[keernan]

Just off the top of my head all three examples I provided violate the First Amendment. It is Constitutionally prohibited for the government to track and gather information on citizens because they exercised their First Amendment rights.

[otterley]

Wait, we just jumped from the Fourth to the First Amendment. Not only did we change subjects, but it's difficult for me to understand how your examples implicate the First Amendment.

[keernan]

My post neither stated or implied the constitutional provisions. The easiest and clearest provision that has been violated is the Government gathering direct data to classify citizens based upon their expression of their First Amendment rights. That is very apparent in every single example in my post.

I'm not going to engaged with someone on HN debating legal principles regarding something so straight forward. And, as I said, this is off the top of my head. It's basic constitutional law which I haven't found necessary to research. After that sentence I googled McCarthyism and found that SCOTUS ruled in multiple cases that Senator McCarthy and his supporters violated the First Amendment rights of the citizens they accused of communism. I haven't read the opinions, but I am confident they ( and many others ) support the very basic principles I speak of.

[otterley]

Respectfully, this is all making me very strongly doubt your bona fides. There are many clues in the above comment that suggest you aren't who you claim to be.

[keernan]

Nice.

The government cannot collect and put the names of peaceful anti-government protestors into a government database; or show up at their homes when they violated no law; or the government issuing a subpoena to google for personal data about a man who wrote a one sentence letter to a DOJ prosecutor asking for leniency for the defendant in a case he read about.

These are all actions taken by the government in response to citizens expressing viewpoints the government did not like. You will never find more classic First Amendment fact patterns.

[otterley]

Then you haven't really studied 1A law in a long time, if you ever did. These fact patterns have not been well tested in court. They look similar to some cases, but are quite distinguishable, too. They might be 1A violations because of the chilling effect they could have on speech, but I'm not going out on a limb to say with certainty that they are; and I don't know any competent attorney who would.

> The government cannot ... show up at [people's] homes when they violated no law

This happens all the time. It depends on the purpose. Is it purely to harass someone, or is it to perform an investigation or for some other legitimate purpose? It's not prima facie unlawful.

You might find this poster to be instructive. It is very difficult under current law to prevail in a harassment case. https://ij.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Infographic_First-...

[keernan]

I have always been a civil trial attorney, much of the time before state Equity Judges ( generally more qualified than our law division judges ). It's been a very long time since law school ( admitted to the bar in 1977 ).

Having said that, my posts had nothing to do with the 'realities' of winning in court regarding the activities outlined. Rather my point is the activities are clearly unconstitutional by any conventional analysis by any qualified US attorney. Whether or not you could develop the requisite proofs is another matter entirely. But it is clear that the current administration is following the Orban playbook ( and of some South American authoritarian regimes ).

This is not 'business as usual' in any way, shape or form.

A US Citizen ( a retired lawyer if I recall ) read an article about a prosecution by the DOJ and the citizen emailed the prosecutor ( after getting his email from the judicial database ) and sent a short plea urging mercy for the asylum seeker. Five hours later he received an email from Google advising him the federal government had served Google with a subpoena demanding information about him. Then they followed up by knocking on his door.

There can be zero doubt that the subpoena upon Google violated due process. Being an administrative subpoena, there was no judge involved but due process ( eg probable cause ) is still required and - absent some wildly unimaginable set of unknown facts - there was clearly no probable cause here.

This administration is clearly in the process of gathering names of US citizens who hold beliefs Trump does not like. The larger question is what is Trump's intention in collecting such names? Based upon his actions in the past year, Americans shouldn't hold their breath hoping they are wholesome.