email on hardware they physically control.

That's orthogonal to Google giving up data to the government, with or without notifying the user(s) in question, except that the above makes clear what we already know: Google doesn't respect the privacy of their users.

> given that Google is (and hasn't been shy about telling us about it) reading all their emails in order to provide more targeted advertisements.

That hasn't been the case since 2017. Nearly a decade ago. They stopped precisely because Google users do care about privacy -- and tracking is one thing, but scanning the content of your e-mails is another.

Yeah, sure. Whatever you say.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/zakdoffman/2025/05/07/googles-g...

https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2025/11/gmail-is-read...

https://android.gadgethacks.com/how-to/gmails-ai-secretly-re...

https://www.howtogeek.com/gmail-might-be-harvesting-your-ema...

https://cyberguy.com/privacy/stop-google-ai-scanning-gmail/

Please don't be rude.

And what you're linking to is NOT what you described, "in order to provide more targeted advertisements".

Your links are describing Gemini integration. If you ask Gemini a question about your e-mails, obviously it needs to look at them. If Google is suggesting a smart reply, obviously it needs to process your e-mail to do so. But these are features designed to benefit the user.

You were talking about target advertising. That's not what your links have anything to do with.

>Please don't be rude.

[0]: "Google publicly announced in 2017 it would stop using Gmail content for ad targeting but continued to scan emails for spam, malware, and other non-ad functionality, which leaves room for ambiguity about downstream uses of metadata or other signals"

Who cares why Google is reading your emails? Not me.

Oh, it's just for non-ad functionality? In that case, go right ahead!

Ugh!

[0] https://factually.co/fact-checks/technology/email-scanning-f...

You're upset Gmail blocks spam and malware?

>Please don't be rude.

> Therefore, it's generally not going to be in Google's interest to break its own terms.

It is also not in Google’s interest to resist this administration. I would not be surprised if they decided to kiss the ring and be by internal policy more cooperative than what the law strictly says.

I guess we’ll get a better idea if more cases show up.

Previous administrations weren't easier to resist. Look up Joseph Nacchio's story. Short version: refuse to install https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAINWAY without a warrant, go to jail.

Google acknowledges that they should have given notice per their own policy and that they violated it. In this case, they said that they violated it because they had failed to respond to the subpoena within ICE's 10-day deadline:

> On November 20, 2025, Google, through outside counsel, explained to the undersigned why Google did not give Thomas-Johnson advanced notice as promised. Google’s explanation shows the problem is systematic: Sometimes when Google does not fulfill a subpoena by the government’s artificial deadline, Google fulfills the subpoena and provides notice to a user on the same day to minimize delay for an overdue production. Google calls this “simultaneous notice.” But this kind of simultaneous notice strips users of their ability to challenge the validity of the subpoena before it is fulfilled.

At what point does Google’s incompetence imply organizations that use its services are liable for negligence?

What if this were a bogus subpoena for a lawyer’s privileged conversations with a client? A doctor’s communications about reproductive health with a patient? A political consultant working for the democrats?

weird everyone's focusing on privacy and google.... Not the actual insanity of a government targeting people who are legally allowed to be in the US.

You can try to find a way to keep things private, and many of the people on HN likely have the capability to do so. But hiding from your government because they are weaponizing your information against you seems to be the wrong approach. I just don't understand the American people just rolling over and letting their country / rights / freedoms just be obliterated.

Was it a right he had in the first place? Many countries make it illegal for foreigners to undertake political activities as a condition of their visa, for good reason.

the problem is, technically yes, they have a right, but their visa can be arbitrarily cancelled for very unspecified reasons, like the government not liking what you are doing and calling a potential security risk. This targeting of people, because they can, amazes me that Americans are so accepting of it. To me this says they'd do this to their citizens if they could. You already have the attack on birth right citizenship to try and take away protections so they can target more people. This targeting on political grounds is nuts. It's so anti American but somehow so many are convinced that it's not a bad thing.

IDK, I think "foreigners shouldn't be coming over here as guests and then trying to influence our politics" is a reasonable stance, and doesn't say anything about targeting citizens.

If that were a uniform stance, maybe, but when it's used for partisan reasons by the party in power it's a different story. That's also not the law, the law is that anyone in the country has the right to free speech. If rights only apply to citizens it is a mockery of the freedoms this country is built on.

weird, don't you think that stance is just fear of free speech? I see it as completely unreasonable. America (of the past now?) has a history of inviting all kinds of people to discuss politics, philosophy, religion from all over the world.... but now you are scared of what people have to say? Also if you don't recognize that it is political targeting (not of citizens, but anyone by any means the government has its disposal), then that's a real problem. We can see the targeting of legitimate visitors, attacks on birth right citizenship, attempts to reconstruct electoral borders. Mass firing from the government institutions of people with differing opinions. Like I said, it's weird americans are so accepting.... "seems reasonable".

> weird, don't you think that stance is just fear of free speech? I see it as completely unreasonable. America (of the past now?) has a history of inviting all kinds of people to discuss politics, philosophy, religion from all over the world.... but now you are scared of what people have to say?

I think active political campaigning is a bit different from discussing political philosophy, and it's a major mistake to treat the former as "just free speech". (I think Citizens United was a massive misjudgement that has lead directly to many of our present-day problems). I think we're all agreed that foreigners should not be standing for office or voting in elections, and foreigners other than permanent residents are already barred from making campaign contributions; to my mind this kind of protest aimed at changing government policy falls into the same category. A protest like that isn't an effort to convey some insight or argument; it's an effort to demonstrate viscerally that the citizenry have a strong view on an issue. I don't think allowing foreign participation helps with that; quite the opposite.

There have been a lot of claims in recent years - from both sides of the aisle - that enemy countries have been deliberately disrupting US politics in order to harm the country. I think it's vital that our political process not only has integrity but is seen to have integrity, and part of that is ensuring that adversaries cannot unduly influence it.

> I think we're all agreed that foreigners should not be standing for office or voting in elections

I don't think we're all in agreement. Do they live here? Work here? They should have a say in Joe here is governed while they do.

> I don't think we're all in agreement.

Well, fair enough, but you must acknowledge that that's the democratic consensus and the law as it stands.

> Do they live here? Work here?

The person in question is on a student visa, so (assuming they're not abusing the system) sort of but not really; they're here for a few years, and they might be doing a little part-time work to support themselves but they're meant to be here to study for a limited period rather than have already moved their life here permanently, they're supposed to intend or at least be open to the possibility of going back when their course finishes.

Do you think that having a say in the way the place you live for 5% of your life might increase the odds you want to settle down there and contribute to making it a good place?

Someone is working on completing their higher education here, seems like that would select for folks who had an interest in education, the resilience to complete a degree, the means to do so, etc. If I didn't believe that borders were generally bad, and instead believed that immigration was good if controlled, it would seem that students are people we'd want to immigrate.

> Do you think that having a say in the way the place you live for 5% of your life might increase the odds you want to settle down there and contribute to making it a good place?

I think giving foreign students the vote would make some of them (the most politically opinionated ones) more likely to want to immigrate permanently, yes. Whether that would be a good thing is very much in dispute.

> Someone is working on completing their higher education here, seems like that would select for folks who had an interest in education, the resilience to complete a degree, the means to do so, etc.

But by the same logic, the worse the conditions attached to doing so, the stronger the selection effect will be.

> If I didn't believe that borders were generally bad

Then you might be in a more reasonable position to understand the general citizenry, rather than sitting in a glass house calling others "weird".

> it would seem that students are people we'd want to immigrate

I used to think that before I talked to more wannabe-immigrants. Goodhart's Law is turbocharged when it comes to routes to immigrate; if being a "student" is the easiest way to get a foot in the door then people will eagerly pay thousands for a "degree" they don't care about, and there are plenty of places happy to take their money. See the whole "day 1 CPT" industry for the apotheosis of that. Even if there was an enforcement crackdown on the worst abuses, it would be virtually impossible to eliminate the cases further along the spectrum, because it's a mutually beneficial arrangement for everyone involved except the rest of us.

> Then you might be in a more reasonable position to understand the general citizenry, rather than sitting in a glass house calling others "weird".

Did I call anyone weird? Did I insinuate my opinion was somehow objectively better? I just have a different opinion than you on borders and immigration, and we're allowed to differ on opinions.

"Influencing our politics" is broad, but I do think foreigners should be allowed to organize strikes, or go to political rallies without risk of being deported.

The Swiss have birthright citizenship. What's so odd about it ?

I'm amazed that people see America as different from any other country in terms of who should be allowed in and what constitutes bad behavior.

Being in America is a privilege that can easily be taken away. Guests of America should walk a narrow path.

Same as being in any other country.

Yes, the First Amendment applies to all people within the territory of the United States equally. US law does not limit the political speech of non-citizens present on visas.

Do you feel that way about the second amendment too? Just curious if we’re picking and choosing what visitors can legally do. What if SCOTUS said that people means citizens and not visitors for guns, don’t you think that would apply to visa, immigrants, or visitors as well?

I think in the second amendment "the people" are quite clearly the citizens so they can secure their own "free" state. Where the first amendment is about limiting what the government can do so they can't make laws against free speech.

How odd that one amendment away the word “people” has two different meanings.

it doesn't. Read the first amendment carefully. People is only used in one specific part, the bulk is about limiting what the lawmakers can do. free speech has no reference to "people"

All amendments are about what limiting lawmakers can do. Even the second.

People is only used in one specific part… ok?

How does that square your idea of 1A with SCOTUS being very recently clear on 2A not immediately applying to non-citizens?

Unfortunately this SCOTUS is not comprised of those who the founders intended would sit on it.

Was it a right that should be had, should be the question. I don't think you are refuting the parent claim. Americans are rolling over and justifying terrifying out reach from not-very-organized authorities (ICE). The American set of freedom, liberties and rights are more fragile than Trump's ego.

> Was it a right that should be had, should be the question.

Fair, but everything else I said goes through the same.

> Americans are rolling over and justifying terrifying out reach

I just don't see the terror? If someone is coming over here on a student visa and then doing political activism, it seems completely reasonable for the immigration authorities to check that out.

Which countries do this for a good reason? I dont think there is a single western country that does this.

Portugal does and they're about as westerly as non-american countries get.

I find it similarly weird that a post threatening genocide remains up, whilst a post depicting Trump as Dr. Jesus was so offensive it had to be taken down and 'explained away' as something other than what it was.

Only on the darkest timeline is a picture more offensive than the threat of genocide.

Gives a good insight into the psyche of power in the US (and probably the psyche of power in general).

How is this insane?

The US isn't some global free zone where everyone has a right to come and go - do as they please.

If you came to the US legally with a visa. Great. When you signed your visa documents there were some questions they asked you and some fine print that basically made you liable for "bad behavior."

I'm an American living in the UK and I'm under no illusion that if I start doing dumb stuff here it's possible they tell me to leave. (Tho apparently the UK government has a pretty lax attitude with who they ask to leave.)

If someone wants to come to my country and behave in any way outside their best - then yes I support the government kicking them out.

I don't think protests in general are "behaving outside your best". Now what those protests contain is an entirely different matter. I read an article about the arrest of a foreign student recently who attended numerous "death to America" protests. I can support deportation in a case like that (even if only for the complete lack of self awareness), but not for all protests.

Protesting against ethnic cleansing is a bad thing, that’s what you’re saying?

No matter what kind of mental gymnastics you try to do, this is just an obvious case of a foreign government having a huge influence and control over internal US affairs.

Just rolling over? What do you imagine regular people should do? The plucky underdogs with good hearts and their dreams take on the CIA, the FBI, and whatever you want to call the criminal network above them, and the good guys win? This isn’t a movie. Be smart and find a way to survive with your soul intact.

I still don't understand. Who gave ICE such power, and who is ordering them to do all this? To me, ICE's actions are similar to those of a private army.

Trump (with indirect support from the Republicans in Congress), and Trump (with indirect support from the Republicans in Congress), respectively.

I would call passing a bill to fund it, pretty direct support from Republicans in Congress/Senate.

It's Stephen Miller, enabled by Trump.

Believe it or not, immigration authorities (like the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency) have the power to enforce immigration laws.

The author isn't American.

Edit - wait until y'all find out other countries also have borders and laws...

Which immigration laws are they enforcing in this case? And are you also going to suggest that the Constitution does not protect foreign nationals inside the US?

The Constitution uses the following in regard to protest in the first amendment

   Congress shall make no law ... abridging ... the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

It uses this same "right of the people" in the second amendment

    ... the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

In both cases, the right is restricted to "the people." Note in the first amendment, only the final bit about protests is restricted to "the people" the rest is generally protected whether it is "the people" or not.

Note in Heller and elsewhere it was determined "the people" are those who belong to the political class (which is a bit vague, refer to next sentence, but not same as voting class). Generally this is not those on non-immigrant visas or illegal aliens (though circuits are split on this). If you don't have the right to bear arms, clearly you are not "the people" since people by definition have the right to bear arms, which means you wouldn't have the right of "the people" to protest either, no? So it appears since they are not people, they don't have the right to assemble in protest, though they may have other first amendment rights since it's protest specifically that was narrowed to "the people" rather than many of the other parts of the first amendment which are worded without that narrowing.

For instance, speech without assembly isn't narrowed to just "the people." Perhaps this was done intentionally since allowing non-people to stage protests was seen as less desirable than merely allowing them to otherwise speak freely.

Note: Personally I do think non-immigrants are people, but trying to apply the same "people" two different ways with the exact same wording makes no sense. If they can't bear arms they necessarily are not "the people" and thus are not afforded the right to "assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."

If you have to work your way round to "they are not people" for the law to be consistent, consider that it might be a bad law.

It's not that they aren't people, they aren't the people that the Constitution refers to. There are many rights that visitors don't have.

That is one possible (specious and self-serving) interpretation of a document that pre-dates the concepts and laws it's being used to prop up.

How many of the Pilgrims had a valid modern visa?

USA was founded well after the Pilgrims. I don't think anyone in 1776, or even in the Pilgrim days, was thinking a foreigner should have the right to vote for instance.

Who else didn't they think should have the right to vote in 1776, and was that the right call in your opinion?

As I said above, a law you have to tie yourself in knots to justify might be a bad law.

What are you saying, the US Constitution is bogus because people were racist in 1776? It's undergone amendments and clarifications by the Judicial branch. It's been consistently obvious that foreigners don't have the same rights as citizens here, and tourism or immigration law wouldn't really work otherwise.

You didn't answer my question, but here's what I'm saying:

> If you have to work your way round to "they are not people" for the law to be consistent, consider that it might be a bad law.

