FBI COINTELPRO Is Back, And Worse Than Ever
By Jim Bovard | The Libertarian Institute | December 27, 2022
Elon Musk has opened the floodgates to expose the FBI’s latest war on Americans’ freedom of speech. The FBI massively intervened to pressure Twitter to suppress accounts and tweets from individuals the FBI disapproved of, including parody accounts. The FBI and other federal agencies also browbeat Facebook, Instagram, and many other social media companies.
Thus far, most of the American corporate media has ignored or downplayed the story, known as the Twitter Files. Since many of the individuals who the FBI got squelched were pro-Trump, the violation of their rights is a non-issue (or a cause for quiet celebration). At this point, it is difficult to know whether the scant reaction to the Twitter Files is the result of political bias, collective amnesia, or simply a total ignorance of American history.
The history of the FBI provides the best guide to the abuses that may be now occurring. From 1956 to 1971, the FBI carried out “a secret war against those citizens it considers threats to the established order,” a 1976 Senate report noted. The FBI’s Operation COINTELPRO involved thousands of covert operations to incite street warfare between violent groups, to get people fired, to portray innocent people as government informants, to destroy activists’ marriages, and to cripple or destroy left-wing, black, communist, white racist, and anti-war organizations. The FBI let no corner of American life escape its vigilance; it even worked to expose and discredit “communists who are secretly operating in legitimate organizations and employments, such as the Young Men’s Christian Association and Boy Scouts.”
While many people are aware of how the FBI hounded Martin Luther King Jr. and pressured him to commit suicide, that was not even the tip of the iceberg of the FBI’s racial persecution. Almost any black organization could be targeted for illegal wiretaps. One black leader was monitored largely because he had “recommended the possession of firearms by members for their self-protection.” At that time, some southern police departments and sheriffs were notorious for attacking blacks who stood up for their civil rights.
The FBI office in San Diego instigated violence between the local Black Panthers and a rival black organization, US (United Slaves Inc.). Agents sent forged letters making accusations and threats to the groups purportedly from their rivals, along with crude cartoons and drawings meant to enrage the recipients. Three Black Panthers and one member of the US were killed during the time the FBI was fanning the flames. A few days after shootings in which two Panthers were wounded and one was killed, and in which the US headquarters was bombed, the FBI office reported to headquarters: “Efforts are being made to determine how this situation can be capitalized upon for the benefit of the Counterintelligence Program.” The FBI office bragged shortly thereafter: “Shootings, beatings, and a high degree of unrest continues to prevail in the ghetto area of southeast San Diego… it is felt that a substantial amount of the unrest is directly attributable to this [FBI] program.”
The FBI set up a Ghetto Informant Program that continued after COINTELPRO and that had 7,402 informants, including proprietors of candy stores and barbershops, as of September 1972. The informants served as “listening posts” “to identify extremists passing through or locating in the ghetto area, to identify purveyors of extremist literature,” and to keep an eye on “Afro-American type bookstores” (including obtaining the names of the bookstore’s “clientele”). The informants’ reports were stockpiled in the FBI’s Racial Intelligence Unit. The FBI also created a national “Rabble Rouser” Index, a “major intelligence program… to identify ‘demagogues.’”
The FBI targeted the women’s liberation movement, resulting in “intensive reporting on the identities and opinions of women who attended” women’s lib meetings. One FBI informant reported to headquarters of a meeting in New York: “Each woman at this meeting stated why she had come to the meeting and how she felt oppressed, sexually or otherwise… They are mostly against marriage, children, and other states of oppression caused by men.” Women’s lib informants were instructed to “go to meetings, write up reports… to try to identify the background of every person there… [and] who they were sleeping with.” The Senate report noted that “the intensive FBI investigation of the Women’s Liberation Movement was predicated on the theory that the activities of women in that Movement might lead to demonstrations and violence.”
The FBI took a shotgun approach toward protesters partly because of its “belief that dissident speech and association should be prevented because they were incipient steps toward the possible ultimate commission of an act which might be criminal.” Some FBI agents may have viewed dissident speech or protests as a “gateway drug” to blowing up the Washington Monument. The Senate report noted that the clearest FBI COINTELPRO constitutional violations consisted of “targeting speakers, teachers, writers or publications, and meetings or peaceful demonstrations… The cases include attempts (sometimes successful) to get university and high school teachers fired… to prevent the distribution of books, newspapers, or periodicals; to disrupt peaceful demonstrations, including… most of the large antiwar marches.”
The FBI especially loathed any opposition to the Vietnam War. The bureau ordered field offices in 1968 to gather information illustrating the “scurrilous and depraved nature of many of the characters, activities, habits, and living conditions representative of New Left adherents.” FBI agents were told: “Every avenue of possible embarrassment must be vigorously and enthusiastically explored. It cannot be expected that information of this type will be easily obtained, and an imaginative approach by your personnel is imperative to its success.” One FBI internal newsletter encouraged agents to conduct more interviews with antiwar activists “for plenty of reasons, chief of which are it will enhance the paranoia endemic in these circles and will further serve to get the point across that there is an FBI agent behind every mailbox.”
