Basically they are issuing (administrative) subpoenas. When they go to court (at the expense of the account holder) they back down so they don't get ruled against / told to stop issuing these subpoenas.
Noted in the article, when this happened in 2017 twitter denied the governments request. Now Meta, etc are rolling over for the government.
I hope courts find a way and the spine to tell them they're not valid. The government usually has a strong presumption of regularity but more and more courts are recognizing they're no longer a fair participant and will abuse the courts to get their way and are dropping that presumption.
Because for all of the issues I take with Obama over Snowden, there were also attempts to keep promises and maintain stability and order within the country. Say what you will but there were no literal masked thugs kidnapping people at gunpoint under Obama. With many things you have to weigh a person’s actions in balance, and in balance Trump is way way way way way way worse than Obama.
I lost faith that the government would respect my right to privacy with Binney, Klein, and Snowden. I then lost faith that the government wouldn't go out of its way to openly attack and subjugate me with Turmp. A pattern of escalation is still escalation.
But to anybody only just waking up to this unaccountable surveillance-industrial complex now: Welcome! While I wish you had been with us after Snowden, I am glad you are here now.
Wrong. Stop both sides-ing this. What the republicans have been doing is nothing at all like what the democrats have done. All of the work of making Americans distrust their government from the executive in the last 60 years have come from Republicans: Nixon, Regan, Bush, and now Trump.
Wrong. Stop being so brainwashed by party politics.
Corporate dems - which are all of them in the last two decades - doing little for the average citizen, protecting megacorps, accelerating wealth concentration, protecting the billionaires, have also played a big role in maling the average citizen distrust their government.
Do you really think not a single one of them knew about the Epstein files? You can't be taken seriously if you do. And if you don't, their participation in keeping it hidden too builds distrust, even if 20 times more reps were involved. The dem candidate of only 10 years ago must have known. The chance she didn't is so small.
Snowden's revelations built distrust. Everything he revealed was absolutely "both sides". You can say "one side has been much worse", and sure, that's fair. But pretending that the other has been squeaky clean and that their own actions haven't played a huge role in the current situation is just sticking your hand in the sand.
People are tired of having to choose between "awful A" and "even worse B". If the dems stopped nominating "awful A" and replaced then with "decent A" then it'd be a landslide. But they won't. They haven't changed one bit. Mamdani, finally an example of "decent A", was hindered. They didn't want to see him win at all, and only started cheering for him when he finally did. By a huge margin, because he's a "decent A".
Until this changes, until the day that decent candidates of Mamdani are universally cheered on and given the full first choice backing by that party, not a single thing will get better, and it will only get worse, because it means the inevitable next rep winner will be even worse.
I'm not sure how you got this mindset, but it's not great, and I'm sure deep down you're smarter than this. These aren't football teams to cheer for.
Corporate dems has suck. They are slightly better than the corporate republicans of the 90s and early 2000s.
Why? Because they knew that stability and economic prosperity were things people wanted. They of course never went far enough and didn’t ever want to rock the boat.
But, importantly, what you’re trying to do is wrong. Trump is not like corporate dems. It’s significantly worse. There’s not a single redeeming thing about this regime.
And all republicans are 100% behind trump. That means the entire Republican Party is guilty and responsible for what trump does.
So yes, it is appropriate to paint the entire group with one broad stroke. They’re all guilty of enabling a criminal to shred the constitution and destroy the entire fabric of US society for the next few generations. (The US has backslid to the late 1800s - blatant corruption everywhere).
The concept of "both-sidesism" is a thought-terminating cliché that attempts to be a more reasonable sounding way of saying that one side is holy and the other is sinful that was invented on social media platforms for propaganda purposes.
> What the republicans have been doing is nothing at all like what the democrats have done. All of the work of making Americans distrust their government from the executive in the last 60 years have come from Republicans
Many examples have been given in this post's comments alone and are already well-known by the average HN user, such as:
1. The Snowden Leaks (Obama)
2. The Pentagon Papers (exposed under Nixon, describes actions under Kennedy and Johnson administration)
No, it’s an attempt to weigh the actions of either side in aggregate. What you’re doing is trying to argue that everything is awful and so why bother. I’ve seen numerous examples of one group acting well-meaning and sincere, and numerous examples of the other group taking advantage and sewing chaos. If you think they’re both the same you’re either not paying attention to everything or you only care about a very few things. Either way it’s going to be impossible for me to find common ground with you as long as you refuse to try to work with what you’ve got.
Number 1 was Bush. The republicans crated the NSA surveillance machine.
Number 2 — know your US history. The democratic and republican parties flipped philosophies in 68. Their dems went pro integration and the southern dems went to the Republican Party, which remained segregationist. Nixon was closer to Kennedy and LBJ than Humphrey.
Number 3 is nothing - it wasn’t active targeting. They implemented rules to check all organizations. The republican affiliates ones were skirting the rules. They looked at orgs with certain things in their name, but it was an investigation. No government action came of it. It was not abuse. This is another lie by the republicans.
1. If I give you a loaded gun you're still responsible for shooting somebody.
2. It is an oversimplified view to suggest that Democratic and Republican parties completely flipped during the late 60s but they certainly did reverse views on race.
3. They put extra scrutiny organizations with "Tea Party" or "patriots" in their names and admitted as much. Unless the Obama administration was secretly Republican and put out this "lie" to negatively impact themselves as part of some grand reptilian conspiracy.
> On Friday, May 10, a top official with the Internal Revenue Service dropped a bombshell. IRS staffers had singled out conservative organizations with “tea party” or “patriots” in their name that were seeking tax-exempt nonprofit status, subjecting them to extra scrutiny to see if they were abusing the tax law as it relates to political activity.
You're not allowed to seek tax exempt status if you are a partisan organization. Searching for political terminology to determine that is perfectly logical.
When Europeans wonder why the U.S. is so backwards and barbaric about not implementing a National ID scheme. Look no further, ladies and gents, because at least once every 200 years, the population has a day of supreme brain off and puts someone like Trump in office. Once that happens, you too will appreciate why it should be hard for the government to do things.
The issue is with the US is that ID is not free. I just had to pay 50 bucks to renew my driver's license. renewing a passport was 150 dollars the last time I checked (which was 2021). So any more costs just to function in society is a major impact to quite a few rights. The most hot topic being voter eligibility.
this is foreign to EU because, to my knowledge, getting an ID is free.
europeans are well versed in the consequences of autocratic takeover of their governments, why they pretend to not know even recent history of the 20th century, I'll never understand.
Noted in the article, when this happened in 2017 twitter denied the governments request. Now Meta, etc are rolling over for the government.