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naraburns  nihil supernum  3yr ago (text post)   17429 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 19, 2022

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

A private entity may be held liable under § 1983 when it "has exercised powers that are traditionally the exclusive prerogative of the state." Conner, 42 F.3d at 224 (quoting Blum v. Yaretsky, 457 U.S. 991, 1005, 102 S. Ct. 2777 (1982)).

In this case, Persistent Surveillance System's actions may be attributable to the Baltimore Police Department for purposes of assessing the Plaintiffs' § 1983 claims. The Baltimore Police Department and Persistent Surveillance Systems have entered into a Professional Services Agreement, ratified by the Baltimore City Board of Estimates, to conduct aerial surveillance over Baltimore. As Defendants conceded during the Preliminary Injunction Hearing, Persistent Surveillance Systems would be exercising powers which are traditionally within the exclusive domain of the BPD when undertaking the actions authorized by the Professional Services Agreement.

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.

or threatening them with forcible compulsion if they didn't

I would contend that it is logically impossible for the government to request you to do anything without the (at least implicit) threat of forcible compulsion if you don't.

These people have a stupendous power imbalance over you and a monopoly on violence, they're (figuratively) tapping their truncheon in every interaction they have with everyone ever.

Is it not true that Twitter denied most of the removal requests? And, people refuse to cooperate with police every day of the week on the streets of every city in the country. . Similarly, public spirited people happily cooperate with police requests every day of the week. So, the implicit claim you are making -- that every govt request is so inherently coercive that it transforms every private compliance therewith into state action as a matter of law -- doesn't make much sense.

Is it not true that Twitter denied most of the removal requests?

Where are you getting this from?

And a 2021 report by the Election Integrity Partnership at Stanford University found that of nearly 4,800 flagged items, technology platforms took action on 35 percent — either removing, labeling, or soft-blocking speech, meaning the users were only able to view content after bypassing a warning screen. The research was done “in consultation with CISA,” the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

Your source to Twitter not complying with a majority of FBI requests is that private actor EIP's JIRA platform 'only' getting 35% of flagged URLs moderated on a mix of four different social media websites?

(why does the final report not break down anything except TikTok or even give a timeline on when the final data collect was run? Wtf?)

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