I disagree that the law (which has been changed, amended and clarified) has been 'consistently obvious', and I still maintain that the conclusion of 'immigrants aren't people' invalidates the law.

The courts didn't come to the conclusion that immigrants aren't people. Probably the opposite in fact.

After the Revolutionary War, most US citizens couldn't vote. I don't think we should be using that time period for comparison.

Most people in the US did not choose to become citizens until the mid 19th century. The process was much easier than naturalization today, though, presuming you were white and in some cases might be required to own property.

US also didn't have Jus soli citizenship until the whole civil war and slavery debacle. You had to go into a local court and show you lived in the US for a couple years, who would swear you in as a citizen. But most people didn't care about voting or holding office enough to bother.

> US also didn't have Jus soli citizenship until the whole civil war and slavery debacle.

Actually, my understanding is that the US did largely follow jus soli. What it wasn't was unconditional jus soli, but the principle was birth in the bounds of the US conferred citizenship except if positive law existed not conferring citizenship.

>I don't think anyone in 1776, or even in the Pilgrim days, was thinking a foreigner should have the right to vote for instance.

Nor does anyone in 2026. Your point?

> the people

You could make this argument, but the Supreme Court does not seem to agree, they have consistently said that "the people" is basically everyone here. Even those unlawfully here.

That said, the second amendment does have some interpretation that allows for restrictions on temporary visa holders like the student that is the topic of this discussion. But it also has rulings that support it applying to illegal immigrants.

> they have consistently said that "the people" is basically everyone here.

This is absolutely false. DC v Heller cites that "the people" refers to members of the "political community."[] Not "basically everyone here." The interpretation of what "political community" means has been split in the circuits. One court in Illinois found it might include illegal immigrants (who have settled as immigrants) or non-immigrant visa holders that were illegally settling here. This is anomalous. Generally they've found the political community to be something approximating those with immigrant type visas, permanent residency, or citizenship -- barring some exceptions from those like felons.

Even if you dig up the most generous case in illinois (I've forgotten the name) which claims some illegal immigrants are "the people", which it has been awhile since I read it -- even they narrow the political community refered to by "the people" to people actually settling as part of the community and not just basically anyone inside the US in a way that would suggest it applies to tourists or student visa holders using their visa in the legal manner.

      What is more, in all six other provisions of the Constitution that mention “the people,” the term unambiguously refers to all members of the political community, not an unspecified subset. As we said in United States v. Verdugo-Urquidez, 494 U. S. 259, 265 (1990):

[] https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/554/570/

> "the right of the people peaceably to assemble"

"Peaceably" is important. If you think the pro-Palestinian protests on campus are peaceful, try wearing a yarmulke and walking anywhere near them. Or anywhere on many campuses, on any day, protest on-going or not.

Search Google images for "yarmulke palestinian protest" and tell me there aren't many Jewish people fighting for a Free Palestine. Every pro-Palestine rally I've been to has had a contingent of Jewish groups in our midst. You'll only get hated on if you show or wave the Israeli flag.

There are videos of Jews getting harassed and attacked by "pro-Palestinians" all over the internet while they attempt to get to class. Jews have been arrested in the UK "for their own safety" for existing near a protest. Not to mention the rampant ZOG and other related bullshit.

Even if there are Jews at some of these protests (as opposed to random people wearing kippahs), all you're doing is whitewashing violence. Same as Candace Owens and MAGA.

> And are you also going to suggest that the Constitution does not protect foreign nationals inside the US?

I thought it was settled constitutional law that it doesn't? Moreover, during the war on terror, it was established that the president can freely order the murder of non Americans outside the US.

Not even remotely. Citizens may be granted additional protections from some things, but the Constitution applies to all persons inside the US.

Might apply to people outside of US too, given that Maduro is being tried in NY for drug and firearm charges while never having set foot in US before.

The courts, all the way to the top, have consistently interpreted the Constitution as a document that circumscribes the behavior of the government, not as a document that grants privileges to "the people" or a subset of that (e.g. citizens only).

Apparently they have the power to murder and kidnap American citizens too, or violate their rights if they happen to freely speak or assemble in ways they don't like.

Did you completely miss the news in January? ICE killed an innocent american citizen. The person responsible never got arrested or jailed.

This isn't about enforcing the law, its the book definition of fascism, and we're letting it happen.

> wait until y'all find out other countries also have borders and laws...

Legal citizens are being arrested based on no evidence. where in your law book says this is legal?

Congress gave them the power. They are federal law enforcement who actions were mainly restrained by desire of their leadership (US President) to keep their actions curtailed.

That desire is gone so they are going all out.

You're making a mistaken thinking power is given. Quite often in the US government organizations 'just do', and it's the power of the executive, judicial, or legislative to stop them.

Unfortunately Trump is doing whatever he wants at this point and ignoring anyone that says otherwise.

Democratic backsliding occurs through the gradual erosion of norms and safeguards. One small step at a time...

The people. We voted for the people who gave the power, and we re-elected them. It’s really that simple. Is it “too late” now? maybe, but we had ~25 years since this all started post 911 to react, and chose not to.

There elections every two years, it's not too late. But only if people actually want that enough to vote and press politicians.

There's no mechanism for pressing politicians except threatening not to vote for them again, and politicians are exceptionally cowardly and avoid picking up hot potatoes that could incur criticism. I'm in a district with one of the safest seats in the country, and getting my representative to state a position on many issues is like getting blood out of a stone.

There's no formal mechanism of accountability for members of Congress. Representatives hold a few town halls a year where they might be subject to social shaming by their constituents, but there's no legal obligation to do so and even when they're publicly embarrassed they often dismiss public opposition as 'a few paid agitators' or the like.

This is doubly and triply true for complex policy issues which require a lot of explaining, making it virtually impossible to build grassroots support. So you just end up with a nonprofit industrial complex that needs to constantly raise funds for lobbying and publishes slates of endorsements at election time that relatively few people have the time or inclination to read.

The answer is to vote in the primaries. That's how you unseat a 'safe' seat. I'm not going to say its a good answer, because the primary system and the two party system in general are terrible, but its the best choice you have besides running yourself.

It also doesn't help that in situations like this, both major parties are moving in lock step. You cannot vote against something that both party stand for.

Terrance McKenna once said that the worst president was the one in power, regardless of when it is. It is because for the most part, they just keep building on the existing frame work, standing on the shoulders of those before them.

Now one could argue that Trump is doing the opposite this term, but depending on were you stand, this might not have been a great out come.

I wonder how the dynamic between members of Congress and their constituents would change if we had a larger Congress. Instead of the ~786k people per representative, having ~107k like the UK. Would it be feasible? Probably not. But Congress is way too small and it results in some poor incentives.

> There's no mechanism for pressing politicians except threatening not to vote for them again...

That mechanism seems uniquely weak due to the american voting system.

Nobody ever voted for mass surveillance. There's no party you can vote for in the US that doesn't advocate for total mass surveillance by the federal government. Don't pretend this is a red/blue thing. The military-industrial complex is fully integrated with both parties in the US.

No major party. There are smaller parties who oppose mass surveillance.

Yes, unfortunately you can't vote for them without benefiting a major party you oppose.

That's a toxic way of thinking. No party is entitled to your vote, and not voting for one is certainly not an endorsement of another.

Unfortunately that is how it works. A vote for the green party is simply a vote not cast for D and favors R; and a vote for a libertarian is a vote not for R, so it benefits D.

A solution is Ranked Choice Voting where you can say, "Green, and if they don't win, D (or whatever)."

Fwiw, I vote my conscience, not to win. Not the best for my political positions maybe, but I hope to send a signal to others that maybe something other than R/D is one day possible. But, yeah, RCV would help with that conundrum.

While this is true, very often that is the impact of a third party vote in a federal election. See the election of one George W. Bush and the impact of Mr. Nader.

Toxic?

Trump recently posted a diatribe about ranked choice voting in Alaska (calling it "disastrous, and very fraudulent").

Do you know why the modern GOP hates ranked choice voting? Because they rely upon getting clown votes wasted on the Tulsi Gabbard, Jill Stein's and Kanye West's of the world as a way to get elected. They just need to entice just enough fool-vote drawers, knowing the cult will not sway an iota.

Maybe if the US had a sane voting system, but they don't. I'm of the opinion that their flawed voting system is a huge factor in why the US government is the way it is.

I might as well write my own name in at that point.

Who is the worst actor when it comes to mass surveillance?

Government or big tech?

> We voted for the people who gave the power, and we re-elected them.

That would be true if We The People were reliably informed when we showed up to cast our votes. However, in recent years, we have become detached from reality. "News media" companies pivoted away from keeping their audiences informed about things that mattered and instead focused on capturing audiences and keeping those audiences maximally engaged so that they could be sold to advertisers and otherwise exploited.

Now when people show up to the polls, they think they're voting to keep themselves safe from violent crimnals running rampant; they think they are voting to keep out the flood of strange outsiders coming to take their jobs and eat their family pets. But in reality they're voting for -- and getting -- something quite different.

> That would be true if We The People were reliably informed when we showed up to cast our votes.

Weren't the democrats criticised for campaigning on the message that voting for Trump was a significant risk to due process and democracy? I feel like every voter was aware of what happened on Jan 6th and still voted for him with some level of knowledge about that.

I agree. People had already experienced one round of Trump before, and had every opportunity to see what he was planning for this term. There is no reasonable conclusion other than that they indeed wanted exactly what we got.

The US has very low voter turnout. Winning is mainly getting your voters to turn up, but usually apathy wins. Of course the media plays a huge part in this, but voter suppression is the US is fine art.

Personally I feel that non voters effectively voted for Trump, and they should own that as much as die hard MAGA types.

> The US has very low voter turnout

Don't disagree with you in principle but 2024 saw a very, very, very large turnout for US standards - the biggest one... Kamala's 75m+ votes basically are good enough (by very wide margin) to win any previous election (slimmer margin in 2020 than others but you get my point...)

> the biggest one

2020 had about 4 million more votes cast.

https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/statistics/data/voter-turnou...

thanks for the correction, I keep forgetting just how awful 2016-2020 years were that 81 million people came out to vote for a senile grandpa (exactly the point I was making, you need strong against case much more than anything else)

> 81 million people came out to vote for a senile grandpa

Yeah, people were getting fed up with the chaos. Biden owes his presidency to Donald Trump, for sure. He tried several times in years prior and could not win on the merits.

Weird, and why didn’t those people show up to vote for Kamala? How did Biden get more votes than Obama, but Trump won the popular vote four years later?

> why didn’t those people show up to vote for Kamala?

Enthusiasm gap. And not during COVID. 2020 was an interesting time as you may recall.

> How did Biden get more votes than Obama, but Trump won the popular vote four years later?

You will be less likely to fall prey to grifters if you look past absolute numbers and realize that the voting age population tends to increase about 10 million every four years. And with turnout generally abysmal, under 60% most times, there is a lot of room for variation.

Kamala was vocal about refusing to defend Gazans. It swung the needle for many. It's not the only thing that swing the needle, but it was significant.

Both sides got more voters out, but it's still a low proportion of eligible voters.

Lots of people don't vote in mid terms, that's what Trump is aiming for.

The Trump factor is interesting.

His whole schtick seems to be getting voters to show up at the polls who otherwise don't bother to put forth the effort. I've heard it said that this was also Mamdani's trick in NYC (heck, maybe that explains why Trump is so smitten with Mamdani).

So GOP politicians do significantly better any time Trump is sharing the ballot with them. I won't be surprised if the 2026 midterms go very poorly for the GOP. And given that Trump won't ever be on a ballot again, I won't be surprised if his control over congressional GOP members starts to noticeably erode even before the midterms. They definitely know how the game works, and they are going to start looking for ways to keep their jobs.

Running against a President (especially one that is not on the ballot) is much easier than people think, all you have to do is pitch that while I may be terrible, your alternative is much, much, much worse which is exactly what the Trump campaign was all about.

It worked because a lot of people bought that story (and many continue to buy it evidenced by DJT's approval ratings among the GOP voters). The whole campaign basically had no platform other than your cookie-cutter "migrant crime", "economy bad" ...

It worked because as bad as the GOP platform was, the dems' strategy was just awful, and their tactical decision making was abysmal.

  * focus on abortion, which is an important issue ... mostly to evangelicals
  * focus on threats to democracy, which sounded shrill and got blown off
  * no real message on the economy, which was widely perceived as floundering under Biden, and was very important to a lot of swing voters

On top of that, Trump's approval ratings on the economy were pretty good when he left office. People remembered that and thought he'd do better.

Then of course there's the whole "hey, let's not tell the senile old man that he basically promised to be a one-hit-wonder, and wait until the last moment to switch to his running mate instead".

In a way, it's impressive that the dems didn't lose by larger margins. Trump wasn't that popular, the dems were just that incompetent. I hope they pull their head out of their ass for 2028. But I'm not counting on it.

I don't disagree but I don't believe there was any way Democrats would have kept power in 2024. They were unable to sell any positive news about the economy (DJT does not seem to have learned this lesson and is doing same stupid thing as Dems did in 2024). The no real message on the economy was real but economy was doing great in post-COVID world especially compared to the rest of the world and there wasn't a reputable financial outlet that did not agree with this (Economist, FT, WSJ, Bloomberg...).

While I wholeheartedly agree with everything you said I do not believe there was a way for Democrats to beat DJT. His machine was just too good and no matter the candidate and no matter the message I don't believe it would have mattered.

> I feel like every voter was aware of what happened on Jan 6th and still voted for him with some level of knowledge about that.

What a particular voter was “aware of” regarding Jan 6th and the events that caused it very much depended on where that person got their news. For example, one prominent network was found in court depositions to have knowingly reported complete BS about what Jan 6 was all about: “During pre-trial discovery, Fox News' internal communications were released, indicating that prominent hosts and top executives were aware the network was reporting false statements but continued doing so to retain viewers for financial reasons.”

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominion_Voting_Systems_v._Fox....

That his vice president confirmed the result still should tell these people everything they needed to know. That at the very least the story peddled by sources like Fox was dubious and they should seek to corroborate that source with others. NPR is a reasonable source that all Americans know about, so I don't think its a reasonable excuse.

Do you believe that there is a large share of people who get their news from Fox News and also trust NPR? And vice versa?

More than ever before, people now live in news silos where they get only the news that engages their prior beliefs. And people who are in the Fox News silo have been told, repeatedly, that NPR is fake news from “far-left lunatic” Democrats. Do you remember all the air time Fox News gave to people arguing for the defunding of NPR? How much do you think a Fox News viewer is likely to trust NPR?

