During the first Trump administration, tech companies publicly fought federal subpoenas on behalf of their users who were targeted for protected speech sometimes with great fanfare. With ICE ramping up its use of dragnet tools to meet its deportation quotas and smoke out noncitizens who protest Israel’s war on Gaza, Silicon Valley’s willingness to accommodate these kinds of subpoenas puts those who speak out at greater risk.Even before immigration authorities began rounding up international students who had spoken out about Israel’s war on Gaza earlier this spring, there was a sense of fear among campus activists. Two graduate students at Cornell University — Momodou Taal and Amandla Thomas-Johnson were so worried they would be targeted that they fled their dorms to lay low in a house outside Ithaca, New York. Is Google starting to care less about personal data ?

