If the police called and asked for my customer list, I’d check whether they had that authority and many other issues before turning it over. I think we had an article on here earlier about ‘second order thinking’ that would cover that... getting an invasive request from the government, and fulfilling it regardless of consequences because you want to ‘help’ or consider them to be like Mom and Dad is first order thinking.

I’m no expert, but it seems increasingly common to have state laws that oppose or are stricter than federal laws, and you do have to be aware of all laws for your jurisdiction down to the county and city. Especially in any voluntary action, you have to consider whether it violates other laws or duties, and if they weren’t legally compelled to do this t was voluntary.

Well established for whom? For many poor Americans, the thought of resisting a local PD seems impossible, let alone a federal agent who comes knocking. Try to imagine being on your night shift at a rural Motel 6 when a few strange individuals start waving badges, making requests, maybe threatening to escalate things if you don't play along. Maybe you would have the courage to stand up to them, but I think a lot of people would fall to the pressure and abide by the request. One big difference is privilege.

I believe ICE should be responsible for illegally attaining this information. They should also bear the cost of educating the Motel 6 workforce on their rights to resist requests from law enforcement agencies.

Totally agree. A hotel worker would be a hero for refusing to comply with an illegal request, but it's not reasonable to expect them to know what's legal or not here.

Citizens should be able to assume that those who enforce the law also obey the law, and when that's found not to be true, the agencies should be in deep trouble. Without law abiding law officers, the whole system falls apart.

Right, ‘The hotel said at the time that the practice was implemented "at the local level without the knowledge of senior management."‘

Obviously, if you are working at a motel and law enforcement enters and start demanding things, you -contact your supervisors-. Not sure how ‘privilege’ is involved, other than having the education or training to understand this. It’s possible that the individuals involved at the motel were not coerced and participated enthusiastically.

Of course ICE should also be obligated to follow the law and not encourage others to break it. However, it’s up to Motel 6 to train their employees, protect customers’ privacy and enforce their own policies.

But then who’s gonna police the police ?

Edit: checked into this. An older story has more details https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2018/01/0...

“ICE agents, who are tasked with arresting people who are not legal residents for deportation, would be given a guest list from the hotel’s receptionist, along with a form to sign confirming the lists’ receipt. The roster included information such as guests’ driver’s license number, room number, date of birth and license plate number.”

an article linked within the earlier one says even more. https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/motel-6-calling-ice-und... It appears to be a voluntary practice and they may even sell/be compensated for the list by ICE.

They say this but look at AT&T and room 641A and the NSA.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Room_641A

The documents identified several technology companies as participants in the PRISM program, including Microsoft in 2007, Yahoo! in 2008, Google in 2009, Facebook in 2009, Paltalk in 2009, YouTube in 2010, AOL in 2011, Skype in 2011 and Apple in 2012.[22] The speaker's notes in the briefing document reviewed by The Washington Post indicated that "98 percent of PRISM production is based on Yahoo, Google, and Microsoft".[1]

To avoid giving the wrong impression to folks, it is worth noting that ‘participating’ means they produced requested communications on an ongoing basis pursuant to orders from a judge.

A separate program, MUSCULAR targeted dark fiber inter-data center links against companies which suggests that the tech companies were not handing out backdoors as they were accused of by Greenwald/Guardian reporting.

There’s a big difference between “show me your warrant” and “oh, the government asked nicely? I’ll give you the data as a favor”

It’s not just semantics. There’s a huge difference between being compelled and being a willing participant who doesn’t push back.

What evidence do you have that the tech companies don’t rebuff or push back on requests that don’t have the full force of the courts behind them?

The article says "after several locations gave information on thousands of guests to Immigration and Customs Enforcement without warrants"

Sounds like ICE got the info from the night manager or similar. I can see why a motel night manager might feel like they didn't have a choice in the matter. Motel 6 is still rightly on hook, but ICE knew better than to route the request to Motel 6 HDQ.

Some, maybe. Definitely not all. Google reportedly has a system to let authorities access GMail. Similarly, Microsoft has been cooperating from pre-antitrust times, let alone now. And these are the richest companies in the world, with market caps in the hundreds of billions; they can afford to pay legions of top-level lawyers for decades-long litigation. Motel 6 in comparison is small beer; they were sold for less than 2$bn a few years ago.

Google probably receives more subpoenas per hour than most companies receive over their entire lifetime, so of course they have a portal for handling such requests and managing the process.

