Trump Admin Attacks Reddit to Get User's Data that Speak Out Against Him?

0:04All right, this MAGA regime likes to flood the zone and thankfully there are so many incredible journalists in the United States doing incredible work exposing the fascism and the erosion of civil liberties. And here to discuss his reporting with me is Ryan Devereaux. He's an investigative journalist and fellow at Type Media Center. He's out with an incredible piece for The Intercept titled, A Redditor Criticized Ice. Trump is trying to unmask them by dragging the company to a secret grand jury, and he's here to discuss it with us. Ryan, welcome to iHip News. This is really disturbing, and there's just so many stories out there that I want to highlight how just a random Some Redditor can be in the crosshairs of this fascist regime.

0:56Ryan Devereaux:Well, thanks so much for having me. Yeah, we published a story last week on The Intercept, which looks at this case that you described where a person had been posting on Reddit. The government didn't identify exactly what the offending post was, but their lawyers have surmised that it was likely to do with ICE and the shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis. sort of a bit of backstory over the past year since the Trump administration came in. They've been sending a ton of what are known as administrative subpoenas to different digital media companies. So the big social media companies, Meta, X, and Reddit, and requesting data on anonymous accounts that post related to immigration enforcement.

1:40Ryan Devereaux:These are accounts that are sometimes tracking ICE operations in the streets, naming agents who are often masked. The government claims that this is doxing and that this is a threat to officer safety. But in a lot of cases, what we have seen are instances where individuals seem to be doing nothing more than venting about their frustration with the federal government and they get hit with one of these subpoenas. In this particular case, it sort of originated in the Northern District of California. An ICE agent from Virginia had requested information and about a month's worth of really extensive electronic data on a user.

2:21Ryan Devereaux:They didn't say, the agent didn't say exactly what had tipped them off, what caused this. Reddit alerted, which they often do in these sort of instances, the user, that there had been a request for their data. The user then contacted a group called the CLDC, it's a center for civil liberties defense, civil liberties defense center in Northern California in the district where these tech companies are based. They filed a motion to quash this administrative subpoena. What they have found, what these advocates have found is that when they actually enter these motions to quash in federal court, ICE is generally backing down in these cases.

3:01Ryan Devereaux:So when people get representation, when they say, hey, we're going to fight this, ICE has been backing down. But what happened in this case, as far as we can tell, maybe the first instance of this happening is that that motion was filed. The lawyers, the defense attorneys, the civil liberties advocates received an email from an assistant U.S. attorney there in the Northern District of California saying, hey, we're withdrawing this request for data. death. And just a few days later, four days later, Reddit receives a grand jury subpoena, not in Northern California, but in Washington, DC, not from an ICE agent, but from an assistant US attorney, a federal prosecutor in the capital.

3:45Ryan Devereaux:And they're calling not this individual Reddit user to appear before the grand jury, they're calling the company itself to turn over this data. So what civil liberties advocates, privacy advocates are saying is that this indicates a significant sort of escalation in what the administration is doing, targeting the companies themselves and the very existence of a grand jury subpoena, a federal grand jury subpoena out of the Capitol, suggests the possibility of a potential significant criminal case sort of centering around this free speech activity. Many argue we don't know what the substance of this case is because Those grand juries are incredibly secret, but we know that its existence suggests something serious.

4:31So we know that like Zuckerberg, Musk, bent the knee to Trump, I mean, that's widely documented. So do we know if the owners of Reddit, are they knee benders to fascism?

4:44Ryan Devereaux:You know, Reddit's an interesting case in comparison to some of these other tech companies. companies, you have groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which tracks privacy protections in the context of these big social media companies. In general, Reddit has scored fairly high on their rankings in terms of protecting privacy. Reddit certainly makes a big deal of their privacy protection policies. We don't know how much to take them at their word because a lot of this happens behind the scenes, but outwardly they very much sort of project the image of a company that does a lot to protect its data.

5:21Ryan Devereaux:In the course of reporting this story, Reddit directed me to some transparency reports that they published in the past year that really include some very interesting data about the moment that we're in right now. So, the past year, the first six months of last year, Reddit recorded more requests from law enforcement, these sorts of administrative subpoenas, grand jury subpoenas, that sort of thing, than they've ever received at any other point prior to their reporting. Now, they don't disaggregate that data to tell us which law enforcement agencies specifically are requesting data, but it is US law enforcement agencies that are making the most requests.

