DOJ Is Using A Grand Jury To Force Reddit To Unmask An Anonymous User

from the government-cheat-codes dept

The government’s reliance on grand juries to bring charges against activists, protesters, and the president’s personal enemies has been misplaced. Increasingly, grand juries are refusing to give the government what it wants: rubber-stamped indictments that will allow it to move forward with vindictive prosecutions.

But there’s still something grand juries offer that regular courts can’t: secrecy. If the government doesn’t want the public to know how it’s building cases, it’s best bet to drag everyone involved in front of a grand jury whose secrecy can’t easily be pierced without a concerted effort by involved parties and the assistance of sympathetic judges.

There’s a good reason the government doesn’t want the public to know what it’s doing in this case detailed by Ryan Devereaux for The Intercept. There’s some shady stuff happening here, along with some incredibly incompetent stuff.

According to a subpoena obtained by The Intercept, Reddit has until April 14 to provide a wide range of personal data on one of its users, whom U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have been trying unsuccessfully to identify for more than a month.

That’s the brief summation. The details, however, make this whole thing look sketch as fuck. Reddit received the first demand for this user’s data on March 4. Two days later, it informed the user that the government was seeking this information. The Reddit user secured legal representation from the Civil Liberties Defense Center.

The user’s lawyers looked through the targeted account and couldn’t find anything that might be considered criminal.

Commenting on a Minnesota Star Tribune article, another Reddit user posted that Ross might be welcomed as a hero in Florida or Texas. John Doe responded by sharing that Ross had lived in Chaska, Minnesota; grew up in Indiana; and served in the Indiana National Guard — biographical details that were circulating widely at the time. “Hopefully he moves up to Stillwater State Penitentiary,” they wrote.

In another post, a Reddit user asked what they should write on an anti-ICE protest sign. John Doe suggested the lyrics to a song: “Urine speaks louder than words.” In a third instance, Doe wrote, “TSA sucks and we all know it.” According to the Reddit user’s attorneys, these were the most aggressive posts they could find.

While one would hardly expect legal reps to dish out inculpatory information in response to journalist’s questions, the lack of anything possibly law-breaking speaks for itself. The whole thing looks like a fishing expedition by the DOJ on behalf of ICE — something that’s confirmed by the administrative subpoena ICE issued in hopes of unmasking this user.

In its summons, ICE indicated the basis for its request was a provision of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930. John Doe informed the court that they had nothing to do with the kind of activities at issue in the near-century-old statute, which governs boat show sales, wild animal imports, forfeited wines and spirits, and cross-border trade in other goods.

In case you’ve forgotten, the C in ICE stands for “Customs.” That means whoever “wrote” this subpoena didn’t even care enough to ensure the correct boilerplate was copy-pasted into the subpoena. ICE wants to punish this person for their speech, which it seemingly believes adds up to a federal crime. In support of its demand for user info, it inserted boilerplate pertaining to customs enforcement.

Then again, this might have been intentional laziness. As The Intercept notes, the Trump administration tried to use the same customs statutes to unmask his critics back in 2017. Those efforts were criticized by the still-operable Office of the Inspector General.

ICE withdrew the tariff-related subpoena. Then the DOJ sent another one nearly a month later, this time targeting Reddit itself:

This time, instead of requesting information on an individual user, the government ordered Reddit itself to appear before a grand jury — not in California, but in Washington.

The request came not from an ICE field agent but rather from a Special Assistant U.S. Attorney in D.C., where Reddit has received the highest number of federal law enforcement information requests. The records sought spanned a period roughly three times longer than what ICE had originally requested.

That’s the backdoor the DOJ is trying to use. It can’t get the stuff it thinks will generate an indictment via the usual Smoot-Hawley whatever the fuck. And since it’s not interested in seeking an actual warrant (which would require judicial review) to compel Reddit to produce user data and information, it’s hoping it can accomplish the same thing in a secret court far away from anything resembling an adversarial process, much less the watchful eyes of a federal judge.

That’s the Department of Justice deliberately routing around a crucial part of the justice system in hopes of securing ill-gotten “wins” against critics of Trump, his policies, and his administration in general. With any luck, this attempt won’t work because it’s been exposed. But rest assured, this administration will never stop trying to bypass the systems of checks and balances that might occasionally prevent it from doing whatever it wants.

Filed Under: administrative warrants, doj, grand juries, ice, trump administration

Companies: eff, reddit