Could you explain/cite what you mean by letters not working the same way? You're saying government agencies can't give give the same sort of subpoena to said third parties? Or that if they did, it wouldn't work?

There’s definitely been variability in how far government agencies have been pushing under this administration.

It’s going to get interesting if the next Democrat in the white house takes similar steps based on current precedent. That would hopefully result in long term reforms, but we might just be heading to civil war regardless.

>Trying to play "guess if the shadowy government agency is doing the right thing this week" is a losing game.

Which is why the best strategy is to bring things out of the shadows and have the government operate in the open whether that is more literal by making their actions part of the public record or just figuratively by requiring a lot of disparate parts of the government to coordinate on something like this so it can only go wrong with truly widespread corruption.

Playing a cat and mouse game with the government via technology is also a losing game. They'll always have more money, people, and expertise on their side. When the heart of the problem is the humans involved, the solution is inherently politics.

Re-read the first few sentences of his post.

> if there is a valid warrant or subpoena

I'm having trouble imagining a way to describe a post-Patriot Act USA as a free state.

In the sense that all reasons are made up, I suppose that might be true. But while deporting illegal immigrants for no other reason is totally fine, deporting the ones that also have a criminal conviction is definitely not made up reasons.

The archive link isn't working for me atm.

But tech companies should be complying with subpoenas from governments in countries they would like to operate in. I don't like what is happening in the US either, but to me this feels like a problem with the electorate. Maybe it's possible for Google to provide some of these services without actually having access to the data under subpoena, but I don't know enough about what services they were using or how they work.

Ultimately, whether or not people are able to do anything involves consequences for their actions.

There's the "three" boxes of liberty that are meant to give a framework for how humans in a society are to introduce consequences to state actors who abuse rights: the soap box, the ballot box, and the jury box.

So we need to start using at least those three to prevent human rights abuses with regard to search warrants.

No, this is absolutely the system working as intended: The State exists to protect large monied interests and their power, and those entities in exchange will sell out individuals to the State that seek to undermine their power. The State will never not do this.

Like, I realize I'm the rambling anarchist up in here, but show me ANY government ever that didn't Murder and Pillage, two things that we all hate when perpetrated by individuals. There's no amount of democracy that can be injected into a hierarchy responsible for controlling hundreds of millions of people that will inhibit authoritarianism, the best people can hope for (and what many white/middle class citizens thought they had for the last few decades) is not being the target of that authoritarianism.

Cat's out of the bag now and we're doing that thing we do every few decades where we weaponize the State against the citizens.

> A free state should not be able to sniff after people for made up reasons.

Right, exactly -- a free state should not do that, yet the system is working as intended, therefore we do not live in a free state. It's time to accept that.

You obviously don't live in the EU, UK.

All systems work as intended — usually phrased as "the purpose of a system is what it does"

If this wasn't the intention they would have changed it by now.

You can't write rules against bad actors. There will always be some legal loophole a bad president can invent to exploit. if not for administrative warrants we would see some other creative (read: illegal) use of executive power.

The only option is to not elect someone that doesn't respect rule of law. And since I know some enlightened "centrist" will play the both sides game: What's 1 thing any previous president has done equivalent to violating posse comitatus.

It's a privacy problem because permitting things like this can lead to abuses.

And yet ICE can't be bothered to reach even that low bar.

A large part of why the government has slowly accumulated these powers is because Congress has been abdicating its power to the President under both Republican and Democratic administrations since the early 1900s.

The first change I would make with a majority in Congress is to change apportionment so that there is 1 representative per 50,000 people. All it needs is a simple majority, and it would neuter the rural-area advantage in the electoral college while also forcing the legislature to streamline its processes.

Texas will undoubtably try to gerrymander itself into a pretzel, but it's not nearly as easy to draw 582 stable districts that produce a huge Republican advantage - a minor demographic shift could easily lead to a backfiring blowout at the polls. With 6,835 seats in the House, Congress would be forced to streamline its procedures (goodbye, filibuster and reconciliation) and it would be significantly harder for the executive branch to ignore public disapproval.

