by Peter Blumberg
Elon Musk’s X is urging the US Supreme Court to shield companies from being forced to disclose sensitive user financial data under “suspicionless” subpoenas issued by federal law enforcement agencies.
The social media platform owned by the world’s richest person asked the justices to revisit a lower-court ruling allowing the Internal Revenue Service to enforce a subpoena for a Coinbase customer’s transaction records in a tax probe aimed at more than 14,000 users of the cryptocurrency exchange.
Lawyers for X, which says it stores subscription and advertising data and eventually plans to offer users financial services, argued in a filing last week that the Constitution doesn’t permit “warrantless searches of customer records held by third-party service providers” when those companies have made a contractual promise with users to keep their information private.
The attorneys said that taking up the IRS case would give the court an opportunity to “re-establish the proper relationship between government and companies like Coinbase and X Corp., who would no longer be extrajudicially coerced into helping the government violate their users’ Fourth Amendment rights.”
Musk, who calls a himself a free-speech absolutist, has petitioned the high court in the past to limit how much the government can force social media platforms to cooperate in law enforcement investigations.
Last May, X argued that a lower court should not have allowed then-Special Counsel Jack Smith to prohibit the platform from telling Donald Trump that it had been served with a government warrant seeking private communications sent by Trump during his first presidency.
An X spokesperson declined to comment beyond the filing.
The filing was reported earlier by the Financial Times.
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