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Notes -
Twitter Files 7
Another Twitter Files post: Link
Michael Shellenberger writes this one, arguing that the FBI worked hard to prime social media platforms into thinking a hacked release would come out prior to the 2020 election. He writes the following.
The FBI's regular meetings with people like Yoel Roth were characterized by the latter as telling him that state actors might try a "hack and leak" operation prior to the election.
The FBI was aware that there wasn't anything to go by on this claim, as Special Agent Elvis Chan testified.
Twitter found no evidence of significant Russian/foreign interference on the platform, and Roth repeatedly informed Chan/the FBI on multiple occasions about this.
Twitter repeatedly resisted efforts by the FBI to get data outside the normal search warrant process and was aware that the FBI was trying to probe a lot.
The FBI eventually got temporary clearances to share top-secret info with Twitter executives regarding APT28, a Russian hacking organization. Roth described himself as being "primed primed to think about the Russian hacking group APT28 before news of the Hunter Biden laptop came out."
Former FBI employees were so numerous at Twitter that they had their own internal slack channels.
In September 2020, Roth and others partook of a tabletop exercise to simulate a "hack and dump" operation regarding the Biden campaign. The goal was apparently to "shape" how the media would respond.
When the Hunter Biden leak finally happened, Roth would argue that it appeared more like a subtle leak, since nothing appeared in clear violation of the rules. Jim Baker would respond that it seemed hacked, so Twitter was reasonable in suppressing it until more information came out. But this is nearly impossible, since the FBI's subpoena for the laptop was attached to the NYPost article.
Roth appeared to buy this story now, and in an email said that it was likely that hacked materials were uploaded to the laptop and given to the shop.
There is a pattern of the FBI trying to warn elected officials with a goal of leaking to the news. They did this with Senators Grassley and Johnson, who were investigating and believed that it compromised their credibility. Jim Baker was apparently investigated twice for leaking information (in 2017 and 2019).
As a reminder, the above is what he's arguing, not what I think is necessarily true.
From what I can see, it appears the FBI was very insistent upon the possibility of a 2016 DNC-style hack. I don't think this is necessarily unreasonable until the election is settled - that the hack didn't happen doesn't mean you could conclude it wouldn't were you in the months leading up to the election.
Far more damning is the attempts at getting Twitter's information outside the normal search warrant process. Twitter and its staff are vindicated in this regard, they appear to not have given in to the FBI's requests in 2020. A caveat to this, however, is that we don't necessarily know why they shut off this access in the first place, and how long it was open before that.
A secondary objection of mine is the blurring of public and private boundary with how intelligence officials and agencies were coordinating with and sharing classified information with these companies in an effort to get them on-board with doing work for the FBI. It's difficult to articulate what I precisely find problematic here. The closest I could come to explaining my feelings here is that I don't want these people to ever be more than formal acquaintances because it ends up reducing the chance of them acting as independent stations of power.
It's not clear it's the FBI's role is to prevent disclosure of information from something like the 2016 DNC-style hack. They could arguably be charged with preventing such hacks, but going further than that runs into first amendment issues real quick.
I'd also separately be very interested in the background behind things like the Aspen Digital meetup cited here, given other summaries. The Aspen Institute is technically a NGO, but it'd also be trivial for it to act as a cutout for government agencies, and Garrett himself has a comfy relationship to the FBI specifically.
Maybe there's some more plausible explanation, given everything else; perhaps the Aspen Digital wargame also had a few dozen other examples ranging from red-tribe-leaning to the non-political. But the incredible specificity to something that the FBI knew or should have known could have occurred without a foreign intelligence nexus (either their own people leaking, or Hunter fucking up somewhere they couldn't clean up fast enough) is... looking like at best the FBI trying to clean up potential problems ahead of time.
I think the trivial objection is that far less direct entanglement has been treated as a violation of rights as a government actor in other environments. I'm sure the FBI's lawyers signed it off and no one would have standing to challenge it anyway, but the extent and degree that the FBI here appears to be pushing and providing recompense to people for the purpose of limiting political speech is a big deal, and worse than I expected to find.
That is a very odd citation for your claim, given that the district court said:
Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle v. BPD, 456 F.Supp.3d 699, 707-708 (2020) (emphasis added).
Any argument that Twitter was a state actor must be based on a completely different theory.
I don't think there is a particularly severe difference between the Baltimore Professional Services Agreement and the contractual repayments present here, nor between the exclusivity of reading 9-11 reports in the Baltimore case and the access to classified documents in this one, or to the extent such a difference exists, that it favors the FBI here.
EDIT: to be clear, I think they fall under the state actor doctrine, too: it's the too that's an emphasis.
In the Twitter case, Twitter received 3.4 million dollars in compensation from the FBI for its time reviewing takedown requests from the FBI.
In Beautiful Struggle, the company was paid solely by a private foundation sponsorship; I don’t know what the city contract actually provided.
I don’t think the distinction is meaningfully dispositive, any more than I think ignoring the funding path in favor of a purely org-chart approach would have made sense for Marsh, or even a ‘who can fire’ standard in some theoretical case. But I do think the lack of meaningfully dispositive traits makes the standard a farce.
Tweet #46
Ironically it looks like prior to 2019 Twitter was doing the work of responding/complying/working with the FBI for free.
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