Think about it. If you are like the vast majority of people, almost everything you know about what is happening in the world, especially about the highest levels of government, is something you have been told from a source you trust. You are not a part of government policy decisions. You do not speak to people who are primary sources in those decisions. You know only what has been reported to you by third parties. Now imagine that you are getting those reports only from third parties that tell you something that is not true. How would you know that you are being misled?

Can you really shrug of responsibility that easily?

However, in recent years, we have become detached from reality. "News media" companies pivoted away from keeping their audiences informed about things that mattered and instead focused on capturing audiences and keeping those audiences maximally engaged so that they could be sold to advertisers and otherwise exploited.

This is true, but it is only one part of the picture. I feel journalism in general has stopped asking controversial questions and investigating. There is no more difficult interviews where they are, if need be, confrontational and try to get answers that mean anything, that deeply clarify an item or a stance. It's all become so docile, nobody goes digging deep into facts anymore, euphemism everywhere. For example: a couple of weeks ago I watched a Johnny Harris video re. America/fascism and he really managed - after spending most of the video on Hitler and Mussolini - to arrive at the conclusion that the US is trending towards an illiberal democracy while depicting Victor Orban as fascist. Orban called his vision for Hungary an illiberal democracy.

But his self-described quest to create a so-called illiberal democracy in...

https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/hungary-election-orban-9.71605...

The whole video managed to ommit that populism always rises when capitalism fails.

News has basically become entertainment and it makes me sad.

Have you considered that you can be misinformed? Maybe you are in an echo chamber that makes it appear others are wrong. Maybe there are legitimate concerns regarding illegal immigrants. Maybe you should try to expand your understanding of the situation.

instead of "just asking questions", mayhaps you could answer them? what are you legitimate reasons regarding immigrants who lack documentation? do you have your documentation on you as all times, as a united states citizen?

Some are criminals, some bring problematic cultures, strain on services and take what is meant for citizens, taking low wage jobs, and they are exploited.

The answer to this is that Google gave ICE this power by complying instead of fighting the subpoena or notifying the subject of the subpoena, both of which they can do according to the ACLU [1].

Willing, optional compliance with the administration is the core problem here.

[1]: https://www.acluofnorthcarolina.org/app/uploads/drupal/sites...

Probably Stephen Miller. Correct, he doesn't have the authority, correct, this is outside the scope of the org. Neither the republican controlled congress nor the republican controlled SCOTUS are interested in exercising their checks and balances though.

Move for a constitutional amendment allowing free immigration then. Don't just stand there!

> While ICE “requested” that Google not notify Thomas Johnson, the request was not enforceable or mandated by a court

Sounds like Google stopped caring.

But... Why on earth do the people filing an administrative subpoena not have to notify the interested parties too? Why is it Google's responsibility? If they didn't tell you, would you ever find out?

What do you mean? Eventually notifying him seems like the one thing Google did right here.

On a scale of 1-10, Yeah, I'd give them a 1-2 for notifying him after the fact.

The problem is they tell user that they'll inform you right away and give them a chance to challenge the subpoena.

A quick search shows that they've done in the past and people have been able to get the subpoena's withdrawn.

https://thefulcrum.us/rule-of-law/us-administrative-subpoena...

Google's lawyer responded by claiming they do follow that policy normally except when their lawyers nearly miss the "artificial deadline set by the government" and sometimes send it out same day.

I'm curious if this was a common issue or Google's legal team was flooded with subpoenas during the first months of the administration during their deportation surge (they did around 100k removals around that time). Homeland sent the request to Google a month prior to when they released the data and notified him, so they had time to notify, but it clearly isn't an automated thing.

You give Google credit for holding someone's head above the icy lake after they pushed them into lake themselves at the request of the piranhas.

> But... Why on earth do the people filing an administrative subpoena not have to notify the interested parties too?

Generally they do - with some notable exceptions being if you're a non-citizen and you're no longer in the US, and it's either a criminal investigation or related to intelligence or national security.

Which is the case here:

> In September 2024, Amandla Thomas-Johnson was a Ph.D. candidate studying in the U.S. on a student visa when he briefly attended a pro-Palestinian protest.

> Weeks later, in Geneva, Switzerland

It is obviously not criminal, but I guess that you don't need much to qualify something as related to intelligence and national security, attending a pro-Palestinian protest may be enough.

How was Amandla even identified? Stingray at the protest? Then how was the phone number linked to Google? Facial recognition at the protest? I guess his details are on file under terms of the visa? So then the government simply asks Google for all details on the individual by name? Either is pretty disturbing.

Cell carriers sell geofenced data about cell phones in an area at a given time to anyone. There's zero privacy.

KYC laws mean that his carrier has his name and email address and the feds probably got that without anyone informing the customer.

Or there may be more to the story than he's telling.

Guy seems to have earned himself a ban from entering Cornell’s premises[1]. They seem to be letting him finish [2], which tracks—they’re pretty chill IME. Something might’ve went down…

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/oct/05/palest...

[2]: https://panthernow.com/2026/03/03/international-students-sel...

This disruption, according to a University statement, involved shoving police officers, making guests of the University feel threatened and denying students the opportunity to experience the career fair.

Sun reporters on the scene did not observe any physical violence towards law enforcement but did note distress among recruiters, students and administration involved in the career fair.[1]

[1] https://www.cornellsun.com/article/2024/09/pro-palestine-pro...

Is there a specific reason for suspicion?

The fact that we're only hearing one side is suspicious enough

ICE is free to speak. I don't think they have interest to explain why they hunt someone.

Nor, I assume, do they have any interest to explain how they hunt someone.

It's true, by not speaking ICE loses some credibility, but they won't speak even when they're right.

That’s rather generic…

Do you apply that principle universally in your life?

C’mon, be honest about why you doubt the story.

Yeah I apply that principle.

To be honest, it's that plus the fact that this article omits things we already know. It wasn't just that he "attended a pro-Palestine protest at Cornell University," they shut down a jobs fair. I went to a liberal college too, I know that a lot of these "peaceful" protests are actually quite forceful and infringe on others' rights more than anyone ever reports.

My bias is in the other direction if anything. The author was protesting the US involvement with Israel, and even if he did something wrong, I believe he was targeted for this reason only. If you ask me, Israel has way too much control over US politics and other institutions. AIPAC and ADL ought to be classified as foreign entities because they de facto represent Israel's govt here, and there are some people in those orgs I consider outright traitors to the USA because they're making us pay taxes to a small country overseas. We need like a Tea Party 3.0 (unfortunately 2.0 already happened).

Thank you for elaborating. Now I understand where you are coming from better.

It’s a huge pet peeve of mine when people don’t say what they are actually thinking :)

> because they're making us pay taxes to a small country overseas.

I read recently that 80% of the money the US commits to Israel has to be spent in the United States. Similar to the US funding Ukraine it is largely just buying from domestic US manufacturers or old stockpiles. It's a sort of stimulus program that funds the US military industrial complex and prop up allies. There was law passed that 100% of foreign military financing has to be spent in the US in 2028.

Israel gets $3b/yr, Egypt $1.3B/yr, Jordan $1.4B/yr, Taiwan etc. Lebanon recently started getting financing. Pakistan used to be a big beneficiary.

Think of it as us giving them weapons for free, either way we're paying for it so their taxes don't have to. Egypt and Jordan's aid are for Israel's protection too. The only thing that has ever rivaled this was Ukraine aid, which wasn't bipartisan as we've seen.

This is the exact same logic as the people who complain about NASA "wasting" money.

But beyond the fact that the aid is basically a subvention for American defence companies (Israel spends way more than 3 billion on American weapons), it also protects American weapons manufacturers from Israeli competition through other terms in the agreement, which is actually a serious threat to them.

Yep it's the same logic. Everyone knows NASA is expensive, but people disagree over whether it's worth.

That full amount of weapons aid is a cost to taxpayers no matter how it's spun. Republicans cut aid to Ukraine because it was too expensive and other countries weren't giving enough, and the hypocrisy wasn't lost on people when our govt turned around and boosted the aid to Israel instead. If weapons aid were free like you're suggesting, that $10B+ Israel gets would also go to Ukraine and anywhere else we care about. And the Mid East is unimportant compared to Europe or east Asia, that's why no other major powers are fighting over it, so our "great adversary" is just the backwards country Iran.

$10B+? Israel gets $3B a year, and spends approximately $30B on American weapons. I guess if you don't like gas in your care, the middle east is unimportant, yes.

$3.8B is only the baseline scheduled amount. We give more each time there's a war, like $17.9B for Gaza. There isn't a net cash flow to us either, they're getting it all for free. Where did you get the $30B figure?

During peacetime, there's enough oil production outside the Mid East that OPEC has no teeth, as we saw in the 2010s. Not that our strategy of supporting a non-oil-producing country has helped us get oil from the Mid East either. We sanctioned off one of the largest producers, and the others are always a fine line.

Yes, I'm sure the Jews control the world...

Tracfone burners for any protests?

The laws closed that loophole a long time ago. You have to either present a photo ID to buy in a brick and mortar store or sign for the package when delivering to an address.

That is easily avoided, but usually people think of opsec constraints after the fact.

Not in the US, am on a burner under a random name right now lol

You can buy a phone on amazon right now and not sign for anything.

Does it have a carrier service when it arrives? That is the part that matters. They don't care whether you have a piece of hardware that just sits idle. They don't want people placing phone calls that can't be traced back to an identity that can be physically located and arrested.

To use mobile data, yes you'd have to prove some kind of identity in one way or another.

What about the find-my-phone BLE database, for which I just learned modern phones broadcast even when off? Is that controlled by the OS (Google, Apple) and not the carrier?

i mean proprietary baseband blobs already provide a back door , but does anyone have a reference for the perpetual ble broadcast ?

""" If the battery runs out or device is off

For supported devices, which include Pixel 8, Pixel 9, and Pixel 10 series, the Find Hub network can locate your phone for several hours even if the battery runs out or the device is powered off. """

https://support.google.com/android/answer/3265955?hl=en#zipp...

Couldn't find any official documentation from Apple, but there's this:

https://www.howtogeek.com/805624/what-does-iphone-findable-a...

Yeah, but proprietary baseband blobs don't control power, right? So if I turn the phone off, the radio ought to be dead... fingers crossed.

Not entirely. An iPhone can be "located" with it's find-my-phone features even if powered off (on by default, I believe you can disable this feature). Even if you disable it, you are trusting that it isn't discoverable in some form.

Use a faraday pouch

Then you can't receive calls?

Pretty sure a majority of people on this site would consider this a feature.

Likely he posted about it on every social network he uses.

He was banned from the Cornell campus. His identity is far from a secret.

The only way to be vaguely safe is to disable or not bring a cellphone with you, travel to and from places in some form of disguise, and to pay with cash.

And to not go in a vehicle with a license plate that is traceable to you.

This story is the one that finally pushed me to leave google. I moved off my ~20 year old Google account and deleted everything off their services including almost a decade of Google photos. I cancelled my Google one subscription for extra space. I'm now self hosting what I can and paying proton mail for everything else. I refuse to allow a company that will hand over data at the request of an administrative warrant to hold my data.

When did you find out about this? The timeline of this actually pushing you to do all that seems a bit unbelievable and difficult to take seriously.

It's this account's only comment and was only created right before posting. It has no credibility.

They could just be very concerned with privacy.

If they were motivated enough by this story to delete 20 years worth of history maybe they were motivated enough to create an account and talk about it?

I don't care. The UX means I can't give it any credibility.

For all I know this could be somebody's OpenClaw spouting bullshit. The default credibility of all throwaways is zero and that was even true before 2023.

If you let it influence your opinion in any way you're a fool.

From busterarm's profile: "Most people are stupid and/or on drugs."

The account is from 2013 but given that profile, I can't give it any credibility. After all, it could be somebody's OpenClaw having been granted control of the account.

> After all, it could be somebody's OpenClaw having been granted control of the account.

Luckily for HN, I actually have a post history. You can use my post history, textual analysis and statistics to make an informed decision about whether I'm a bot or not. Whether I'm being consistent or spouting any random bs.

The account I was responding to doesn't have anything.

> The account is from 2013 but given that profile, I can't give it any credibility.

What's in my profile is a statistical fact. It's there as a reminder, to me, not to expect everyone to see the world the same way that I do. To be comfortable with strong disagreement.

Just a hair shy of half the population is below average intelligence. Roughly 1 in 4 people has a cognitive impairment. This is of any age but trends upwards with age, reaching 2 in 3 by age 70. 1 in 4 Americans take psychiatric medication. 1 in 4 participates in illegal drug use. We haven't even touched on alcohol abuse.

My profile statement is just objective reality, whether you're comfortable with being stated openly or not.

The content of the message is the credibility. It doesn't matter where it came from or who posted it. This exact topic comes up every time Google reveals its true self and lots of us have a resurgence of our latent interest to de-Google (the massive inconvenience being the major barrier).

Maybe they read one of the articles written about this incident months ago.

Setting aside the fact that this is a new account and it's their only post, what about the timeline is difficult to understand?

The request came in April 2025, and the user was notified the following month. That's next to a year for them to hear about it internally and then quit and setup self-hosting prior to today.

Note that there was a major press cycle about this in October / November of last year - a quick Google showed stories in the Guardian, The Intercept, and the Cornell Sun, as well as commentary on Reddit. Not inconceivable that they found about it last October and had six months to leave and de-Googlify.

> Note that there was a major press cycle about this in October / November of last year

Fair point. However...the parent's comment is also fair because the article does a poor job of raising this material fact. You have to click through a sub-article.

It's almost like this article should be tagged (2025) because it's basically a replay of the author's account from 2025.[0]

[0] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/oct/05/palest...

As other comments say, it was a major story months ago. I started moving off around December. It's a long process to switch over all email accounts. I only recently got self hosted kubernetes set up for immich as a Google photos replacement and some other hosting needs but for the most part I am off google. I get probably 1-2 emails a week still going to Gmail but when I do I just switch those accounts to my new email. It will be a while before the old Gmail is deleted entirely unfortunately.

I didn't mention it in op but I also moved to graphene os which tbh feels much better than android has recently.

Wasn't even a warrant, right? They did this willingly.

Google leak ALL the time without warrant, Apple as well.

When have they done this before?

500k time a year: https://transparencyreport.google.com/user-data/overview

Those are supposedly ones where they legally had to comply. This case was different.

No, they do it also for any sort of administrative, without warrant.

Depends on how legitimate you consider an administrative warrant and how willingly you think complying with one is.

On a more practical level, forcing them to go to court might not be much better. If this went to a FISA court, those are essentially rubber stamps and give nearly 100% approval.