Of course, this represents a ~15x dilution in the power of each current representative (who would then have to run in a new district) so I'm skeptical. Hopefully enough Democrats have woken up and realized that the country won't survive if it keeps going on like this and deep reforms are needed.

I wouldn't give any power at all to Hitler. I wouldn't name him head of state. I wouldn't even let him vote in a town hall meeting about fixing a water main leak. By the principles you have stated, then, I shouldn't let anyone be head of state, and I shouldn't let anyone vote to fix water main leaks?

Google, among most other tech companies, deny portions of administrative warrants. Here's a story about someone who was stressed out about their notification by Google (spoiler, Google decided to deny the government's request)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2026/02/03/hom...

edit: It appears that this outcome is an outlier and most admin warrants are honored. It is unfortunate to see the Washington Post decline in reliability like this.

There is a case to be made that administrative subpoenas can be good. They save taxpayers money, they speed up investigations, and they free up the court for more important matters.

As with all things though, these agencies should not be self-regulated without civilian and judicial oversight.

Isn't that why the scare quotes are there?

I'm getting tired of these comments that normalize being in the middle of the slippery slope as if it is merely the same as being at the top of the slippery slope was. They may not have been "good" times, but they were certainly better times when government agencies at least aimed to carry out their roles in good faith rather than minmaxing the rules to cause the most damage to enemies of the Party. Applying judgement while exercising delegated authority is exactly why these agencies were given wide leeway in the first place. And while we can say this was naive, it is even more naive to normalize the current behavior.

> An administrative subpoena implies that there has been a legal procedure and the administrative agencies are not exactly run like the wild west

Hard disagree. The fact that a government agency "reviewed" its own subpoena before enforcing it does not follow the spirit of the Fourth Amendment, which is to prevent government overreach in taking your belongings and information.

In fact, to take your definition of what's not unreasonable to its logical conclusion, by definition any process an agency came up with would be acceptable, as long as they followed it.

I think a better definition of a reasonable search and seizure would be one where a subpoena goes before a judge, the target of the subpoena is notified and has the opportunity to fight it, and where there are significant consequences for government agents who lie or otherwise abuse the process of getting a subpoena.

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects,[a] against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

>>no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation<<

that means there must be affirmation of probable cause to an overseeing body [i.e. judiciary]

administrative warrants are a process of "i know im right i dont need someone else to look things over"

If the party on the receiving end of a search needs to be a lawyer to simply understand the legality of a warrant, I’d argue the search is unreasonable.

> All the fourth amendment guarantees is unreasonable search and seizure.

Are you saying that by the existence of the fourth that unreasonable search/seizures are guaranteed to happen? It can't guarantee protection from them either.

[dead]

DHS/ICE is in a weird constitutional spot. Most immigration violations in the US are _civil_ violations. So the Fourth Amendment is less applicable. It's also why detained immigrants don't automatically get the right to be represented by a lawyer.

ICE/DHS technically are just acting as marshals, merely ensuring that defendants appear at court proceedings and then enforcing court decisions (deportations).

Maybe it is to a child or average citizen, but I don't believe that "not understanding the consequences" is the case here on HN. This is just a difference in philosophy, the old "freedom vs. security" tradeoff that everyone falls down on a little differently. Giving up your data to a company (and therefore the government) in exchange for services is a trust exercise, and there are ways to avoid making it, but they have significant unavoidable costs. It's an easier decision when you don't fear your own government, but where you fall on the spectrum rapidly changes when your government makes you the target. Of course you can say "the government is always going to turn on you, so you should never trust them!", but you'll sound like a loon to many native citizens of a Western nation that have had little to fear for decades.

The US is just experiencing a little more of what the citizens of communist and fascist nations have experienced. Over time, that might lead to rapid societal change, or maybe it's too late.