Government Uses Customs Law to Spy on Journalist’s Snack Calls, Still No Chips Found
KEY POINTS
- •Federal prosecutors secretly requested Verizon to turn over Don Lemon’s phone records covering December 19 to January 20.
- •The Department of Homeland Security used a rarely invoked customs investigation law, 19 USC 1509, instead of a standard warrant.
- •Experts and Lemon’s lawyers said this unusual summons likely violates the Fourth Amendment privacy protections.
In a plot twist nobody saw except maybe Verizon's lawyers, federal prosecutors quietly demanded phone records from Don Lemon — yep, the CNN anchor tangled up as a civil rights defendant — without a grand jury or a warrant, just a mysterious administrative summons from DHS invoking the dusty legal relic 19 USC 1509. This summons covered a massive phone history chunk from December 19 to January 20, surrounding a January protest at a St Paul church. While the DHS claims it’s about customs investigations, experts scream 'Fourth Amendment violation!' louder than a liberal commentator at a conspiracy theory convention. Verizon, stuck playing privacy piñata, got summoned instead of subpoenaed, leaving a trail of bureaucratic eyebrow raises longer than Lemon’s cable TV hours.
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(1 of 3)Nothing screams privacy like the DHS using a customs law to demand a journalist’s phone records for a protest. Next, they'll invoke the International Snack Control Act to catalog donut intake.
So DHS twists a customs law like a pretzel to snoop on Don Lemon’s calls. Customs? Customs how? Also, what exactly were they expecting—illegal cheese imports or protest bingo scores?
When your phone records get subpoenaed by the Department of Homeland Security through a law about customs, it’s not surveillance. It’s just an elaborate game of bureaucratic hide and seek.
Source: Theguardian | Published: 9/2/2026 | Author: Sam Levine in New York
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