> In several cases, the DHS has withdrawn a 1509 summons after it was challenged in court and before a judge could rule on its legality. That may be a deliberate strategy to avoid having a judge rule on the legality of the summons.

They have a toy, they’re increasingly abusing it, then trying to dodge from it being taken away.

The thing is nobody has to comply with 1509 summons, DHS has to go to court to enforce it. A lot of the fault is on a company that complies without just ignoring it.

The government isn't big brother, they just let mega corps do all of the spying via "ads" and then just buy your data from a data broker to whom you let have all of your personal information for game on your phone that gives you a little dopamine hit.

We somehow let corporations just take the data that we all create every day and then sell it and make billions in profit.

I want that to change. I want to own any and all data I create interacting with anything anywhere, to be copyright by me, in an enforcable way. I should get paid for the data I generate. The problem is that as long as we, collectively, allow ads that spy on us in exchange for really nothing other than amusement and that pursuit of the next dopamine hit we get. I can't enforce agency and ownership of the data I create unless we, collecively, change the rules. We have the power to do that by voting for the candidates that speaks to the issues you care about. We also need to tell politicians what we want, because if we do not, nothing will change. I think the data we create should be automatically copyright of the person generating it, so I can make money from my data if I choose, or not to, if I don't.

Don't you want to own and make money from the data you create every single day?

Apparently in this case, T-Mobile caved and Google didn't:

> The DHS also sought and obtained six months of phone records for Fort from T-Mobile, which included records for more than 10,000 calls and text messages. Fort was not notified the government was seeking the records until mid-July, when government lawyers produced them to her lawyers. Fort’s lawyers wrote in a filing this week they were “stunned” to see the government had unilaterally been able to obtain a log of her communications after a judge had warned them about obtaining records about a journalist.

...

> In Fort’s case, Google did not comply with the summons for any of the accounts. The company responded to the DHS by saying it had not offered evidence of how it was related to a customs investigation.

> A Google spokesperson said the company reviews each request for data it gets to ensure it is legal and pushes back when it is too broad or doesn’t follow the correct process.

Note that the DHS budget ($100bn) is sufficient to provide healthcare to every uninsured child, and about half (EDIT: a third) of what it would cost to provide universal healthcare to every American under 18 at the CMS average rate.

At the end of the day this sort of wastefulness eventually attracts attention.

Perfect thread to drop tmailplus. It's for journalists who can't rely on centralized systems.

Become your own tiny infra

https://gitlab.com/here_forawhile/tmailplus

I'm surprised they still need a law.

This is like UAE and North Korea behavior.

If you have to spy on these particular groups then you know you’re doing something wrong.

Most countries are on the path to curtail privacy in the name of security and profit. The US, however, is really good at being at the forefront of the movement while pretending to be otherwise. It’s extremely obvious to outsiders how blissfully ignorant the average american is.

Use small platforms where possible. Oh wait, small platforms get sanctioned as terrorist organisations. I've been thinking I need to get my own IP range, but that requires exposing a lot of personal information.

“It’s outrageous conduct on so many levels. It’s hard to know where to begin,”

Do they not get that we live under an authoritarian regime? The regime doesn't care about the law. They have been installing their own people at every level of government for years, taking over parts of the government, and granting themselves new powers. When eventually every powerful person in government is part of the regime, it won't matter what the law says. This isn't hyperbole, this is how they have been operating for 1.5 years.

This is what the beginning looks like. The end looks like Germany 1942.

ah, but the boot is off of a16z’s neck, so it’s all worth it!

Friends don't let friends use SMS/MMS

  19 USC 1509 – dealing with customs imports

edited title for length

Honestly not sure how we escape this shit pile of fascist government organizations other than completely abolishing the DHS, ICE, and the majority of police departments at a minimum and start fresh again. But I don't see that happening without a complete upheaval and downfall of both major political parties which seems even more unlikely.

They are disgusting pigs and the sooner the public sends them to political hell the better

Welcome to the dictatorship.

One has to wonder whether all Trump voters wanted this. I don't think so.

we went full authoritarian empire in less than a year

imagine two more years by 2028 what this nightmare is going to look like

even if the Dems get the Senate somehow it will barely slow them down

Bush admin was horrible with Iraq War and economy crashing but this is a whole new level of corruption

and I am starting to believe USPS is most definitely going to destroy voting by mail handing them the midterms anyway while supreme court slow-walks sorting it out if not making it 100x worse

DHS is using obscure law to snoop on China and Russia

FTFY

Domestic terrorists do exist. And Don Lemon got kicked out of the CNN. Not surprised he’s mentioned here. Not everything is an abuse of power.

>There is no judge in the loop. You don’t have that independent authority to scrutinize the demand and to say whether or not it’s legitimate,

The 4th amendment does not require a judge in the loop to decide if a search is unreasonable. This type of thinking leads to adding bureaucracy making law enforcement less efficient. Criminals benefit from having law enforcement's throughput minimized so they will campaign at every turn to make the government less and less efficient and require more and more procedures for an investigation so it all comes to a halt that way as long as they aren't most wanted 1-10 for a year they can get away with what they are doing.