Canadian Alleges Legal Intimidation by U.S. Homeland Security Over Social Media Posts ⇥ cbc.ca

Chris Iorfida, CBC News:

A Canadian is fighting back in U.S. federal court over what he says is an attempt by the Department of Homeland Security, through Google, to seek “vast swaths of information” about his personal life following social media posts critical of Donald Trump’s administration.

[…]

On Jan. 30, the Canadian X user disparaged ICE in a post that received nearly 96,000 views, according to this week’s complaint.

[…]

The complaint at hand, however, states that John Doe was not seeking entry to the U.S. and has not done so since 2015.

The only details we have of this case are as alleged in the complaint (PDF) and the partially redacted summons (PDF), and they are incomplete. The tweet in question is not quoted, the account is not named, and, though there are enough clues that I tried to track it down, X’s search feature sucks, so I have no idea what it said. Perhaps there is another reason the Department of Homeland Security is trying to obtain details of the Gmail account; perhaps, too, the government was not aware it was targeting a Canadian. (Though, if it were targeting a U.S. resident for their speech, is that any better? Probably not!)

One thing that remains unclear is how the government obtained this email address. Iorfida writes of a previous case:

In the first Trump administration, CBP issued a summons to Twitter in 2017 requesting information regarding the account of a user on Twitter, which the company objected to.

It would be unsurprising if X was entirely compliant with the government’s request.

What is shocking to me is that the U.S. government is apparently going after someone whose X posts, according to the complaint, “have received tens of thousands of views or more; collectively, his posts have received well over 100,000 views”, and this single tweet might represent around half that total. I do not intend to be mean, but those are not the numbers of a notable X account. Officials in the most powerful country in the world are apparently going after some random Canadian for an unmemorable and basically unpopular tweet.