6:02Ryan Devereaux:And a lot of those requests are coming from federal law enforcement, a lot of them are coming out of DC. And so it is a strong indication that these companies, Reddit in particular, but also Meta and Axe are receiving a lot of requests on accounts. Requests for data are not unusual for these companies from federal law enforcement. Normally Reddit will get a number of requests for child endangerment type of cases. But what's different in this moment is a ton of requests from the government about anonymous accounts that appear critical of the administration's immigration enforcement regime. Yeah, and it makes you wonder, remember all the don't tread on me flags at the January 6th, the don't tread on me people?

6:50Yeah, absolutely. And here we have a clear, you know, attack on free speech. There is this, I've read about this, I think it's NSP-17 or something like this. That's right. national security memo where they are wanting to get files on people probably like me or like you or these Reddit users and label us. It's a pre-crime labeling. They're labeling people with a pre-crime. Do you see any link between that NSP-17 and these requests coming out of Washington in this pre-crime era that DOJ, Trump, Stephen Miller, they're wanting to, it goes back to what the president ran on, which is the enemy from within.

7:38Any reporting that this is all linked in that umbrella of this regime?

7:43Ryan Devereaux:Yeah, so NSPM 7 was a national security sort of memo that went out to all of the sort of ecosystem of federal law enforcement agencies is sort of outlining what the administration's law enforcement priorities and agenda are. And as you indicated, folks can look it up. There's a whole list of sort of criteria that the administration is asking, ordering its agents to be on the lookout for. A lot of this stuff has to do with being critical of immigration policies. Anything that threatens sort of traditional, and this is not my sort of description of what, this is not my interpretation, is literally what it says.

8:31Ryan Devereaux:It's sort of anyone that's critical of traditional American values, sort of Christian, traditional American values, critical of immigration enforcement. That's the sort of broad umbrella that the administration has tasked its federal law enforcement agencies to be sort of targeting and zeroing in on and paying attention to. So I think what we've seen, and this is pretty clear at this point, is obviously the administration's immigration agenda is quite unpopular politically right now. In addition to a really intense crackdown on undocumented people themselves, the administration has widened the aperture to include critics of its policies.

9:15Ryan Devereaux:We saw this playing out obviously very dramatically in Minneapolis where I was earlier this year. I think that these cases like we're discussing here in this instance of the Reddit user being targeted with administrative subpoena and then the government sort of getting that batted down and turning around and filing a sort of order that a major, one of the largest tech companies around to appear before a grand jury in Washington, in DC is part of the same sort of project. I very much believe that the kind of Miller agenda that lumps immigration in with cracking down on the left are intimately intertwined.

9:56Yeah, I do too. They call him, his nickname in the White House is Mr. Prime Minister. And I don't think they're, this is my opinion. I think that whether it's Kristi Noem or Senator Mark Wayne Mullen, they're just a puppet. I think Stephen Miller runs DHS. He's the one who puts the pressure on the people in Minneapolis to be aggressive with protesters. So let me ask you this. I think one of the biggest American things, it's a shit talk. I have a podcast called I've Had It because I like to shit talk, right? So I think a lot of Americans like to shit talk. The president likes to shit talk. Look at his social media feed.

10:35It's ridiculous. He's the biggest shit talker on the planet. So you're telling me I can go on Reddit right now and I can be like, I sucks. I think Stephen Miller's a prick. I think what they did in Minneapolis is bullshit. I think they're behaving like fascist Nazis. And then they're going to come after me via some secret grand jury. That's what's happening here to Americans shit talking on Reddit.

11:03Ryan Devereaux:Yeah. So a bit more context about this case in particular. like i said we don't know what triggered it for ice but this person who's identified in court records as john doe you know got legal counsel and they did a review of all of this person's posts um you know recent posts and what they saw were some you know they posted in a thread uh that shared an article a news article that identified jonathan ross who was the ice officer who shot Renee Good in January in Minnesota. The comments from this poster in that account, which I report on in the piece, I include three different posts that are probably the spiciest of anything that the attorneys could find.

11:51Ryan Devereaux:And they were even the most aggressive in that thread. So again, we don't know what the context or what the substance of this case that the feds are apparently pursuing is but yeah your description uh of what the sort of ramifications could be uh if you're going on reddit to shit talk um seems accurate it seems to be what happened in this case you're saying he named the shoot the the ice uh agent that shot renee good he named no no the the this subreddit had posted a news article from Minneapolis, the news article that broke the news of who Jonathan Ross was. And this was just people commenting on the news.

12:43Ryan Devereaux:The poster didn't share anything that wasn't already circulating widely in mainstream news accounts. They said, you know, that Jonathan Ross was, you know, lived in Minneapolis for a while, served in the National guard their commentary was that they would like the reddit users commentary was that they would like to see ross in prison uh that there was no sort of disclosing new information that wasn't already out there protected all of this is protected speech right okay so civil liberties lawyers say they can't find anything remotely criminal in this user's post what do you think the government's actually trying to accomplish here with Reddit.

