cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/29802
Google handed a British graduate student’s bank and credit card information over to US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) after he was targeted by the agency for attending a pro-Palestine protest for just five minutes.
The tech giant fulfilled a subpoena request from ICE for “a wide array of personal data” on Amandla Thomas-Johnson, an activist and journalist who was studying in the US at Cornell University, The Intercept reported.
Thomas-Johnson went into hiding in the college town of Ithaca, upstate New York, in spring last year as Donald Trump’s administration began rounding up foreign students who opposed Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
He had briefly attended a 2024 protest against companies supplying weapons to Israel at a Cornell University job fair, which got him banned from campus.
As well as financial information, the data requested by ICE included usernames, addresses, a list of any IP masking services, telephone numbers, subscriber numbers or identities, and credit card and bank account numbers.
Thomas-Johnson had no opportunity to challenge the subpoena.
He believes ICE was planning to monitor and then detain him, but by the time of the subpoena he had already fled to Switzerland.
“We need to think very hard about what resistance looks like under these conditions,” he told The Intercept, “where government and big tech know so much about us, can track us, can imprison, can destroy us in a variety of ways.”
Google did not respond to a request for comment from the outlet.
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Good to read the student had already successfully escaped to a safe country.