Google handed ICE student journalist's bank and credit card numbers
Source: Hacker News
Google Provided ICE With Extensive Personal Data on Student Activist
Google gave Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) 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
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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 protest got him banned from campus.
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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.
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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.
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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 gives no justification for why ICE is asking for 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 data to track and eventually detain him. He had already fled to Geneva, Switzerland, and is now in Dakar, Senegal.
Legal Response
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (representing Thomas‑Johnson) and the ACLU of Northern California sent a letter last week to Google, Amazon, Apple, Discord, Meta, Microsoft, and Reddit, urging tech companies to:
- Resist similar subpoenas from DHS without court intervention.
- Provide users with as much notice as possible before complying, giving them the opportunity to fight the request.
- Refuse gag orders that would prevent 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 cites other instances where technology companies supplied 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 a 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 the 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,” Nash added. “And I think that’s important to protect rights that they may have to their own information.”
Google did not respond to a request for comment.
Legal Framework
Tech companies’ data‑sharing practices are primarily governed by two federal laws:
- Stored Communications Act – protects the privacy of digital communications, including emails.
- Section 5 of the Federal Trade Commission Act – prohibits unfair or deceptive trade practices.
“Under both federal law and the law of every state, you cannot deceive consumers,” said Neil Richards, law professor at Washington University St. Louis who specializes in privacy, the internet, and civil liberties. “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, referencing the FTC’s 2019 lawsuit against Cambridge Analytica.
Google’s Stance
- 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 requests over the past five years. It is unclear how many users were given notice before or after those requests were fulfilled.
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Note: The original text ended abruptly after “Ric”.
Hards on Data‑Privacy Reform
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.”
Richards on Big Tech’s Shift
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,” Richards said, “is much more friendliness of Big Tech towards the government and towards state power.”
Thomas‑Johnson on Journalistic Resistance
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.”