13:27Do, do, I mean, I, for me, and this is just me deducing, I'm not an investigative journalist like you are. To me, the work you do is the gold standard. I am an online commentator slash shit talker. For me, it seems like a layup that Trump could call Zuck or, uh, Musk and be like, Hey, we want this shit. And you know, Elon Musk, I mean, hi on Academy. He's gonna be like, yeah, sure. Here's all the DMs, whatever you want, buddy. But is there any, do you know of any link that Reddit is something they're trying to get their hands on? Do you think that this is more like we need to get control of Reddit because Reddit hasn't bent the knee?

14:03Or do you think this is, is more, we're sending out a flare to like when they arrested Don Lemon, they're trying to send out a flare to people like me. What is your take through your investigation on this? What do you think the message that the Miller Stephen Miller's the world because we know Trump doesn't give a shit about any of this stuff he's laser focused on his ballroom so what do you what do you think they're trying to what

14:26Ryan Devereaux:message do you think they're trying to send here you know there's a lot of you know we're doing a lot of speculating here because obviously it's a grand jury it's super secret we you know that's that's the nature of a grand jury we don't know what the substance of this investigation is but But I think that it is fair to conclude that this is an indication that the administration and federal law enforcement under this administration is taking this doxing of federal law enforcement epidemic as they describe it really seriously. They're going beyond the administrative subpoenas, which an agent at ICE can whip up pretty quick.

15:08Ryan Devereaux:They don't need a judge's approval to request this data. They're seeing pushback in federal courts as they did in Northern District of California. They're seeing some of these knocked down. So instead of backing away from this project of going after these accounts, they're taking it to the next level and they've convened a grand jury and they're seeking evidence and they're hauling the companies themselves in and asking them to turn over data. And that's a pretty significant turn. We'll have to wait and see whether an indictment comes down out of this grand jury or not. But the fact of a federal grand jury in this kind of case is significant.

15:51Ryan Devereaux:For listeners who might not know, a grand jury is not like you hear jury and you're thinking an adversarial kind of trial, a defense attorney making arguments. That's not what a grand jury is. A grand jury exists for the purpose of allowing a prosecutor to present evidence in order to bring charges. Everything is under seal. So all of this is happening behind closed doors right now. We're going to have to wait and see to see whether or not something comes out of it. But yeah, I think that this is a strong indication that the administration is taking this whole doxing thing very, very seriously.

16:30Ryan Devereaux:They're committing resources to it. They're assigning agents to it. And obviously agents are going around and they're looking for stuff that they can request data on. Like I said, Reddit has received a ton of these type of requests over the past year. And it's not just Reddit. X has two. Meta has two. They are making a concerted effort to find people who are behind these accounts. Which is really rich because, I mean, nobody is a bigger doxer than Donald Trump. When he had all of these cases against him, lawsuits against him, He's doxing judges, judges, kids. I mean, just absolutely horrible. I just want to point out that everything with this administration, it seems like it's a shakedown.

17:14When they started, they had to shake down the law firms and then they're shaking down universities. Now they're shaking down tech agencies. And all of this is a means to curtail criticism. I will say something hopeful for my listeners is that sometimes, a lot of times, federal courts have been really strong resistance in Trump 2.0. And grand jurors have been really strong resistance. You may remember, Ryan, the Trump regime tried to convene a grand jury against sitting members of Congress and the Senate that told people in the military, do not disobey illegal orders. And they tried to indict John Kelly, et cetera.

18:00And the grand jury, which would indict a ham sandwich, was an everyday American standing up as resistance. So that's why I just want to say to you and to the listener, these stories and the journalism that you do is so important in the world of podcasting. And I'm a podcaster. I always say the gold standard is journalism to shine a light, to disinfect wrongs and to right wrong. So thank you so much. Do you have any closing thoughts for our listeners as we continue through, you know, this fuckery with the Trump regime?

18:37Ryan Devereaux:Well, just, you know, So I was just sort of thinking as you were commenting there about the level of resistance that we're seeing in the United States right now. And I spent a good chunk of the beginning of this year in Minneapolis and saw what that looked like there in Minnesota. And I think that sort of as unprecedented as the moment feels in terms of the crackdown, I think that there is a sort of nearly unprecedented level of resistance out there. And I think we can expect that to continue as the administration's efforts roll on. I agree with you. Ryan Devereaux, thank you so much for what you're doing.

19:16And listener, please go read his article at The Intercept and support journalists. The most important part of our democracy right now is journalism. Thank you so much. Thanks so much for having me.

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