Migrating is such a good feeling. You don't have to do it all at once, either: I migrated to fastmail over the course of several years. Each time google did something that got my blood pressure up I went into my password manager and migrated another account. In aggregate it was a hassle, but these days I almost miss the feeling of being able to do something in response to stinky actions from google.

I've migrated everything from Google except for Google Voice. I have yet to find an alternative that can match the feature set and ease of use, regardless of the cost.

What part of the feature set in particular has been lacking in competitors?

EDIT: asking because I've been working on an alternative of sorts. I used GV a lot before I figured I could go without it/Google.

I'm not sure what the OP does, but at least for me I find myself chained to Google Voice for SMS 2FA use because it's basically the only phone number provider that cannot be exploited with a sim swap attack (same deal with Google Fi). And while I don't necessarily trust Google, their account security is leagues ahead of anyone else imo.

I previously looked at jmp.chat but they didn't really inspire confidence on the security front.

My use cases include 2FA and I like the added security that Voice provides, but it's not really added security, it's just moving the risk from your cell provider to Google. IMHO, Google does security better than the cell providers do.

I like the muti-platform integration of Voice. I use it on my iPad, on my Android phone, and mostly from my desktop. It works well on all platforms.

When I'm at home, I mainly use my VoIP phones. GV forwards to them, and they spoof my GV numbers when I make outgoing calls.

I like the spam text and call protections that GV provides. I believe they're partnered and integrated with Nomorobo.

I also have jmp.chat. It has capabilities that GV doesn't have, but it's not well integrated. (I use Cheogram on my Android phone, but there's no easily usable client on my iPad, or my desktop.)

> it's just moving the risk from your cell provider to Google

Yeah and imo Google has better account access controls than any other mobile provider, especially if you enroll in the Advanced Protection Program.

The main downside of GV that I didn't have with jmp.chat is that numbers are almost guaranteed to be detected as VOIP which sucks but whatever.

Not affiliated and never used them, but Cape (https://www.cape.co/) says they protect against SIM swaps with private keys.

I have one page with my full history of text messages, full transcription of all voice messages, contacts information connected with every number, and I can search everything. I can configure which of my phones ring.

And, possibly most importantly to me right now, my current phone has only a data connection and I make and receive calls using the Voice app. I think SIP eats too much battery and data and doesn't work well for wifi<->lte switching, but it's been a long time since I used it much.

I've been using voip.ms for over a decade, they have a great feature set and are very affordable.

I took a look at their complete feature set: https://voip.ms/features#features_filters

I don't like they way they've made it harder for me to see what they actually offer vs. what I offer myself (with my FreePBX VoIP client). I wish they would (maybe on a separate page) show the capabilities of their SIP trunk. E.g. Does it support SMS? Does it support video calling? Does the client require a static IP? Etc.

I don't think fastmail is going to help you. They are subject to legal requirements too and probably American jurisdiction also despite what their particular position is. https://www.fastmail.com/blog/fastmails-servers-are-in-the-u.... People love to hate Google but they're just doing what any corporation subject to law is going to do.

Fwiw that post states:

> It has been pointed out to us that since we have our servers in the US, we are under US jurisdiction. We do not believe this to be the case. We do not have a legal presence in the US, no company incorporated in the US, no staff in the US, and no one in the US with login access to any servers located in the US. Even if a US court were to serve us with a court order, subpoena or other instruction to hand over user data, Australian communications and privacy law explicitly forbids us from doing so.

They can say what they like, and I am a customer, but in hand-wavey generalization terms one should be aware that Australian law enforcement has excessively broad access to telecommunications data on request and a long history of doing the bidding of the United States. Carriers are forced to retain your data for 2 years.

Under TIA Act provisions (such as s180), an authorised officer of a criminal law‑enforcement agency can authorise access to prospective telecommunications data [metadata only; not whole messages] if satisfied it is reasonably necessary for investigating an offence punishable by at least three years’ imprisonment. (In other words, ~any time they want)

Example: the data‑retention regime’s records were being accessed over 350,000 times a year by at least 87 different agencies, including non‑traditional bodies such as local councils and the RSPCA [pet cruelty nonprofit].

Given Australia's population is only 28M, that means roughly 1 in every 80 people gets communications metadata pulled by their own government annually.

Yep, I am a fastmail user, born and live in Oz. I just assumed that this data would be collected either on this side or via the US servers. Also, we are still a part of the 5 eyes alliance.

The only way to win the game is to not play.

That's an old post. Fastmail has a US office now.

In addition to what the sibling comments say, this also puts Fastmail at risk of having their US based service suspended while they attempt to resist government overreach (were they to attempt to do so) which is really not a lot better for their users.

I wasn't looking to dodge US jurisdiction, I was looking to dodge "our craptacular moderation AI had a brainfart when reviewing your account and now you are locked out of your life."

Anticipation of stories like this are why I didn't rely much on Google 20 years ago.

Never used Gmail other than as a throwaway account.

Went many years before I had a Youtube account. Finally made one to upload some videos. I am normally not logged in.

(OK, OK - I was more concerned with them suddenly charging for a "free" service, as well as selling data to commercial enterprises than with them giving to the government).

(OK, OK - I do use Android).

What will the world be like in 2046?

The same :-)

Edit: People are not understanding the humor in the question. I implied I predicted this reality 20 years ago, and he's asking for another prediction 20 years out.

That doesn't matter.

The question is, who do you trust with your private data forever? To me and the parent, the answer is obvious: no one except yourself.

Digital gulag of whitelisted opinions and actions you are allowed to think/perform/express

Does anyone else remember Epic 2014? It was a video made years ago that speculated about the future of the internet and media, with the end game being personalized news written by a computer. The timeline is off but the brand names are mostly the usual suspects. Rewatching it now gives me this uncanny feeling.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eUHBPuHS-7s

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPIC_2014

I recently migrated off of my legacy "Google Apps for Your Domain" (now Workspace) account to a mix of self hosting and a regular old vanilla gmail account.

It was a real eye opener to experience how challenging it was to move my data from one Google account to another. Takeout is nice in theory, but there is no equivalent "Takein" service that accepts the data form import to another Google account in the format produced by Takeout! I naively assumed "Export Google calendar from here, import same files to there" but nope, that did not work at all. Maps data was even worse.

Apple and Microsoft are also subject to US laws. It's not like any company can get around this.

That statement is true at face value. But if you look at how Eric Schmidt travels with government representatives, how rich and powerful BigTech is, and how much they individually and collectively spend on lobbying, then they could be a massive obstacle if they only cared.

Administrative warrants do not carry the weight of law. It's merely a term of art for a request for information.

The Apple story isn’t too bad if you can deal with the limitations of advanced data protection. It doesn’t cover email, but does cover:

  - iCloud Backup (including device and Messages backup)
  - iCloud Drive
  - Photos
  - Notes
  - Reminders
  - Safari Bookmarks
  - Siri Shortcuts
  - Voice Memos
  - Wallet passes
  - Freeform

That’s according to https://proton.me/blog/apple-icloud-privacy

A reasonable approach might be to use an iPhone with a privacy respecting email provider.

Have you run into any serious complications doing that? I'm a bit worried that I've used my google account for so long and for many things that I might accidentally lock myself out of something important without it.

I migrated away from my main email, it wasn't a Google mail but it was on the providers domain.

First I signed up with Proton Mail and added my own domain, they fit the bill for me, YMMV.

Then I did a search in my password manager and went through those accounts.

Then I just let the old account sit there for a year. Each time I got an email from something I cared about I'd log in and change mail.

It's been a year now, and I'm about to terminate the old account. All I get there now is occasional spam.

I really dreaded this, but all in all quite painless. And next time it should be easier since I now own the email domain.

edit: Forgot to mention I use Thunderbird, so old email I archived to local folders. That's part if why I ended with Proton, their IMAP bridge allows me to keep using Thunderbird.

I exported all my email with Google Takeout, and Claude Code was able to write me a threaded email viewer local web app with basic search (chained ripgrep) in about 10 minutes, for any time I need to search archived emails.

I started doing this a while ago, but made the mistake of buying a .io domain. With the future of that domain uncertain, I’ve been rolling that back, not back to Gmail, but to the underlying Proton account for the moment.

I’ve also had some bad experiences with rates being raised on domains. That still ends up feeling like a risk to me, as the problem of domain squatters has not been solved, and the “solution” being employed seems to be continued rate hikes and exorbitant pricing for “premium” domains. It makes buying a domain for email not seem worth it… or at least not without its own long-term risks.

My current project has been trying to reduce my footprint, by deleting old and unused accounts, so any future migrations will be easier. I’ve found with many sites, this is easier said than done. For example, I deleted my Venmo account at least 2 months ago, yet I just got an email from them yesterday about reviewing privacy settings. Did they delete my account? They sure didn’t delete all my data if I continue to get emails. I’m betting they just set a ‘delete’ flag in the database. The lack of accountability and transparency on these things is really bad.

> My current project has been trying to reduce my footprint, by deleting old and unused accounts

I've actually split the accounts. I have a Gmail which I use for "throwaway" accounts, like shopping sites where I don't care if I lose access. But it's probably better to exercise some account hygiene and do some spring cleaning every now and then.

One thing I've not seen mentioned when people talk about moving to an owned domain is what happens when you don't own it anymore?

There are a million services that assume that if you have access to the email content you are the account holder. Google claims they don't recycle email addresses, but if you lose your domain, the next owner has access to all emails from that point forward.

If something happens and you're unable to renew your domain, are your next of kin out of luck?

> If something happens and you're unable to renew your domain, are your next of kin out of luck?

I'd say "don't do that". I had a friend pass which I knew had a custom domain for email, I told the relatives they had to be on the ball regarding renewal.

At least my registrar will keep sending invoices for a few months without letting go cough cough, so should be enough time to get the certificate of probate. With that the heirs should be able to get the invoice so they can pay.

Personally, I deleted everything I could but kept the Gmail account for a couple of years with a forward to my new account, and after that, I also deleted it. Google Takeout is a very useful way to quickly create a backup of everything Google.

[flagged]

> I just use two hard drives sitting and home, replicated

The failure modes of that are fire/natural disaster, and thieves. Do that, but also have a geographically redundant backup scheme. Either encrypted eg Backblaze or a relatives house in another state.

I use Fastmail and the main difference I notice is less effective spam filtering — it’s good but not as great as Gmail was.

Overall it’s been an acceptable trade off and I’m glad years ago I switched to a custom domain for email so I can have portability.

Interesting, I have used Fastmail for probably a decade plus at this point, and whether it's my obsessive rating of false negatives and positives, it is amazingly rare that I get spam slip into my inbox (maybe one message a week from ~100/day received, while my spam folder gets about 10/day).

I, too, mark all positives and negatives obsessively, but still get the same obvious spam in my inbox too often for my liking. Still, though, I love Fastmail.

Damn that’s wild to me, because Gmail absolutely refuses to send things to spam despite me incessantly marking them as spam.

I honestly assumed that everyone had a rotten time with Gmail spam filtering but I guess it’s just a me problem. I suppose that means I’m up for an interesting time dealing with it as I move to a custom domain somewhere else.

Anyone have any recommendations for providers that have exceptionally good spam filtering? Hell I’d even just settle for ones that honor “mark as spam,” because Gmail absolutely does not.

I get maybe one genuine spam not marked as such and maybe one false positive per month.

I'm getting a lot of emails and between 10-20 spams a day, but that's years of the very careful messages reporting and categorisation.

Similarly with important and "normal" emails - i only get one-two important per week, and marked as such for the same reasons; no false negatives.

It's not just you. I experience the same thing. It is thoroughly maddening.

I've run into one government website that required email addresses to come from gmail.com, outlook.com, or another common domain, and several websites that won't let you change your email address once registered. It also makes it really confusing if someone needs to share Google Docs with you. So I've moved as much as I can off of Google, but some stuff will linger forever.

I've run into this, too, and found it hilarious because I remember when some sites wouldn't allow you to sign up with hotmail, gmail or other free email provider (over 20 years ago).

This. The real solution here is to keep your data, encrypted, on your own devices. The idea that everything needs to be in the cloud is absurd and naturally leads to concentration of power.

If the data is encrypted, it can go on the cloud, though.

It still is risky, as who knows what tools NSA & cie really have. Even if it feels safe now, it can be stored by them, and what will (quantum?) computers be able to do in a decade? And how will the US gov look like at that time?

Forget that. If they are really so motivated, they can get a warrant to raid your home and confiscate your hard drives.

It's not an apples to apples comparison because an administrative warrant served to Google is much different from raiding your home but if they wanted to they could.

At this point, acting as if America (and many parts of the world for that matter) aren't living under an authoritarian government is futile. We still have freedoms but they're trying really hard to take them away from us.

> If they are really so motivated, they can get a warrant to raid your home and confiscate your hard drives.

This is where encryption comes in.

Encryption is easy to crack. Ever heard of the $5 wrench attack?

Even if the encryption is sound, some day in the future laws can be written that compel a citizen to relinquish their passwords. In 2000, the UK passed a law called RIPA that can be used that way. They say it is only used in emergencies, but who is to say what constitutes an emergency.

https://thblegal.com/news/can-i-be-prosecuted-for-failing-to...

Of course, technical solutions are only helpful for a small portion of the population, while the default is what happens to most people. Since this is Hacker News, for plausible deniability for forced password disclosure, you can use VeraCrypt hidden partitions.

Exactly. People aren't taking SNDL seriously enough.

Isn't symmetric cryptography safe from quantum computers? For your backup, just use a symmetric key, right?

My understanding is that symmetric cryptography is not at risk from quantum computers, though. For a backup, symmetric cryptography is fine.

That is A solution. To be "the real solution", it needs to be within the grasp of a regular person. Self hosting your entire digital life is absolutely asking too much of the vast majority of people

This is like saying the real solution to bad practices of food companies is to exclusively grow your own food, or the answer to anti-repair practices is to only build your own devices, vehicles, etc. Contractors cut corners? Don't try to regulate, just learn carpentry, plumbing, and HVAC plus codes!

You said it better than I could! As someone who does software for a living, do I want to come home and maintain a homelab that hosts photos, email, decentralized social, etc? Hell no!

Even if it's fun as a hobby, I don't want to be on call for my own basic online services.

This is what stops me from doing it. I used to host all my own stuff, with custom setups etc etc. But you end up having no free time, or reduces it at best, and it'll break down at the least convenient time.

The last part about it breaking can of course be true, although knock on wood has not happened to me in quite some time. But I don't find myself spending all that much time on my selfhosting setup day to day. Once a week I do a backup to external storage and upgrade software and that's it most of the time. Once everything's set up it is mostly quite hands off.

That said, I also don't think selfhosting is a realistic solution for most people.

