If you're not familiar with the LEGO scandal, the tl;dw is that this YouTuber Reckless Ben (Ben Schneider) has been investigating a stolen set of LEGO worth ~$100-200k (depending on who you ask) and the local police dept and criminal justice system has been colluding with the criminals (all members of the local Mormon church) to get him to STFU. The long version is, very long. You can check his channel for more.
Previously the local police dept managed to get a warrant to raid Ben's rental home with guns drawn and arrest him, based on what is clearly fabricated evidence. Here they appear to have done it again to get access to his Google account.
The linked video is mirrored on Peertube and timestamped to the relevant section.
Ben does also provide a copy of the subpoena in the video but I cannot vouch for its' validity, and he has used placeholder evidence before, but that's neither here nor there.
Anyway, the part that was relevant to this community was that in the course of their investigation they subpoenaed Google, and Google handed over basically his entire life to them. I'm sure this was very useful in their investigation.
I don't necessarily blame Google here for complying with a subpoena, but the moral of the story is to stop giving Google your data, because everything you say and do can and will be used against you in a court of law, with or without legitimate justification, and the more stuff you give them, the more ammunition you're providing the prosecutor.
This is also not exclusive to Google. Anything not local, self-hosted or encrypted a la Proton can be subpoenaed and the provider will have to comply. It just so happens that Google probably has more information about literally everyone in the world than any other particular entity
This whole saga is wild.
The best summary of it I’ve heard is “everyone here waited wayyy to long before talking to a lawyer”
Yeah, seems like the Lego store is in the wrong overall but Ben has done some stupid and illegal shit along the way. And any time listening to him analyze and think critically makes me think he's even more of an idiot than I previously thought.
Expecting everyone except the original owners and the cops to get in some trouble over this. Cops deserve it too, but they're cops and I'm a realist.
For folks not in the loop, what are those things?
Acting recklessly, probably.
Stopped paying attention a whole back and forgot a good chunk but it included false impersonation and stalking.
Those are things he's accused of, not things he's actually did wrong.
I'm not sure if anything he did was actually illegal but making videos where he basically taunts about how he fled the jurisdiction when he had an arrest warrant and how he attended a protest against BAM while his restraining order was still in effect was inadvisable.
I like Ben and his videos, but he just is not a intelligent nor a well spoken person, two things that go the furthest in court. It doesn't even sound like he gave all this info to chatgpt to at least have some coherent and potentially valid points to make. Listening to him in court pro se is painful to listen to. "Um so yeah pretty much... So um... Yeah so this guy... I'm making a documentary... So um this guy just like thinks that um... Like he um is just making up evidence." Jesus fuck man, just pay the $2k or whatever to have a actual attorney file a motion to dismiss. They can lay everything out in that motion and the judge has to read it before trial.
That's the part of this performance art which makes me cringe the hardest; however, I think it's a Nathan Fielder sort of performance which is intentionally dumb. Ben's basically showing what the average American can get done by appeal to the First and Fourth Amendments, and his audience is rightly outraged at the bad behavior of the government which he can predictably provoke with his playing-dumb routine.
At the same time, I think that the sorts of leverage that he can create are fundamentally not credible if he were an attorney or receiving good legal advice regularly; a judo flip requires your opponent to be much taller than you, after all. If we think of Ben as a First Amendment auditor then this particular audit has put at least two municipalities on the Monell hook, by which he may still be compensated for his time and effort, and also has doomed a shady pawn-shop franchise via sheer sunlight.
Yeah everyone wants to act like Ben is the innocent victim and while I agree the other parties did far worse things than he did due to the corrupt usage of government violence, his behavior has also been a bit unhinged and not all of what he's said in his videos has been completely honest. Could have been handled a lot better imo.