Complete customer lists are a data gathering exercise, not a query to investigate a 'lead'

Maybe you could make an entrapment argument against the Federal officials. IANAL, so I don't know how that works. (I guess it's not entrapment because the Federal officials weren't trying to get Motel 6 to break the law for the purpose of going after Motel 6.)

And btw, since when has the law ever been enforced fairly, really?

I really don't understand this. How can it be legal for a government to ask its citizens to break the law?

I don’t even know how to differentiate between a real Federal Officer and a fake one.

What does a real court order look vs a fake one ?

If I cheat on my taxes, it’s my fault. If the federal officers do something knowingly they shouldn’t do. They should get sacked and fined.

I’m not saying whether I agree or disagree, just stating my understanding of how it works.

And yes, the imbalance of power is ridiculous.

Aside, if the Motel 6 employees had asked the ICE agents: “is it legal for me to give this to you without a warrant?” and the ICE agents had answered in the affirmative, then Motel 6 may have had an entrapment defense[1], but I’m not certain and IANAL.

1. http://www.uscivilliberties.org/themes/3750-entrapment-by-es...

We gotta keep trying our best, even though we're never gonna get it 100% right.

I can come to any bank, and politely ask them to help me out a bit by giving me some money. That's not an illegal (or wrong) thing to do.

Now if the bank does help me out by emptying out their customer's storage cells, someone's going into jail for that.

See, it's fine to help out. It's not OK to do so at someone else's expense. In this case, Motel 6 gave away something that's not theirs to give away, according to the law (namely: their customers' data).

Motel 6 did not break the law by helping out the feds. It broke the law by harming their customers (sharing their customer's data).

In the end, it's normal to ask for help. It's also pretty normal to politely decline to provide it.

Title nitpick: Motel 6 illegally gave away this information. They broke the state law, were sued for that, and lost $12M (and made further commitments on top of that). Why NPR chose to soften it to "improperly" is beyond me; the attorney general quoted in the article uses "illegally" in the same sentence.

And ICE doesn't have authority over Motel 6 without a warrant.

There's all kinds of times when turning over information to the government, or certain agents of government, without a compulsory order is illegal, either under civil or criminal law or both. Sometimes it goes beyond that, and even prohibits such disclosure under otherwise compulsory orders.

I've worked with personal data of federally-funded substance abuse treatment program clients. Beyond (and actually, IIRC, predating) HIPAA protections that also apply, I could not, legally, disclose such information even to an law enforcement agent with a subpoena for the information, without a separate, accompanying federal court order authorizing disclosure of the protected client information. The implementing regulations (42 CFR Part 2) even take the unusual step of specifically calling out a number of nonexceptions to the general rule against disclosure outside of the specific parameters permitted: [42 CFR § 2.13(b)] ”The restrictions on disclosure and use in the regulations in this part apply whether or not the part 2 program or other lawful holder of the patient identifying information believes that the person seeking the information already has it, has other means of obtaining it, is a law enforcement agency or official or other government official, has obtained a subpoena, or asserts any other justification for a disclosure or use which is not permitted by the regulations in this part.”

If you work in an industry to which the law—state, federal, local, whatever—applies such protection to the data you hold, you are responsible to know that, abide by it, and not just roll over when someone vaguely waves a badge in your direction.

> If we want companies to require a subpoena to share information with the federal government (and personally I do want that) then we should set that standard in law.

The State of Washington did that. That's exactly what the case is about.

> (How much information does the CIA and FBI vacuum up from Washington telcos in a day in violation of this law, and why isn't anyone held to task?

Probably none, mostly because the law at issue doesn't apply to telcos.

What crime? The charges were for a civil violation of state consumer protection law, which restricted the behavior of the motel, not ICE.

Even if ICE officials, in the federally-lawful conduct of their duties could be subject to state law, I don't see any indication that they did anything that would have broken the law at issue, which prohibits the disclosure, not the request.

i wonder whether the agents may be breaking any law if say the night manager informed them that he couldn't legally disclose the information, yet the agents would still pressure him into giving it up. Wouldn't the agents thus become participants of a conspiracy to violate that law [IANAL]?

I believe it’s somewhat defensible to task only one side here with protecting the data. They have that data all the time, and it’s therefore more practical for them to explore the legality of such requests. They are also the party entrusted with that data by the customer, and therefore have a fiduciary duty. It also aligns with the idea of those profiting from data to accept liability for its protection.

