Google Handed ICE Student Journalist's Bank and Credit Card Numbers

Published: 2 days ago (February 10, 2026 at 12:48 PM EST)

6 min read

Source: Hacker News

Google Provided ICE With Extensive Personal Data on Student Activist

Google supplied Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) with a wide array of personal data on a student activist and journalist, including his credit‑card and bank‑account numbers, according to a copy of an ICE subpoena obtained by The Intercept.

Background

Amandla Thomas‑Johnson (Intercept article) attended a protest targeting companies that supplied weapons to Israel at a Cornell University job fair in 2024 for only five minutes. The action resulted in his being banned from campus.
When President Donald Trump assumed office and issued a series of executive orders targeting students who protested in support of Palestinians, Thomas‑Johnson and his friend Momodou Taal went into hiding.

Google’s Disclosure

In April, Google informed Thomas‑Johnson via a brief email that it had already shared his metadata with the Department of Homeland Security, as The Intercept previously reported.
The full extent of the information the tech giant provided—usernames, addresses, itemized list of services (including any IP‑masking services), telephone or instrument numbers, subscriber numbers or identities, and credit‑card and bank‑account numbers—was not previously known.

“I’d already seen the subpoena request that Google and Meta had sent to Momodou [Taal], and I knew that he had gotten in touch with a lawyer and the lawyer successfully challenged that,” Thomas‑Johnson said. “I was quite surprised to see that I didn’t have that opportunity.”

The Subpoena

The subpoena offers no justification for why ICE is requesting this information, other than that it is “required in connection with an investigation or inquiry relating to the enforcement of U.S. immigration laws.”
ICE also requests that Google not “disclose the existence of this summons for an indefinite period of time.”

Thomas‑Johnson, who is British, believes ICE requested the information to track and eventually detain him. He had already fled to Geneva, Switzerland, and is now in Dakar, Senegal.

Legal and Advocacy Response

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), representing Thomas‑Johnson, and the ACLU of Northern California sent a letter to Google, Amazon, Apple, Discord, Meta, Microsoft, and Reddit calling on tech companies to resist similar subpoenas from DHS without court intervention.
The letter asks companies to:
1. Provide users with as much notice as possible before complying with a subpoena, giving them the opportunity to fight it.
2. Resist gag orders that would prevent tech companies from informing targets that a subpoena was issued.

“Your promises to protect the privacy of users are being tested right now. As part of the federal government’s unprecedented campaign to target critics of its conduct and policies, agencies like DHS have repeatedly demanded access to the identities and information of people on your services,” the letter reads.

The letter also references other instances where technology companies provided user data to DHS, such as a subpoena sent to Meta to “unmask” the identities of users who documented immigration raids in California. In that case, users were given the chance to fight the subpoena because they were made aware of it before Meta complied.

Expert Commentary

Lindsay Nash, professor at Cardozo Law and former staff attorney with ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project, said that by not giving prior notice, Google deprived Thomas‑Johnson of his ability to protect his information.

“Your promises to protect the privacy of users are being tested right now.”
“The problem is that it doesn’t allow the person whose personal information is on the line and whose privacy may be being invaded to raise challenges to the disclosure of that potentially private information.”
Neil Richards, law professor at Washington University St. Louis (privacy, internet, civil liberties), explained the legal framework:

“Tech companies’ data‑sharing practices are primarily governed by two federal laws, the Stored Communications Act, which protects the privacy of digital communications, including emails, and Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act, which prohibits unfair or deceptive trade practices.”

“Under both federal law and the law of every state, you cannot deceive consumers. If you make a material misrepresentation about your data practices, that’s a deceptive trade practice.”
Richards noted that the question of whether corporations are clear enough with consumers about how they collect and share data has been litigated for decades, citing the FTC’s 2019 lawsuit against Cambridge Analytica.

Google’s Position

Google’s public privacy policy acknowledges that it will share personal information in response to an “enforceable governmental request,” adding that its legal team will “frequently push back when a request appears to be overly broad or doesn’t follow the correct process.”
According to Google’s transparency report, the company has overwhelmingly complied with the millions of requests made by the government for user information over the last decade, with a noticeable spike in the past five years. It is unclear how many users were given notice of those requests.

Google did not respond to a request for comment.

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Hards said that cases like these emphasize the need for legal reforms around data privacy and urged Congress to amend the Stored Communications Act to require a higher standard before the government can access our digital data. He also said the federal government needs to regulate Big Tech and place “substantive restrictions on their ability to share information with the government.”

“It’s hard to know exactly how tech companies are handling our personal data in relation to the government, but there seems to have been a shift in optics,” Richards said.
“What we have seen in the 12 months since the leaders of Big Tech were there on the podium at the inauguration is much more friendliness of Big Tech towards the government and towards state power.”

From Dakar, Thomas‑Johnson said that understanding the extent of the subpoena was terrifying but had not changed his commitment to his work.

“As a journalist, what’s weird is that you’re so used to seeing things from the outside,” said Thomas‑Johnson, whose work has appeared in outlets including Al Jazeera and The Guardian.
“We need to think very hard about what resistance looks like under these conditions… where government and Big Tech know so much about us, can track us, can imprison, can destroy us in a variety of ways.”