This week news broker that Donald Trump’s Twitter account was subject to a warrant back in January. By itself this is only noteworthy because it is Trump. The real problem is the secretive nature of these warrants — no one is allowed to tell and the subject is not allowed to know.
This is not new. For year, the FISA court has been so secretive that the ACLU was denied access to any related decisions, the Wall Street Journal has written about the abuses, But the pales compared to the number of non-FISA requests against social media.
Google alone lists roughly 70,000 requests for user information per year*:
It’s unknown exactly how many of these have some sort of secretive order — where Google is barred from disclosing to the target that there even is a warrant out for their information. Until a few years ago, most companies were not even allowed to report that they had any secret warrants served against them.
Forbes reported in 2019:
The statistics for other social media companies are just as bleak.
There is no difference between a warrantless search and seizure or a warranted search that you never know about. You have no rights to exercise when the government refuses to acknowledge that they are being violated.
It doesn’t matter who the target is, outside of the most sensitive, classified and national security implicating cases, all Americans have a fourth amendment right to know when there is a warrant out for any of their information.
*Includes non-warrant sources, that amount to roughly the same thing.
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