There’s probably also a federal/state law angle here that I’m unqualified to opine on.

Also: this is civil law, and therefore nobody was or will be charged (just a pet peeve).

Nor did Motel 6 for that matter. It was hit with a civil lawsuit...

Now in the case of a large business, I would expect that they have the resources to figure out when to comply or when to ask for a warrant. But individuals have a harder time -- imagine getting sued by your employer for complying with a TSA agent's demand that you open your laptop for them to search through, then you get sued or fired because of that. It should always be illegal for a government official to imply that you are required to do something, if that isn't the case (and make it clear that there is no penalty, such as not being to board your plane, for not complying).

This is a huge motel chain. They operate in a state which defines laws as to how you are allowed to handle your customer's information. Ignorance is not an excuse. I don't see how the individual citizen argument apples here and it's all hypotheticals anyway.

It’s also relevant that ICE mostly deals in civil law, not criminal. While illegal entry is also a crime, deportation is a civil enforcement action. The fruit of the poisonous tree doctrine doesn’t quite apply. There might be something similar though, and I’d love someone more knowledgeable to chime in.

No, getting evidence voluntarily from any party (or even involuntarily and illegally from a third party!) doesn't trigger the exclusionary rule. No rights triggering the rule are violated in the voluntary case, and if the government violated A’s rights but then use the evidence only against B, the rule doesn't apply either.

And, of course, this is ICE, and the exclusionary rule only applies in criminal cases, not in deportation (civil removal) cases, so the question is largely moot, anyway, even if they were doing this for evidence rather than just to locate targets.

It's extremely different.

Law enforcement can ask to search in cases where they don't have a warrant or other legal reasons to insist on a search. If you say "yes", the results are admissible. People mess this up all the time when cops pull them over or knock on the door.

In a criminal trial, of the person who had the legal expectation of privacy, which in most cases is the person with possession of the documents, etc., not the subject of the documents, where those are different.

But, in any cases, not in most civil proceedings, and explicitly not in civil removal (deportation) proceedings, which is what ICE is mostly concerned with here, so the Constitution is essentially irrelevant as there is no practical remedy available for violations (which is one reason states have adopted rules against information sharing with immigration officials.)

Specifically, the State alleges that Motel 6 violated the CPA, RCW 19.86.020 and RCW 49.60.030(3), and the WLAD, RCW 49.60.030(1)(b) and RCW 49.60.215(1), by:

a. Disclosing private guest registry information to ICE agents, in violation of the public policy of the State of Washington, including the Washington State Constitution and Motel 6's own privacy policy;

b. Disclosing private guest registry information to ICE agents with the knowledge that ICE was requesting the guest registry information for the purpose of discovering and investigating guests on the basis of national origin, including guests with Latino-sounding names.

Seems reasonable to me.

As a front desk person, refer to the laminated playbook card that explains to the LEO exactly what Motel 6's policy is. The card refers the front desk agent to request a warrant for any protected information. If LEO insists, call corporate legal, and comply if threatened with arrest. Make sure interaction is captured on security cameras.

Don't be facile. Of course anyone working the front desk at Motel 6 is going to be trained on what to do from now on.

The natural result of this is then everyones rights would constantly be violated. Police would ask and every company would roll over and give out any info that is requested. And when we talk about personal information getting out, the damage is sort of done once it happens. And your only recourse is to then sue the government or get your state AG to possibly do it for you?

If you want to operate a business that takes personal information, it is your responsibility to protect it. Nobody is forcing anyone to start a business but there are inherent risks.

Well, maybe they should not, if that help involves violation of other's right to privacy. If your ISP would "help" federal government to watch your communications without a court order, you might be justifiably upset.

Yes, telecoms are guilty in such behavior too, and largely are never punished. That doesn't mean it's ok.

> In other words, Washington should sue ICE, not Motel 6.

ICE has the right to ask. M6 should have answered "sure, gladly, as soon as we see that warrant".

It depends on whether you are in a demographic that believes law enforcement is just or corrupt.

I’ve told my sons if they ever get questioned by the police to not say a word until I get there. Even if they don’t have anything to hide.

I’ve told them how to react when they get stopped by the police and always keep their emotions under control. I’ve told them never to expect fair treatment. All of my paranoia is backed by statistics.

I don't think invading privacy is part of the government's job.

Because this never happens XD