Robert Reich accuses DHS under Kristi Noem of subpoenaing Google

Robert Reich has written what amounts to an open letter to US homeland security secretary Kristi Noem: if the Department of Homeland Security is “tracking down ICE critics”, he says, it can start with him.

The provocation is a report Reich attributes to the New York Times: DHS has sent subpoenas to Google, Meta (Facebook and Instagram’s parent) and other media companies seeking identifying information about social-media accounts critical of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Reich’s Guardian column treats this as a constitutional scandal—an attempt to intimidate dissent and unmask critics who believed they were speaking under a layer of platform-mediated anonymity.

Whatever one thinks of Reich’s politics (he is not exactly a refugee from the regulatory state), his complaint usefully highlights a structural fact of modern governance: surveillance and coercion no longer require a single, easily hated “state” actor. They are increasingly a supply chain.

Start with the legal mechanics. Administrative subpoenas—issued by agencies without prior judicial approval—have become a routine way to compel data from third parties. Reich argues that using them to identify critics violates First Amendment protections. That may be litigated. But the more immediate point is that the state has quietly built a system where political monitoring can be outsourced to private intermediaries who already hold the data, already run the identity layer, and already normalize compliance as “trust and safety”.

Google and Meta don’t need to be enthusiastic co-conspirators; they only need to be frictionless vendors. A subpoena arrives, a compliance team processes it, an account is linked to an email, phone number, device identifiers, location history, ad IDs, and whatever KYC-like artifacts the platform has accumulated in the name of “security”. The user experiences the result as a ban, a doxxing, or a knock on the door—while the platform can credibly insist it merely “followed policy” and “complied with lawful process”.

Reich’s own rhetoric—calling Noem’s work “unconstitutional” and describing detention practices in lurid terms—also illustrates why governments like these tools. Political conflict is now conducted on platforms whose business model is visibility, virality, and permanent storage. When speech becomes database entries, the temptation to treat opposition as a query is overwhelming.

The deeper irony is that the same political class that demands platforms police “misinformation” and “harm” now discovers the obvious: a centralized moderation-and-identity infrastructure is politically fungible. Today it is used to throttle one tribe’s speech; tomorrow it becomes the other tribe’s opposition-research machine.

Reich frames this as creeping fascism. They can call it something more banal and therefore more dangerous: procurement. The state doesn’t have to build a telescreen in your living room when you paid for a smartphone, signed the terms, and let a handful of companies become the passport office for modern life.

If DHS is indeed fishing for critics, the scandal is not only the fishing expedition. It is the existence of a ready-made private apparatus—identity, data retention, behavioral profiling, and compliance pipelines—waiting to be pointed at whichever “threat” is fashionable this quarter.