Federal prosecutors went looking for the personal details of everyone who subscribed to three YouTube channels and a judge refused to let them.
Newly unsealed court records from the Justice Department’s prosecution of people who disrupted a church service in St. Paul, Minnesota show the government reaching for subscriber data that had little to do with the conduct it was investigating.
We obtained a copy of the warrant application for you here.
Journalists and commentators Don Lemon and Georgia Fort were charged as part of the disruption, though both allege they were there as reporters rather than participants.
On February 24, prosecutors filed five search warrants. Three of them asked YouTube to turn over the names, mailing addresses, residential addresses, business addresses, email addresses, telephone numbers, and IP addresses for every subscriber to channels run by Lemon, Fort, and activist William Kelly, whose channel goes by DaWoke Farmer.
The applications, sworn out by Homeland Security Investigations agent Timothy Gerber, went beyond the journalists and activists running the channels. They swept toward the audience, the ordinary people whose only link to the case was having clicked the channels’ subscribe button.
Magistrate Judge John Docherty rejected all five, several of them for lack of probable cause. On the warrant aimed at Kelly’s channel, Docherty pointed to a video that “appears to be paradigmatic political speech protected by the First Amendment.” A demand that treats a list of viewers as evidence turns watching journalism or activism into a reason to be identified by the state, which is a steep price for pressing play on a livestream.
Prosecutors tried again on March 6, refiling four warrants, including the three tied to Lemon, Fort, and Kelly. This time they cut the request down to the channel owners themselves, dropping the demand for subscriber rosters and asking only for the same categories of identifying data on the three named people.
What’s interesting here is that the government already treats the list of people who subscribe to a YouTube channel as something it can ask a court to hand over.
Picture that same demand landing in a world where every account is welded to a verified government identity. That world is being built right now.
The numbers tell part of the story. By late 2025, half of US states required people to prove their age before viewing some content, with nine states enacting such laws in 2025 alone. The movement started in Louisiana in 2022 as a single-state experiment and turned into a coordinated national push.
Hellbound and Down 