The Guardline
A federal judge in San Francisco on Wednesday temporarily blocked a federal administrative subpoena aimed at unmasking Instagram accounts that named and shamed a Border Patrol agent who was part of the immigration raids in Los Angeles this summer.
The Department of Homeland Security sent an administrative subpoena to Meta in early September demanding the names, email addresses, and phone numbers associated with six separate Instagram accounts. Three Instagram users and immigration activists filed separate motions to quash the subpoena last week.
“Pending resolution of this motion, the Court now orders Meta not to produce the requested information without further order of the Court,” wrote Magistrate Judge Alex G. Tse in a brief order on the motion filed by the activist who runs the Instagram account for the Long Beach Rapid Response Network.
“We are grateful that the Court took prompt action to prevent the irreparable injury to Long Beach Rapid Response if she had been stripped of her anonymity,” said Joshua Koltun, attorney for LBRRN, in an emailed statement. “We look forward to litigating this matter and vindicating the First Amendment rights of the people to speak and associate anonymously in opposition to the government.”
Another judge issued a similar order on Friday in one of the three cases, which was filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California on behalf of Long Beach Protests and Events, which uses the handle @lbprotest on Instagram.
“I’ll be able to sleep tonight without worrying that government agents are going to come pounding at my door simply for exercising my First Amendment rights,” the second activist, who sued under the pseudonym “J. Doe,” said in an emailed statement on Friday.
There has been no order so far in the third case, filed by activist Sherman Austin, who runs the Instagram account for StopICE.net. But Austin’s attorneys read the other two orders as blocking Meta from handing over their client’s information too, they told The Intercept.
“As a legal matter we believe the initial stay order issued last week in [the ACLU case] effectively blocked compliance with the subpoena in regards to all the folks named, including our client,” said Matthew Kellegrew, an attorney with the Civil Liberties Defense Center. “That said, I think we’d feel a lot better if there was an order in each matter that left no room for question.”
The Trump administration has not yet filed any briefs in response to the three motions to quash the subpoena, which were all filed in federal court in San Francisco, near Meta’s Silicon Valley headquarters.
Meta declined to answer The Intercept’s questions, including whether the company would back its users’ legal challenges to the subpoena.
Meta “appeared willing to comply without any thought for the constitutionality of the request.”
The activists and their attorneys had plenty of criticisms for Meta’s handling of the matter so far. In email notices sent to three of the six targeted accounts in early September, Meta gave users just 10 days to challenge the subpoena in court before the company would hand over their data.
“I feel like it’s getting lost in the shuffle here, but Meta is the subpoenaed party,” Kellegrew said. “Meta is in the best position to resist providing this information, and the fact that they appeared willing to comply without any thought for the constitutionality of the request essentially leaves it up to the individuals targeted to have the wherewithal to contact lawyers to intervene on a very tight timeline.”
Do you have information about DHS or ICE targeting activists online? Use a personal device to contact Shawn Musgrave on Signal at shawnmusgrave.82
Some of the accounts never even received Meta’s email about the subpoena. In a court filing, LBRRN said that due to a “technical difficulty,” it never received the notice sent to other users. “The process of opening a line of communications with Meta and determining the status has been disturbingly complex and slow,” their attorney wrote.
Kellegrew said Meta had not responded directly to his team about the subpoena and what steps, if any, the company has taken in response to the federal government’s demands.
“It is totally possible they are taking this seriously and acting responsibly. However, there’s no way for us to actually know,” Kellegrew said.
