Reports are coming out that the White House Administration legal team has obtained search warrants in three separate cases allowing them to gain access to as many as 6,000 Facebook accounts of anti-Trump protesters.
The American civil Liberties Union has reacted with shock at this news and says it is filing a motion to quash the warrants.
ACLU attorney Scott Michelman: “What is particularly chilling about these warrants is that anti-administration political activists are going to have their political associations and views scrutinized by the very administration they are protesting.”
The requested data would result in personal information of some 6,000 individuals who have “liked” an anti-Trump Facebook page.
One of the targeted users was an organizer of the protests that took place on inauguration day last year, known as “disruptj20.org”.
Together with the warrants, Facebook was served a gag order preventing it from alerting the individuals that the government was seeking to obtain their private information.
The Justice Department is not officially commenting on these ongoing searches, however it is good to note that White House attorneys have already some knowledge in these matters. Before making their move on Facebook, they served web provider DreamHost with a similar order, aka to hand over IP addresses of individuals who were part of the disruptj20.org website.
One of the users, Miss Emmelia Talarico, stated that if the government would obtain her information, it would logically gain access to her “personal passwords, security questions and answers, and credit card information,” as well as “the private lists of invitees and attendees to multiple political events sponsored by the page.”
The federal government got three search warrants from the D.C. Superior Court against three Facebook accounts: the disruptj20 page (now known as Resist This) owned by Emmelia Talarico, and the personal accounts owned by Lacy MacAuley, and Legba Carrefour.
Mr Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, famously reacted not being anti-trump yesterday. We wonder what he will say about this.
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