Ideally, self hosting shouldn't be like building your own devices, vehicles, furniture and pipes. It should be like owning your own devices, vehicles, furniture and pipes. Go to a store exchange money and it runs itself with minimal maintenance. I'm not saying we are there, but it's clearly a state that could exist.

Yes. I'm a a software developer, but as a father of three I just don't have the time to maintain self-hosting.

> This is like saying the real solution to bad practices of food companies is to exclusively grow your own food, or the answer to anti-repair practices is to only build your own devices, vehicles, etc. Contractors cut corners? Don't try to regulate, just learn carpentry, plumbing, and HVAC plus codes!

you're acting like these are bad or impossible skills to learn? these is just basic skills that people should have.

> Don't try to regulate, just learn carpentry, plumbing, and HVAC plus codes!

This is exactly what I do, whenever possible. I do my own car maintenance, HVAC, and similar things.

>encrypted, on your own devices

the entire point of encryption is to facilitate communication across adversarial channels, if you want to keep your data in a locker you don't need encryption, and if you use encryption you can keep it stored in North Korea for all it cares

Not only. Someone could break into your house and steal a PC, or you might lose your laptop while traveling. You don't want someone reading your files, passwords, or crypto wallets. You absolutely want some form of disk encryption unless you have exceptionally good physical security.

Use of Google seems to have become implied consent for them to use or give away any and all of your data, for whatever purpose, to any government, legal entity, or advertiser.

Are there good hosted options that will not respond to non-judicial data requests?

Someone is going to say self hosted is better and I don't disagree, but there's limits to how much time I can spend on self hosted stuff.

Protonmail iirc. You can even get documents and photos synced. Not sure how well it works for photos.

Protonmail is widely believed to be compromised and some evidence supporting this has come forth in two separate incidents in the last year.

Protonmail also has gone on record stating that they will comply with legal orders from the Swiss government to spy on and turn over the private data of their users.

https://proton.me/blog/climate-activist-arrest

Swiss law has recently gotten significantly more aggressive in recent years, especially wrt to prosecuting climate activists. Criminal damages for drawing with chalk on pavement, for example...

Look up the "Secret Files Scandal" of 1989 and decide for yourself how comfortable you are with Swiss law.

> Protonmail is widely believed to be compromised and some evidence supporting this has come forth in two separate incidents in the last year.

There has been no evidence of this, stop spreading misinformation. They're clear on what they can and can't hand over and what you can do to reduce the information that they can hand over like billing info. For some inexplicable reason people expect a corporation to disregard legal government warrants and subpoenas. Thinking any company would do this is next level delusion. Even if you self-hosted, you wouldn't be able to escape this because it would just end up with you in jail.

The only protection against that is end to end encryption. And to this day Proton has handed over zero data that falls under their E2EE umbrella.

At best, even if you assumed that they were collecting incoming/outgoing emails before encryption it would be nonsensical to think that this wasn't happening to other providers, it's just the nature of email. Nobody who cares about absolute privacy should be using it as a means of critical communication regardless.

The notion that Proton capitulates and somehow hands over your emails or other encrypted data is false and completely unsubstantiated. Unlike Google on the other hand, who will hand over your entire inbox unencrypted with zero issue to DHS/the FBI merely for writing a letter to an attorney:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2026/02/03/hom...

https://archive.is/kmWHG

I would put Phrack's reputation up against ProtonMail's 10 times out of 10.

https://redact.dev/blog/proton-mail-journalist-suspensions-c...

Well that's subjective. But Proton's response to that is also valid imo (which is also subjective):

https://www.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/1nd07w0/comment/nd...

Compromised how and by whom? In the form of the answer to legally binding Swiss courts subpoenas, or in the sense some other agent(s) have access to their systems and can read the encrypted data?

It's good that people migrate, just remember that you haven't deleted anything. They have all of that data and so do various US government agencies and, who knows, maybe other third parties.

Also remember, that when you exchange email with people who use GMail, then they've got you again.

If you haven’t already, have a look at Immich. It’s a fantastic self hosted replacement for Google photos. They have pretty much perfectly replicated the UI.

Have you tried Ente.io and have any thoughts on comparison? I only use ente and have been happy with it but hear many good things about immich. Does it support E2EE?

Immich is self hosted only so it doesn’t really need e2ee since you can just encrypt the disk of the server. It also runs a load of on server machine learning stuff for automatic people tagging and search.

Ente is selfhosted (also has a hosted version) but encourages family use so I think that's why they do E2EE. It also does all the ML on the client side for people tagging and search.

Mozilla backed it with a grant but that was a few years ago.

I used Ente, switched to immich just recently. Overall immich gives more of a quality feeling, has much more community support as well and a clear roadmap. I also think it will eventually receive nice, native apps for all platforms with the support of sizeable community. E2EE in Ente was nice but that's pretty much its only advantage.

It was 13 years ago that Snowden told us they were using FAA702 as the #1 source of sigint to warrantlessly obtain any data they want from major service providers.

Did you not understand it at the time? Did you not see the news stories? This isn't rhetoric, I'm genuinely curious. It's been public knowledge for a long long time that Google hands data over to the USG without a warrant (likely without even Google eyes on the request, via automated means).

What changed that this story was the one that made you react?

Nice. I want to do the same too. What process/workflow did you use to move all the websites you had given your email addresses to, to move to your proton email? I am guessing it will take several years, but I would like to start the move of my gmail.

it was mainly meta-data they acquired, which paints a fairly complete picture of what you do on the internet anyway. an isp can hand it over also but google likely just has more of it to give.

I've built a tool that scanned my inbox, identified tiers of emails per various criteria (essentially how personal, important, unique/irreplaceable etc the information contained therin is) and built semantic search over it.

My initial motivation for this was the "account 89% full" notice, so I wanted to delete all the old junk to free up some space. But after reviewing what's in there (and I've had that account since ~2004) the opposite sentiment arose: delete everything important, unique, personal. Leave them with the junkyard of various subscriptions, newsletters, just the digital flotsam that's both ambiguous and meaningless -- perfect for appearing both legitimate and irrelevant.

He disrupted a career fair because it had defense contractors.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/oct/05/palest...

Should he be harassed and deported for this?

Yes. If you're a guest in a country and don't follow the law you should be deported. You don't need waste money putting them on trial (except for murder/rape/etc), just deport.

How do you find out if someone followed the law without a trial?

That only works if the accused has committed a crime in their home country too.

Not simply because it had defense contractors…

You made an editorial choice to leave out the part about selling weapons to Israel to use against Gaza.

Once can agree or disagree with the action to disrupt the career.

Either way, I find your omission a bit glaring.

It was omitted because it is irrelevant. It doesn't matter which ally the US sells weapons to. If the Gazans attacked Luxembourg, Luxembourgers have the right to defend themselves (and win) too.

I apologize for bringing up irrelevant information.

You really should. It is self serving information.

I’m sure you’re also applying the same logic to Iran and saying they have a right to defend themselves?

Is your omission of the attacks on October 7 carried out by Hamas equally glaring? How do you know what exactly Israel will do with the weapons? They presumably need this for defense as any country needs weapons for defending themselves.

Ah, thank you. I'm not a native speaker so that's not what I imagined when I read that he "attended the protest for 5 minutes".

I simply assume that everything that travels out of my home through a wire gets tracked and stored by the government.

Everywhere you go, if your phone is in your pocket, you are being tracked and stored, and available to the government.

Everywhere your car goes, is tracked and stored and available to the government.

BTW, the J6 protesters were all tracked and identified by their cell phone data.

> BTW, the J6 protesters were all tracked and identified by their cell phone data.

Many of the insurrectionists were also caught on camera in congress after they broke down the doors and stormed the building. Some even took selfies in the offices of various senators and house reps.

And now they're being let off and called "heroes" by the United States Government.

It's all part of this administration's strategy to set the stage for next time. By pardoning violent criminals, they make it clear that they endorse political violence. Now, when he incites a mob to interrupt the elections next time he loses - in 2026 or 2028 - everyone in the next mob will know that their actions will be pardoned.

Meanwhile it took them 4+ years to find the barely functional autistic pipe bomber in his parents basement. And IIRC, a large part of the FBI at one point assigned to it.

Protestors huh? That’s quite the revisionist take on recent history.

Some of them were identified by DNA left in the shit they took on Pelosi’s desk.

So much of this was backed up by Snowden, not just in the machinations of each of the CODENAMEX operations but also in the attitude that the TLAs felt entitled to implement them in the first place.

There’s been some pushback since then, but nothing to give any confidence that CODENAMEY, CODENAMEZ, and many others have have sprung up.

We keep failing to learn over and over that "Cloud is just someone else's computer." If you wouldn't send a particular bit of data to some random person's computer, then don't send it to a cloud service, either. This includes Gmail, iCloud, AWS, Facebook, WhatsApp, iMessage, everything.

If it's not your computer, it's not your data.

But we don't want totalitarianism. It is like assuming every person on a train is an undercover spy, so you don't say anything bad about the government ever.

This is (mostly, but not entirely) true - but it's also a completely useless statement. It doesn't help anyone change their behavior with regards to seeking privacy day to day, and it doesn't help anyone know what to do to change the state of affairs. It's smug and defeatist, and seems to imply that there's nothing that can be done to change it.

There are many things everyday people can do to insulate themselves from these choices. Encrypted DNS, VPNs, avoiding cloud services, educating friends on why Gmail is really Fedmail, etc. It's not so over-and-done with as you seem to make it out to be.

The Jan 6 insurrectionists in my county were turned in by their neighbors after bragging about it. Cell phone data was used to convict them.

Why would they need to subpoena Google if they track and store everything?

They took pictures and videos of themselves, with geotracking, and uploaded to platforms that do not remove metadata

Does anyone remember when western nations were freaking out that Huawei would handle everybody personal data to the Chinese government?

Now, please tell me that American companies are better at privacy than the Chinese ones.

Btw, some alternative email providers in truly democratic countries:

* ProtonMail (Switzerland)

* TutaMail, Posteo, Mailbox.org and Eclipso (Germany)

* Runbox (Norway)

* Mailfence (Belgium)

In that case, the US was worried about espionage, not violation of civil liberties.

American companies give data to the U.S.

Chinese companies give data to China.

I don't trust either of them, but if I had to choose, I would use Chinese products in the U.S. and vice versa.

None of those countries are interested in free speech, not even this particular kind of speech, especially Germany.

They don't sack you from the street and put you in a Camp. At least not anymore.

Say what you want about especially Germany, but there you don't get sued by the president for billions if he doesn't like your opinion.

Germany will literally fine you for viewpoints, including criticism of Israel. What happens if you don't pay?

Also you can't insult anyone especially politicians (which Americans like to do ) in Germany as it is a crime . https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwachkopf-Aff%C3%A4re

It's worse in Germany. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schwachkopf-Aff%C3%A4re

Everything about his Robert habeck comment was dropped by the courts.

Personally, I would not trust anyone (e.g. ProtonMail) more than Google.

If you have sensitive things in your emails, host your own mail, use GPG encryption or a one-time pad, or even avoid electronic networked machines altogether (depending on the level of security that you require).

Switzerland-hosted services are no safer than others, recall that Crypto AG, who promised to sell secure encryption machines, were just a cover by foreign intelligence services (jointly US/DE-owned/operated by the CIA & BND).

> host your own mail

This is such a myopic view of the situation. Are you going to only exchange emails with people you host as well? Otherwise, anyone you exchange emails with will go through other email providers.

Privacy, technology and actual freedom overlap massively. Stories like this making it to HN are important since many of the people working at Google that had interactions with this, either by creating the tech or being aware of internal policy changes, read HN. Additionally many founders and decision makers in companies read these stories because it hit HN. Knowing that Google will do this changes your legal calculations. Should I trust them to store my company's data? Will they honor their BAA requirements if they are ditching other promises they made?

People may be tired of seeing stories like this appear on HN, but getting this story exposure to this group is exactly why they need to hit the homepage.

> People may be tired of seeing stories like this appear on HN

I am not tired of that at all. But you have people be tired of tons of things, on reddit too. That should not distract discussions. If technology is involved I think it perfectly fits HN and in this regard, the state uses technology to sniff after people - without a real legal, objective cause. It's almost as if the current administration attempts to inflate court cases to weaken the system, e. g. until judges say "no, that's too much work, I just auto-convict via this AI tool the government gave me".

The number of HNers who were earnestly arguing that this was the party of free speech indicates that this absolutely needs to be on the HN front page.

> the administration’s rhetoric about cracking down on students protesting what we saw as genocide forced me into hiding for three months. Federal agents came to my home looking for me. A friend was detained at an airport in Tampa and interrogated about my whereabouts.

> The number of HNers who were earnestly arguing that this was the party of free speech

Do you think any of them were sincere?

I work in this industry. I sample the same distribution in person. I don't think they were, I know they were.

I'm seeing it in a lot of younger tech people. We had a NASA presentation at work about air quality and that forest fires are one of our biggest problems in CA. TWO separate people (from maybe 20-25 attending) brought up "do you think that if we managed our forests better, this could help?" (clearly talking about the crazy "raking the forests" Trump rhetoric). It blows my mind how "intelligent" people can be this stupid.

> "do you think that if we managed our forests better, this could help?" (clearly talking about the crazy "raking the forests" Trump rhetoric)

Were they clearly actually talking about that? If that was their question, word-for-word, it's a good question! We are not managing our forests all that well. No, we shouldn't be doing Trump's dumbass raking "idea", but we should be doing controlled burns, at minimum.

I remember hearing about forest mismanagement long before Trump's presidential runs. It's curious how many people complaining about right wing talking points associate it solely with Trump.

While Trump's "raking the forest" take is clearly uninformed and unintelligent, there's a substantial kernel of truth to longstanding forest management policies making some of these wildfires worse than what they could have been. We've been artificially suppressing fires far too long in a lot of these places, for example.

Not that this is the only factor in play here on a lot of these fires, and once again I do agree Trump's take is idiotic and ultimately he's not helping but pouring gasoline on the issue. Just pointing out, we definitely aren't managing our forests well for a multitude of reasons.

https://news.berkeley.edu/2023/12/12/twenty-year-study-confi...

The federal vs state conflict over prescribed burns doesn't help much either. In states with a much lower % of national forest or blm land or whatever, you get a much larger amount of prescribed burns.

In the west coast, the state vs federal friction reduces how much of that happens, and there's more uncontrolled growth happening. And there's not always a lot that e.g. CA government can do about it if it's federal land.

For example, Minnesota (intentionally) burns like 50% more acreage than California on an annual basis, despite being like half the size. But CA also is like half federal land, MN is like 5% or something.

