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]
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'
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.