Ryan 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 that is as far as we can tell maybe the first instances 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 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.

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

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 capital suggests the possibility of a potential significant criminal case sort of centering around this

free speech activity.

Many would argue we don't know what the substance of this case is because grand juries are incredibly secret, but we know that its existence suggests something serious.

You know, Reddit's an interesting case in comparison to some of these other tech companies.

You have groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which tracks sort of

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.

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.

A lot of those requests are coming from federal law enforcement, a lot of them are coming out of DC.