I totally agree with you there. I'm in no way trying to suggest it was specifically a failure of certain states or individual administrations; its a mixed bag of failures at a lot of different levels with the federal government having a lot of the blame across a wide range of administrations that did nothing to really address the growing problems.

Is that really what you're concerned about that somebody would ask a soft ball question about proposed solutions? Why is questioning the buildup of brush a crazy idea? It's been a mainstream concern for years. I really don't think it's healthy for any inquiry to propose a particular mindset and shut down alternative thinking. It doesn't seem very scientific or intelligent to me.

The issue is that the rhetorical game being played is that by saying the risk is all due to the buildup of combustible materials, it shifts the blame to California's Democratic politicians and away from Republican fossil fuel donors. Clearly in a good faith discussion we'd suggest better forest management, as well as doing everything possible to combat fossil fuel emissions. The problem is that it's not a good faith discussion.

Am I dumb to think that the main worry from fossil fuels right now is CO2, not air quality? (at least while environmental regulations are still mostly intact) It seems reasonable to me to ask about forest management for air quality.

Maybe there was some other sign they didn't ask in good faith? But I have no idea what dumb thing trump said you're even talking about.

Notice how pro-free speech = pro-clearing brush buildup?

It's so weird how people join these partisan factions that have a full package of beliefs that you have to be evil not to share. Woe to your job if you say that you think brush buildup should be cleared; you're obviously racist.

California, and every other agency that attempts to manage forests, does clear brush, in a variety of different methods and approaches.

It turns out the actual problem is more complicated than "duh just light some fires!"

> It blows my mind how "intelligent" people can be this stupid.

Intelligent people don't post condescending, shallow dismissals.

>clearly talking about the crazy "raking the forests" Trump rhetoric

Are you sure about that? I've been hearing for at least a decade that the solution to CA's forest fire problem is something along the lines of reducing the amount of potential fuel that is allowed to build up by either allowing smaller fires to run their course without intervention or alternatively aggressively executing controlled burns on a regular schedule.

Not sure how viable that is as a solution but I do know the idea didn't originate with Trump because it predates his entire political career.

Or maybe they're 20-25, aren't experts in forestry, and are asking generic questions b/c that's what you're told to do as a young scientist?

Which industry? Tech? Surveillance? Government? I know my father in law is a MAGA racist who believes whatever makes it easy to justify his own beliefs. I’m not sure you can ever reliably judge someone’s true motives in a professional setting.

What they meant is "freedom to say slurs", not "freedom of LGBT books in school libraries"

Being trans, I feel this so much.

On a side note, it was interesting after Trump was elected where some of my co-workers wanted to use old pronouns after some laws changed _in meetings_ and I realized the only thing stopping them was the awkwardness it would have been for _them_ in that situation

In the Before Times, I thought that asking Americans to mind pronouns would never work -- not because they were mean, but because it would require the average American to learn what a "pronoun" was.

Of course, it turned out that the average American had no problem learning what a pronoun was if it gave them the opportunity to be mean. Sigh.

There was a certain dark humor from all the people proudly proclaiming to be "against pronouns".

Yes. A particular interest is that of freely insulting people they don't like.

Allowing people they don't like to insult them? Not much of a priority.

I'm all ears if you've got someone that we can put in power that won't rat fuck us when it comes to privacy or civil liberties. Bonus points if they aren't just slightly less bad than the other guy.

Kamala was a lot less bad than Trump. It wasn't close.

You should have been "all ears" during the election...

Chase Oliver was the only non-writein person on my ticket that even bothered to put up much pretenses of running on a privacy and civil liberties ticket.

I do get that. Both parties are clearly bad. But one in particular is and was yelling from the rooftops about how they were going to destroy civil liberties of certain groups, and are now doing exactly what they promised.

Everyone must simultaneously fight for a better system and choose the least-worst option when it comes time for an election.

The one that forced people into their homes, required proof of medical operation to shop at stores, and tries to abolish my second amendment rights? Or the one that god forbid is deporting people that shouldn't be here in the first place.

lmao who was in office in 2020?

The ones who started the covid mandates were mainly democrat governors. Not sure why some people only pay attention to the president lol.

trump claimed ownership of vaccine development, deployment, and mandates when they were successful. i remember you guys booing him about that

also how do you reconcile your belief in second amendment rights with alex pretti's death at the hands of ice, an organization empowered by the current admin?

Uhhh that was wrong, duh??? But sometime bad things happen? I would much rather ice be empowered and we deport the people who should be deported. Its like how some people died from the vaccine.

The guy who decided to wrestle with law enforcement officers performing their lawful duties?

I was definitely one of those useful idiots, not on here though

If it helps you feel better, I voted for free speech and feel that the administration did not hold up their end of the deal. The FTC’s recent “debanking” letter to the payment processors is just theater until something changes. I’ll leave it at that.

You found that after the first administration, in the end, he had earned your vote for Free Speech?

Some people weren't paying much attention to "politics" until Dumpty started going full crazy. Still unclear exactly when that started.

I don't really think he's even gotten that much crazier than his admittedly high 2016 baseline. He has gotten a lot better at execution of said craziness, especially after realizing consequences would be slow and few.

> the administration did not hold up their end of the deal

Trump? Not holding up his end of the deal? Who could have seen that coming!

The Art of the Deal!

Oh don’t get me wrong, I’m unironically looking forward to the other shoe dropping next term, so that we can finally get a generation of politicians that can bring on the great reset. Too much legacy software running on the kernel and it can no longer be maintained.

Ok but why? They did not campaign on freedom of speech or expression, they actively campaigned against both...

IMO there are no surprises from this admin, they are doing what they promised.

Who is “they”? I voted on party lines, state, federal, and local. The way that people on the left shut down discussions more readily is what contributed to it, using tactics such as bringing particular candidates into the discussion despite me never volunteering that I was pro-Trump per se in this thread.

It’s probably going to be awhile before I’m sympathetic to the “other” side though (it’s still two sides of the same turd after all), seems some things haven’t changed yet.

You voted against free speech. The sooner you can admit to that the better.

Trump has been very clearly against free speech well before 2015. He's been anti-American and anti-constituion well before he came down that escalator.

It doesn't make me feel better that you're still pretending otherwise.

Please give examples to your accusations if you want to be taken seriously.

If only there were signs.

Twitter files

You want to elaborate?

Do you?

Sure. He ran on being an anti-immigrant authoritarian in his FIRST campaign. Those were the signs. Now, tell me what you meant by "Twitter Files".

Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from consequences of that speech

It does if those consequences are imposed by the government.

So I'm free to murder, I'm just not free from the consequences of murder?

Depends what the consequences are, obviously.

What is freedom of speech a freedom from?

Freedom of speech is the freedom from State retailiation.

What the hell are you on about?

>The number of HNers who were earnestly arguing that this was the party of free speech indicates that this absolutely needs to be on the HN front page.

The number of HNers (and people at large) who think that both corporate parties don't vehemently oppose free speech and privacy is disturbing. Right now, today, a massive number of Democrats who have spent years decrying Trump (and Republicans as a whole) as fascists are lining up to support a "clean" reauthorization of section 702 of FISA, which allows (despite the phony claims of its supporters) the warrantless and unconstituional surveillance of US citizens (and others). If our government was controlled fascists, why would anyone give them the power to spy on anyone without a warrant? Because it's all kabuki theater and everyone in DC is part of the same team, and you ain't on it.

I don't think "both sides" works very well when one side has been supporting the murder of citizens for exercising their free speech, calling for denaturalization of citizens for expressing the wrong opinions or being from the wrong community, openly suppressing criticism by threatening to revoke broadcast licenses and barring reporters from DoD briefings for not taking sufficiently flattering photos.

I don't think anyone posting here thinks that Democrats are pro-free speech and pro-privacy, and it would be great if we could have politicians that truly support free speech and privacy rights. But of the options currently available, one is much less bad than the other.

Well, the "worst" side has currently returned to power, the other hasn't. There's no reason to belive that the other side wouldn't become worse in its own way to further solidify its power. Before you talk about priors, remember that Trump's 1st turn also wasn't as unhinged as this. While it is okay, perhaps advisable, to temporarily support the current less worse side, try to not build house for people that would gladly step on you once your usefulness runs out. As OP said: it's a small club, and you ain't in it.

Yes, the point is to keep picking the option that's better on the things important to you. Blind loyalty is why the current guys are acting with such impunity.

>I don't think "both sides" works very well when one side has been supporting the murder of citizens for exercising their free speech

Obama was murdering US citizens for exercising their free speech, and their children, more than a decade ago.

>But of the options currently available, one is much less bad than the other.

If one person says they are going to stab 99 people and the other person says they are going to stab 100 people, you could argue that the guy who stabs 99 people isn't as bad, but I won't ever support either one of them or consider them worthwhile no matter how many others do.

So in the trolley problem, you would abstain from supporting either side? I think that's actually a choice of supporting the status quo.

You are entitled to your opinion that I'm supporting the status quo by refusing to support the abject murder and depravity of one group of people over another, who may be slightly less murderous and depraved, and I'm entitled to my opinion that you are complicit in the the murder and depravity of the people you support.

Trump's second term has had dire consequences for the US that are simply not on the same level as Obama, and it could have been avoided. The democrats are also terrible, but it's a matter of harm reduction. In this case, I would strongly argue that the difference was greater than 99 and 100.

You should vote to do harm reduction. Elections happen regardless of what you do. Whether 30% or 100% of Americans vote, the winners of elections still get access to the same amount of state power. The system does not require our political participation to continue to exert control our lives. Abstaining from voting is not an effective tactic in reducing the legitimacy of the system. That tactic might work in other situations, but not in this one.

I hope you will keep your distaste for both parties, but still vote for the lesser evil, even if it's distasteful. Because I think we should help that one person not get stabbed. And if indeed you have voted for the lesser evil and my post has a tone that assumes otherwise, I apologize.

Knowing that Google will do what changes your calculation? Abide by the law? I would be surprised if Google's so-Called promise to notify the subject of the inquiry was not couched in terms of being subject to legal requirements. Companies are not activists, and they shouldn't be expected to act like activists.

Google is acting like an activist here. They went after this guy willingly.

They were also very eager to supply weapon tech to Israel when the Gaza war started, far more eager than they ever were to supply it to our own country. Leadership was letting employees push back, then all of a sudden in ~2023 they told everyone to shut up and physically gated off the HQ. Then told everyone to shut up even more after some people broke into Thomas Kurian's office.

Maybe the founders have personal reasons. Sergey Brin called the UN antisemitic for calling out genocide in Gaza.

There is no architectural design where some covert team in Google can't exist to leak out data. After all the system needs to be able to let the user see their data. Unless they go open source, e2e encrypted, user managed keys and key backups, and user verification of client code. Which also means ad free.

That is very much not possible at Google. Attempting to do it covertly would trigger any number of alerts.

I don't think you understand how silo'd the workers are at a place like Google. Their physical plant security, as well. They do security like any other federal defense contractor would.

When you call in to Support at Google, you'll get someone who is a specialist in a certain thing, and they have access to only the tools and data necessary to do their particular job with your account. They rely on your disclosure of stuff to them. I often find myself uploading files to Drive, or images to Photos, and sharing them Public so that the Googler can follow a link.

As an anecdotal example, I've visited Waymo depots a couple of times. (Not actually Google, but a sister company under Alphabet.) The depot is completely nondescript, and I wouldn't have identified it if I didn't know what it was. There are a few Visitor parking spaces up front. And the front entrance leads to a Security Desk. The waiting room has about 4 chairs and a table of interesting design. The Security Guard will see you know. And there's a door beyond.

I was there to pick up "Lost & Found" items. You basically get the impression that security is tight as a drum. The guards can be kind of informal; there are employees circulating in and out; but ain't nobody going to exfiltrate a bunch of data, if they appreciate their freedom and civil rights.

And yet... this debacle. Snowden. etc.

"Don't be evil" they used to say.

They dropped that a long time ago, at least a decade ago. Which is really an odd thing to do, what company would think that not being evil was holding it back but Google clearly did.

And we all ought to have dropped them, then. (Most of us, myself included, did not.)

No other big american company says "don't be evil", if you aren't dropping Apple and Microsoft then you it doesn't make sense to drop Google.

While this is a common quip that I find pretty funny, it's not really true. What actually happened was that while updating their code of conduct[0], Google changed it to only say "don't be evil" in one place instead of multiple[1].

Google was also sued by former employees who claim they were fired because they tried to prevent Google from doing evil[2], in accordance with the code of conduct they agreed to. Sadly that lawsuit ended with a secret settlement, so we'll never know what a jury thinks. Since "don't be evil" is still in there I suppose it could come up again.

[0]: https://abc.xyz/investor/board-and-governance/google-code-of...

[1]: https://www.searchenginejournal.com/google-dont-be-evil/2540...

[2]: https://www.npr.org/2021/11/29/1059821677/google-dont-be-evi...

"Don't be evil" was dropped after the DoubleClick acquisition completed their internal takeover of the old "Don't be evil" Google (Google purportedly purchased DoubleClick, in reality they 'did' purchase them, but then the old DoubleClick advertisers slowly took over old Google from the inside out).

What is called "Google" today is actually the old, fully evil, advertising firm "DoubleClick" pretending to be "Google" to make use of the goodwill the "Google" brand name used to have attached to it.

Couldn't be more simplistic. Of course a three trillion dollar Google would behave differently than a 2008 Google with or without DoubleClick.

Even today, I would argue an average sample of Googlers will likely think slightly differently about these things than an average sample of Facebook employees; but of course both will have to respond to influence from the external world: i.e. customer, society, govt.

this is a fun story, but... its a story.

here is the google code of conduct: https://abc.xyz/investor/board-and-governance/google-code-of...

scroll down to the bottom, and you will see:

"And remember... don’t be evil, and if you see something that you think isn’t right – speak up!"

Honestly this slogan was always a joke. Obviously an evil company would say that.

I do think they earnestly tried to swim against the current, but yeah, they always knew where it was taking them. Removing the yellow background behind paid results was the turning point IMO.

> The goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users.

- Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, 1998

Idk what they've even done that was not profit-motivated. They loss-led newer products in the 2000s just like everyone else, then 2010s started tightening up, then 2020s went to maximizing profit and paying out. That's ok in a way really, they're a corporation after all. But nobody ever took that "don't be evil" slogan seriously unless maybe they were Google employees.

Ok idk if anyone cares but wanted to fix it, 2020s they went to maximizing profit on some things, but are still aggressively spending and growing on other things.

Such a wise observation from a paper published in the now-defunct journal "Computer Networks and ISDN Systems" after being rejected for the SIGIR conference...

...then BackRub turned Gogool mis-spelled, and the rest is history.

These days Google fails at even the much simpler "Don't be fscking creepy."

That plus aggressive avoidance of anything resembling customer service and what sounds like an internal environment that may be moving towards cage matches makes it worth avoiding for anything important.

Promises are broken, policies are changed and political regimes vary. You need to make sure that you consider the future and not just now. And that means NEVER handing your data over in the first place.

That's easier said than done. Even if you don't directly use Google services, chances are that Big Data is still watching you on every website you go to. And if you have a mobile data plan, your service provider knows exactly where you are 24/7.

It's insane to trust a company in the way you trust a person. Companies can change their terms of service, their policies, or even their entire ownership or leadership at any time. We have seen over and over again that companies are seldom held accountable for even explicit breaches of prior agreements unless there's either collective action or someone very powerful affected. The only way to trust a company not to leak your data is for them not to have it. The only way to trust a company not to break their product or exploit you with it is for this not to be possible.

I would love more information.

What exactly did the request for information say from DHS? What exactly was the reason for them to look for you specifically (certainly there are many others protesting)? Following up on that, how do others avoid something like this? What red flags should be avoided and how?

There may or may not be a solid answer for any of this. But this article feels like it's made for awareness, when it could also be made for action, with the right details included.

> That notice is meant to provide a chance to challenge the request.

That's the author's interpretation. The promise doesn't indicate anything of the sort (as of this writing). And users cannot challenge these requests -- users don't own the data (in the US). The promise is very clear that Google will provide the data, if the request is compliant.

Now the text of the notification was past tense, that the information was provided, whereas the promise is crystal clear that Google will notify before providing the info, but to me that could amount to a simplification of "we have verified that the request is legally compliant and will be providing the info to them in 250 ms".

Don't get me wrong, I'm not on Google's side. I'm a huge privacy nut. But the fix is to not give your info to Google, not trust that they will abide by any policy. Especially in a case like this where your freedom is at risk. Most people are completely unaware and unthinking but this guy seems that he was fully aware and placed his trust in Google.

Every time this happens the debate goes the same way — trust Google or don't, switch to Proton, self-host everything. But the real issue I believe isn't whether we trust Google. It's that the data existed somewhere it could be taken from in the first place.

I've been thinking about this a lot while working on a side project. I ended up making it work entirely offline — no server, no account, no network calls. Not out of paranoia, just because I couldn't come up with a good reason to ask users to trust me with their data. Turns out the best privacy policy is just not having anyone's data.

Outstanding, and ethical too. So tell us, did you forgo monetization forever, or do you have a plan for revenue? Perhaps it’s not an issue for you, but knowing what you have up might help others conceive of a shift of the Overton window such that it’s no longer a given that that must be harvested.

What’s your project by the way. Would be curious to know more, if you’re up for sharing now. Later is fine too.

No monetization plan — it's all local, no server, near-zero cost to run. Free and open source. I believe good tools should be accessible to everyone. Open source first, monetization will figure itself out down the road.

It's called Hodor — prompt launcher for macOS.

Yeah, in this case, the cell carriers did a lot of the work.

I suspect Proton are subject to the same laws as Google.

We could and should have better privacy laws, though foreigners will always be subject to less protection.

That said, a lot of this comes down to a failure in education around privacy and the cultural norm around folks thinking they have nothing to hide. The intuition most people have around privacy, and security, is incredibly poor.

I think the issue is deeper than that. In the US, data about you belongs to the company that owns the hardware that the data is stored on. In the EU, data about you belongs to you.

My point is aside from policy, knowing what you give up to use that free software is a huge part of the equation.

One thing to note when talking about "foreigners" is that many rights in the constitution specify "persons". So citizens and non-citizens theoretically have equal rights from that standpoint. So I agree in general but it's worth noting that he was supposed to have constitutional rights to speech and against unreasonable searches.

Yes, sorry, by foreigner I mean non-citizen.

Others do have constitutional rights, but the legislative and executive hold plenary powers in the realm of national security and immigration.

As far as the Constitution goes, non-citizens have the same rights as citizens (at least for all the rights given to "persons") and there's no carveout actually in the Constitution for national security or immigration. Practically you have a point given case law but even in cases of immigration and national security these Constitutional rights still apply (regardless of what any branch of either Congress or the president try to do).

You can read the bill of rights here (no mention of citizens or national security): https://www.archives.gov/founding-docs/bill-of-rights-transc...

I never said there was a carve out? Citizens and legal permanent residents enjoy more rights beyond the constitution than non citizens.

I'm not a lawyer, but see the privacy act, FISA and EO 12333.

It may come as a shocking surprise here, but human rights are not actually conferred by the Constitution or any other piece of paper.

Human rights are “endowed by our Creator” and so the actual function of the Constitution is to protect those rights, and any logical person could reason that our Creator would probably not endow only certain persons or citizens with those rights.

If you’re going to believe in a creator anyway, why not decide they have arbitrarily chosen to favor one group over another?

[flagged]

No. Do explain why that’s relevant.

It's ironic that the country that screams freedom loudest is actually not that free after all.

> Am I now a marked individual? Will I face heightened scrutiny if I continue my reporting? Can I travel safely to see family in the Caribbean?

As difficult as it sounds, we need to wait this crazy dude out, and do our best Vance doesn't take over.

What's up with America not allowing any critique on Israel-a foreign state?

The author not say whether the subpoena prevented advance notification.

The Google policy he linked to says:

> We won’t give notice when legally prohibited under the terms of the request. We’ll provide notice after a legal prohibition is lifted.

This is the key detail everyone is glossing over. NSLs and subpoenas with non-disclosure orders are extremely common in these cases - Google literally cannot notify you without being in contempt. The EFF article frames this as Google "breaking a promise" but if there was a gag order attached, they had no legal choice.

This EFF article does not announce any legal action they are taking as a result of Google complying with the government's request. I'm not really sure what the purpose of the article is. If you object to the NSL non-disclosure requirements, sue the US Government. Google is probably blameless here.

This is why E2E encryption is important

This incident validates the opinion that for an US citizen, it's better to hand over his private data to a foreign (read Chinese) cloud company than a US one.

It's not just ICE that can abuse subpoena to get your data-- scammers and other fraudsters can file a federal lawsuit against a bunch of John Does and then run around issuing subponea for records to attempt to uncover their identities.

There appears to be no defense against this beyond not allowing companies access to your data in the first place.

Google broke its promise… and the drunken sailor that I met last night who told me he loved me did not text back…

Has Apple done this? Trying to figure out a safe place to store photos in the cloud without having to self host.

The fact that they complied with an administrative subpoena makes it so much worse. "Administrative" anything essentially has about as much value as toilet paper unless it goes to court and the judge agrees with whatever agency wrote it.

The best time to ditch Google was years ago. The next best time is now.

Obama set the record for deportation. I wonder if ICE used similar methods when he was president. There might be a roadmap for digital invasion of privacy going back that far.

> ...he briefly attended a pro-Palestinian protest. In April 2025, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) sent Google an administrative subpoena requesting his data.

incredible.

My simplified model always was: If you give it to Google (or MS, Amazon, Meta, ...) you basically already gave it to all these agencies.

Was that ever wrong?

I used to joke that by using Google products, the NSA backups my data, but I’m not sure I like ICE having access to my YouTube history.

Just get a friend overseas to email you and it kicks off the backup. Best UX of any Google product.

It's definitely important to fight all the key battles including against companies like Google, but the root of the problem is the government. I would suggest that it 's worse than any particular government. At a fundamental international level, we don't truly have a civil society. Things operate on a strategic and often criminal basis. And there is a strangely prevalent pervasiveness of ethnic hatred and tribalism. And a fundamental lack of respect for human life.

"Who, exactly, can I hold accountable?" Yourself. Don't trust Google, or anyone with big money and influence.

He was banned from the Cornell Campus for participating in a violent demonstration, inciting violence against Jews.

It's very much not clear whether he is in a legal right or not. And no other country besides Western liberal democracies would allow anything like this. Certainly many Muslim countries do not allow it.

As an aside, a pro-Palestinian African is a laugh. Do you think Palestinians give the slightest damn about black African's plight?

When visiting other countries never take part in protests. Avoid areas where protests are likely to occur, travel advisories sometimes explicitly point out areas. It is probably best to avoid anything political.

"In September 2024, Amandla Thomas-Johnson was a Ph.D. candidate studying in the U.S. on a student visa when he briefly attended a pro-Palestinian protest."

A promise from google isn't worth the pixels it's presented on.

> for breaking that promise

eff are a joke "they pinky swore!"

Still waiting for the story that apple does the same.

"You either die a hero or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain" - Larry Page, Sergey Brin, Eric Schmidt - chanting to each other after a round of ayahuasca.

If you live in the United States, use Russian email services; if you are in Russia, use Chinese email services; if you are in China, use Gmail

It's fascinating to watch the absolute dishonesty/mental gymnastics of all the free speech absolutists who were crying that they could not say what they want on other people's platforms just a few years ago. Now they are justifying actions by the state (against whom the free speech protection was designed), with reasons like there were people at the protests who hurt a police officers feelings by shouting something mean. Let's remember this is the regime which pardoned people actively engaging in violence at the Capitol.

an apropos bit from the NYT today:

President Trump pressured House Republicans on Wednesday to extend a high-profile warrantless surveillance law without changes, declaring on social media: “I am willing to risk the giving up of my Rights and Privileges as a Citizen for our Great Military and Country!”

Mr. Trump urged the G.O.P. to “unify” behind Speaker Mike Johnson for a critical procedural vote that had been scheduled for late Wednesday night. The vote would clear the way for House approval of a bill extending a major section of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA. The law is set to expire on April 20.

The statute, known as Section 702, permits the government to collect the messages of foreigners abroad without a warrant from American companies like Google — even if the targets are communicating with Americans.

You should submit this as a HN article, this is important.

If Trump was able to imprison other political opponents who were not immigrants, he would do it.

Take this as a warning.

Unfortunately, "Google let the government have my private data" is right up there with "President Trump said one thing yesterday, and now he's saying the exact opposite" in the what-did-you-expect hall-of-fame.

What's interesting to me about this submission is that the author believes this policy document contains a "promise"

https://policies.google.com/terms/information-requests?hl=en...

I cannot find any promises in that document nor would I expect to find any. It's a policy not an agreement

At best, the policy contains "representations"

The author might claim he was deceived by misrepresentations, and this deception had consequences for him, amounting to measurable harm

But proving these statements about Google's internal operations are false is difficult. Proving Google's intent in making them is even more difficult

It's incorrect to interpret a "policy" comprising statements about what Google allegedly does internally as an agreement to do anything in the future

Promises can be enforced through the legal process. Generally, Silicon Valley's so-called "tech" companies do not make "promises" to users that can be enforced. Imagine what would happen if they did

Sounds like promises are worthless and only capabilities matter.

"Google promises that it will notify users before their data is handed over in response to legal processes, including administrative subpoenas."

Where?

The policy does not contain the word "will" and makes no reference to what Google will (cf. "may") do in the future

The policy is comprised of statements about what Google has done in the past

The claims here are for deceptive trade practices, not breach of agreement (enforceable promise)

Google could agree, i.e., promise, to notify. It does not. Readers should ask themselves why

Instead Google states it typically notifies, i.e., has notified in the past, or may notify under certain circumstances

No doubt Google can show the statements in the policy are true at least some of the time. It is just disclosing what it has sometimes done in the past. Nothing in these statements binds it to doing something in the future. It could decide to change its procedures and update the policy at any time. It can also make justifiable exceptions at any time for any reason, irrespective of whatever it has done in the past

The "Guest author" of this EFF page should not be surprised when he/she is ignored by the Attorneys General contacted

It must really really suck to be a data-holder, that every single government out there views as some piggy bank, sitting there waiting to smash & grab.

It's certainly been quite the turn recently. But being between the people and the governments that seemingly inevitably will turn into arch fascist pricks & go to war against the citizens is not an enviable position. Hopefully many jurisdictions start enacting laws that insist companies build unbreakable backdoorless crypto. Hopefully we see legislation that is the exact opposite of chat control mandatory backdoors. It's clear the legal firewalls are ephemeral, can crumble, given circumstances and time. We need a more resolute force to protect the people: we need the mathematicians/cryptographers!

Thanks for sharing, this should get more attention.

This is a good reminder that you should assume there's no privacy on the internet whatsoever, unless you really go to extensive lengths to cover your tracks. And even then, you have to be really careful.

I've long maintained that anyone who has a personal email address ending in @gmail.com is clueless, both about digital privacy/security, but also about society, history, and geopolitical events.

It was a decade+ ago that Snowden explained to us, with receipts, that the USG has warrantless access to everything stored in Apple (iCloud Photos and iCloud Backup are unencrypted and contain a copy of everything on your device), Google, Microsoft, Amazon, et al. You have to be an ostrich with your head in the sand to not be well aware of this at this late juncture.

You'd have to be a moron to let the feds read all of your mail without a warrant by default - any country's feds.

Google has been a fish (carp) for long time now, just as another boring corporation.

Huh, I don't think anyone expect Google to maintain privacy for them, Google deliberately leak 500K user info to various governments, every year [1].

https://transparencyreport.google.com/user-data/overview

The stats are per half a year, so even more than that.

And we don't even know what the guy is really wanted for. I think EFF was just waiting for this to happen to make a political statement. That's what they do, if course, but how the hell can they be sure they're aren't vouching for a criminal?

Stop using google, ffs.

Left wing agitators will continue to FAFO tbh

this is just a case of play stupid games win stupid prizes. total non issue.

USA, are you ok bro?

There isn't much further to go down the slippery slope it seems, if he only did what he claims: attending a pro-Palestine / anti-genocide protest at a university for five minutes.

TL;DR: Trusted an American big tech with your data, what did you expect??

A brand new car.

Paying the price of your own choices.

rare google W

This is so wrong. What's the solution? Google class action lawsuit?

Start actively divesting of Google where possible. There are a lot of 'Switching to 100% European cloud' stories hitting HN lately. The more things like this happen the more stories like that will be there. Google and US tech are becoming toxic at many levels and an appropriate response is to mitigate risk by going to other providers.

>Switching to 100% European cloud'

Yea, they are even worse. They would sell out in a sec once goverment is going after them.

What is the basis for this claim?

The law of their respective country most likely.

Realistically? Treating visiting or studying the USA as visiting or studying in North Korea. Would you stand in Kim Jong square and protest their foreign policy? If you would I salute you. If something terrible happens, I will not blame you, the victim. But if you surprise pikachu at the results, you are a moron. Foreigners will end up making a choice -- study or protest -- but don't expect they'll be able to manage both.

The powers that be in the USA have signalled they won't tolerate foreigners protesting state department policy on their soil. This is obviously unconstitutional. But it won't be changed through lawfare.

You're going to sue Google for following the law of the land they're incorporated in? And demand that they - as a mega corporation - just ignore laws?

How about making sure that your laws don't authorize ICE data requests? How about that?

Such are the times that he feels he must say that he only attended the protest "for all of five minutes" and that he was protesting "what we saw as genocide".

He is almost ashamed of his views because of the current climate but he didn't do anything wrong, apparently.

He should be ashamed. Why did (does) he see the punishment for the 7th octobor attack as a genocide but the 7th octobor attack itself as not-an-issue? (not an attempted genocide)

The law protects people up to a point. Collaborating with the enemy is an issue especially if you're not a confirmed citizen.

Is it OK for some Israelis to do genocide against Palestinians if some Palestinians tried to do genocide against Israelis? IMO no, there is no justification for anyone to do genocide.

Honestly, I think the author is expecting too much from companies that are under jurisdiction of the US Government, especially in the situation as of 2026. It is telling that when they say "federal government" in the article, they implicitly mean the US Federal Government and not those of the UK or Trinidad and Tobago.

The author (in my opinion) needs to raise this with their own governments (UK is probably the one where they can get better action) to push for data sovereignty laws so that it's at least UK or Trinidad and Tobago that are the governments involved in investigating their data, via appropriate international warrants.

I don't see how your opinion matches the article.

Expecting a company to hold its own promise (of notifying the user before it happens) sounds like a pretty minimal expectation, hard for me to imagine it being "too much".

Furthermore, how would data sovereignty affect whether Google holds its promise on notifying users?

It's not anything close to minimal. Expecting a company to hold their promise against an authoritarian government is an extremely strong expectation.

It's even harder than people doing the same, because at the end of the day companies are a bunch of stuff that can be taken over and controlled by other people.

My opinion doesn't match the article. I do think the user has a legitimate grievance; I am merely suggesting a different avenue for fixing it.

> Expecting a company to hold its own promise (of notifying the user before it happens) sounds like a pretty minimal expectation, hard for me to imagine it being "too much".

I am saying that this expectation is unrealistic for a British/Trinbagonian citizen, given the political situation in the US right now. For a US citizen having the same issue (Google gave their data to the government without a safeguard), it would be realistic.

> Furthermore, how would data sovereignty affect whether Google holds its promise on notifying users?

The user could file a lawsuit in the UK about Google handing over their data without notification and proper jurisdiction. If Google UK employees were involved in handing over this data, they could be prosecuted and fined by the UK government.

Overall what I am hinting at is that this would incentivize Google to put in proper safeguards for non-US citizens. Currently they seem to be treated as a separate, non-protected category.

You're essentially saying "Don't trust Google at all and ask your local government to put pressure on Google" and I agree with that but you frame it in a needlessly apologist way. If a company makes a promise and breaks it, that should always be a reason for concern, and the article is right for pointing that out.

Yeah, I'm sorry for coming off as a Google apologist. That wasn't my intention.

I'm merely saying that I'm skeptical that calling them out for breaking a promise is a useful path to go down. The alternate path (often proven to have been effective) is to pressure your non-US regulators into regulating them more. What I foresee is that this will either make Google follow more safeguards for everyone, or incentivize them to get out of non-US jurisdictions altogether.

If you were loyal to the country you chose to live in, you would support the protection of their people, not yours. Ask the Somalis.

Weird to be more upset at Google about this than ICE or the other parties involved.

Weird to assume that anyone is more upset with Google than ICE about this when nobody said anything to that effect.

Weird to decide that you have to choose to be mad at one party or the other, and that getting mad at one party somehow indicates that you are less mad at the other party.

Weird to make this comment in response to perfectly valid criticism of Google by the EFF.

Fair, but we all have a limited outrage budget. Getting mad at Google for not disclosing when they may not have legally been able to is not for me.

Weird to make that assumption. You don't see hundreds of thousands of people marching in the streets to protest Google do you?

Overseas citizen foments government trouble? That's terrorism in Australia. Should be in yours and the countries you raise trouble in.

What are you trying to do. Affect the policies of a democratic country that isn't yours? Shame on you, and go do it in Russia.

Recently in SF, the police have been very open about their use of drones to follow thieves (completely violating their privacy). It is like China where there are posters telling you drone surveillance is in effect.

I think we need to expand CCPA so that the government cannot simply spy on you by claiming that “criminals” are near you. Even criminals should have their privacy protected or else they will just label everyone criminals.

If you're being followed/tracked by a drone, you are clearly not in a place where you expect privacy. How are we confusing being out in public and expectation of privacy issues?

how does using a drone to follow thieves violate anyone's privacy? how is it any different than police pursuit in a marked car?

Don't know the specifics of what the OP is referencing, but some police departments are experimenting with some wild tech. Check out the Baltimore "Spy Plane", for instance. It used high-altitude Cessna airplanes (rather than drones) equipped with a massive array of cameras, that recorded everything.

It allowed analysts to:

- Watch and record a 30-square-mile area of the city simultaneously, in real-time.

- If a crime occurred, they could "go back in time" to see where a suspect came from. Ie. track a vehicle from its destination back to its source.

- Or they could follow a vehicle "forward" in time to see where it parked, identifying potential hideouts or residences.

Of course, it was recording everyone, not just criminals.

Just fyi, you deserve what happened to you. I am Palestinian & what you are doing is turning our situation into a social trophy.

Maybe you guys should read about what you are supporting first.

In the US, “not my president” is a mindset many seem to believe in. That not agreeing with the actions is somehow enough to wash one’s hands of responsibility for their country’s actions.

> In September 2024, Amandla Thomas-Johnson was a Ph.D. candidate studying in the U.S. on a student visa when he briefly attended a pro-Palestinian protest.

Why would you go to a country for study purposes - where you explicitly tell the visa officers you're on US soil ONLY for study purposes - which is what the student visa explicitly grants you to do and then participate in a protest against the very country that granted you the study visa and then get mad that you are under investigation and would have been kicked out for violating the said visa? That's so bizarre.

And probably bought a pizza at some point, too. That's not studying. Shameful liar.

That's not a meaningful comparison. Eating a pizza isn't the same as violating the terms of your visa - which is an explicit contract between you and the country you're entering which you sign before you enter the said country.

Please quote the clause he violated in said contract.

I think most countries on earth have very little tolerance for visitors protesting against the government.

Yes. And whether protests should be allowed or not as part of the visa is a different discourse, but most countries simply forbid it.

Author of the article is a journalist, attending a protest could very legitimately be for study purposes in his case.

> where you explicitly tell the visa officers you're on US soil ONLY for study purposes

What in the world does “ONLY for study purposes” mean? 24 hours a day, every day of the week?

> participate in a protest against the very country that granted you the study visa and then get mad that you are under investigation and would have been kicked out for violating the said visa? That's so bizarre.

First, he briefly attended the protest. Not the same as participating. I doubt the data from Google indicated he was holding a sign, shouting slogans, or speaking on stage. And it doesn’t sound like there was any marching or sit-in involved. (And if so, for 5 minutes?)

Second, why are you willfully equating a pro-Palestinian protest with being an anti-US protesT? Was the purpose of the protest to raise charitable funds, encourage more open discussion about the war on campus, provide moral support to Palestinian classmates, and/or any of a myriad of other purposes?

Finally, even if the purpose of the protest was politically motivated —- to push US policy on Israel and Palestine to change, how is that bizarre? In your mind is any protest that seeks to change a government’s policy at that moment an assault on that government, or on that nation? Someone who protests the death penalty, protests for stronger/weaker abortion laws, stronger/weaker gun laws, etc?

This is the USA we’re talking about. Despite all our faults (and they are legion), it is the bedrock of our founding and our core principles that democracy is a participatory process. Not just on Election Day. Throughout history we have advanced as a people and a nation because individuals have stepped up and spoken up. That has always been what has pushed us forward.

Bizarre indeed.

> 24 hours a day, every day of the week?

Strawman

>First, he briefly attended the protest. Not the same as participating. I doubt the data from Google indicated he was holding a sign, shouting slogans, or speaking on stage. And it doesn’t sound like there was any marching or sit-in involved. (And if so, for 5 minutes?)

You misunderstand. I'm not against protesting, nor am I against the reasons behind his protests. He may have had valid reasons. What I'm saying is - if you are a green card holder or a citizen, this would be very little risk vs going to a foreign country in a study visa and doing what he did. If you pay tens of thousands of dollars to get a degree from whatever country, for whatever reasons, why would you want to gamble all of it?

Also, if you are getting into a fight, you need to make sure you have the upper hand. As it stands, it is him who is in hiding and crossing borders, not the government agents or the corporate white collars that gave away his data. That's my point.

"When in Rome, do as the Romans do"

Political events are usually part of student university life in western-tradition universities. From my personal experience, it was hard to completely avoid them if you had any involvement in the student extracurricular life.

I disagree. I cultivated a preference for the basement terminal labs while I was attending UCSD. While I was definitely in touch with the communist/socialist underbelly of dissenters there, I never found myself wrapped up in rallies or protests or any sort of political activism.

In fact, my mother had strongly discouraged me from attending UC Berkeley, because of the politicized environment there, the protests, the drug use. I had no interest in that stuff to begin with!

I read the on-campus commie newsletter that was distributed free. I ate at the vegan cafe out in the woods. It was literally called "The Ché Café". But I literally attended no protests or rallies. If they went on, I was steering clear or unaware of them. I went to rock concerts and other stuff at the student center, so I wasn't ignorant of events there.

Furthermore, in community college, I found engagement with a diversity of student groups, and most of them weren't political. There was an Asian-Pacific Islanders group (I am not) which had social events and films and no political advocacy (because they were probably oriented towards cultural exchange as well as assimilation.) There was an entrepreneur's group, an amateur radio group, and a cybersecurity group. Yes, there was a lot of activism on campus. There were rallies and protests and art installations. But I didn't partake, and it was basically easy to cultivate friendships and networking with apolitical people.

> From my personal experience, it was hard to completely avoid them

> I was definitely in touch with the communist/socialist underbelly of dissenters there [...] I read the on-campus commie newsletter that was distributed free.

Basically, this doesn't sound like disagreement to me. You did come across political activism, and you have some minor exposition. Granted our experience may be different, since we attended different universities at different times ; and so the magnitude of political activism was likely different. But academic freedom is a core tenet of western universities, and that means political life has always been part of campus life.

You seem to draw the limit at "attending protests", but this is an arbitrary limit. If, instead of profiling who attended the protests, the inquiry had been a network graph analysis of the commie underground, you may well have been listed.

Political rights are protected in the US. They don't have an arbitrary threshold such as "it's fine to read the commie newspaper but it's not fine to protest a topic". You draw an arbitrary limit which sets you on the good side, but what happens in reality is that this article questions whether it's fine for some government entity to draw that arbitrary line as they see fit. That's not exactly the same thing.

I feel bad for both sides in this. Google can be put under so much pressure by the government, they are basically forced to do what they says; yes they can fight it, but if the government wants something badly, they will get it, they have powers (especially under the very broad definition of 'national security') to just get automatic compliance, using the same powers they can silence the companies from publishing anything about it too.

I of course feel bad for the student here too, he should not be targeted for exercising his rights to peaceful protest.

But Google is not the enemy here, I would bet good money their hand is forced to comply and their mouth is silenced. The enermy here is the overreaching government and ICE

Google's sin here is not in obeying a warrant, it's by pressuring a strategy of extreme concentration of power and intermediation. Google wants to know who you talk to, where you are, where you work, how much money you make, what kind of jobs you are interested in, whether or not you've searched for recipes to make controlled substances, etc. etc. We can be happy that they failed, or at least are only weakly succeeding. They almost completely dominate email services, which were supposed to be distributed and run by whomever. This is hugely anticompetitive practice, right in the middle of our relatively new ubiquitous information infrastructure. One side effect of this is that they are one-stop shop for governments to get extremely detailed profiles of..to be honest, almost of all of us. But that's just one of the unfortunate side effects.

Or they could implement end-to-end encryption for many of their products and they wouldn't be able to give the government the data, even if they wanted to. But that would hamper them to analyze data for ad targeting.

I do not feel bad for Google here and they are at fault. If they are in a tight bind now it is only because they have eroded the privacy safety buffer so thin over the past few decades that they are finally having a hard time walking the line. If they had been fighting for strong, clear, boundaries then this wouldn't be an issue. Instead they have pushed automatic TOS changes that let them do what they want when they want and ignoring privacy settings and selling info to anyone with no consequences. Yes, they are likely in a 'tight bind' right now but it is one that they set up for themselves.

How does one feel bad for a corporation, especially of this size? Double so for one that quite literally removed "Don't be Evil" as its motto and from its code of conduct.

The corporation has no feelings and I don't imagine the board members or shareholders are feeling bad about this.

> removed "Don't be Evil" as its motto and from its code of conduct

It's still in the code of conduct

https://abc.xyz/investor/board-and-governance/google-code-of...

And it still doesn't mean a damn thing.

I don't! For one thing, Google is not a person and has no feelings. Individuals within Google decided to comply. And none of those individuals would face any significant consequences for not complying. The US government, even now, has an extremely good track record of treating companies separate from their employees.

The US is not in a full blown authoritarian regime. Big companies aren't failing to resist because they fear dire consequences. They're doing it because they don't care. If they think caving to the administration will result in $1 in additional profit compared to fighting it, that's what they'll do.

Big corporations are paperclip maximizers but for money. Treat them like you'd treat an AI that's single-mindedly focused on making number go up.

> Google can be put under so much pressure by the government, they are basically forced to do what they says

This is true, but only because Google is a horrific monopoly and is allowed to continue to be (and to grow) only by the grace of government. If they don't do what they're told, they won't be allowed to steal in the way that they are accustomed to doing.

I don't think that anybody who controls Google misses a moment of sleep over it, though. They're being "forced" to do it like a kid is being "forced" not to do their homework if you offer them candy. It's easy and lucrative to be passive.

Utter nonsense. All it would take is for all of these trillion dollar companies to stand up to fascism. Yes, corporations don't have a conscience, but this would be good for their bottom line. They chose not to.

I believe there are many US citzens discussing here. I always wanted you to ask: do you ever wonder why there are retaliations related to pro-Palestinian protesters in your country? Do you think sometimes why your mainstream media name them always this way while they actually are anti-Israel protests? Are you aware about anti-boycott regulations which you have since many years?

I think this is much more important than what big-tech do.

It's almost like we can pay attention to multiple things at the same time.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com