An FBI memo warned that “the anarchist activities of a few can paralyze institutions of learning, [conscription] induction centers, cripple traffic, and tie the arms of law enforcement officials, all to the detriment of our society.” The FBI declared: “The New Left has on many occasions viciously and scurrilously attacked the Director [J. Edgar Hoover] and the Bureau in an attempt to hamper our investigation of it and to drive us off the college campuses.”
Other federal agencies also trampled citizens’ privacy, rights, and lives during the late 1960s and early 1970s. The IRS used COINTELPRO leads to launch audits against thousands of suspected political enemies of the Nixon administration. The U.S. Army set up its own surveillance program, creating files on 100,000 Americans and targeting domestic organizations such as the Young Americans for Freedom, the John Birch Society, and the Anti-Defamation League of B’Nai B’rith. Nixon aide Tom Charles Huston, testifying to Congress in 1973, lamented the FBI’s tendency “to move from the kid with a bomb to the kid with a picket sign, and from the kid with the picket sign to the kid with the bumper sticker of the opposing candidate. And you just keep going down the line.”
Throughout the COINTELPRO era, presidents, congressmen, and other high-ranking federal officials assured Americans that the federal government was obeying the law and upholding the Constitution. It took a burglary of an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania to break the biggest scandal in the history of federal law enforcement. After hundreds of pages of confidential records were commandeered, the “Citizen’s Commission to Investigate the FBI” began passing out the incriminating documents to the media. The shocking material sparked congressional and news investigations that eventually (temporarily) shattered the FBI’s legendary ability to control its own image.
The Senate report on COINTELPRO concluded: “Only a combination of legislative prohibition and Departmental control can guarantee that COINTELPRO will not happen again.” But the Ford administration derailed legislative reforms by promising an administrative fix. In 2002, Attorney General John Ashcroft threw out many of those reforms as part of “a concerted effort to free the [FBI] field agents… from the bureaucratic, organizational, and operational restrictions” imposed after their prior abuses. Ashcroft declared: “In its 94-year history, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has been… the tireless protector of civil rights and civil liberties for all Americans.” The same tripe has been uttered by many Democrats and liberals in the last five years.
The FBI’s latest war on wrong-thinking Americans took off after the FBI helped fabricate the narrative that the Russian government conspired with the Trump presidential campaign to interfere in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The 1976 Senate report noted that COINTELPRO’s origins “are rooted in the Bureau’s jurisdiction to investigate hostile foreign intelligence activities on American soil” and that the FBI used the “techniques of wartime.” William Sullivan, former assistant to the FBI director, declared, “No holds were barred…We have used [these techniques] against Soviet agents… [The same methods were] brought home against any organization against which we were targeted. We did not differentiate.” Senate investigators warned in 1976 that the “FBI intelligence system developed to a point where no one inside or outside the bureau was willing or able to tell the difference between legitimate national security or law enforcement information and purely political intelligence.”
In our time, FBI officials pressured Twitter to suppress Americans based on false claims of fighting foreign influence. The same pretext was used by the Department of Homeland Security to massively suppress Americans’ criticism of election procedures (especially mail-in ballots) for the 2020 presidential election.
One of the biggest “misses” in the media coverage of the Twitter Files is the stunning failure of Congress to expose the abuses that Elon Musk is revealing. A few months ago, FBI director Christopher Wray, facing vigorous questioning from Sen. Charles Grassley (R-IA) and others, walked out of a Senate oversight hearing claiming that he had an urgent appointment he must keep. It was later revealed that Wray’s “appointment” was hopping on an FBI jet for a family vacation. Congress punished the FBI with a $570 million budget increase, plowing $11.3 billion into its coffers in the coming year.
Is Congress terrified of the FBI nowadays like congressmen were in the COINTELPRO era? In 1971, House Majority Leader Hale Boggs revealed the shameless kowtowing on Capitol Hill: “Our very fear of speaking out [against the FBI]… has watered the roots and hastened the growth of a vine of tyranny… Our society cannot survive a planned and programmed fear of its own government bureaus and agencies.” Boggs vindicated a 1924 American Civil Liberties Union warning that the FBI had become “a secret police system of a political character.” (The Louisiana congressman died a year later in an apparent plane crash.)
But old quotes provide no protection against new depredations. The Twitter Files prove that G-men have been off the leash for years. We still have no idea how far the FBI and other federal agencies have gone to suppress our freedom of speech. Until federal abuses are fully exposed, Americans would be damn fools to believe their constitutional rights are safe.
Jim Bovard is the author of Public Policy Hooligan (2012), Attention Deficit Democracy (2006), Lost Rights: The Destruction of American Liberty (1994), and 7 other books. He is a member of the USA Today Board of Contributors and has also written for the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Playboy, Washington Post, and other publications. His articles have been publicly denounced by the chief of the FBI, the Postmaster General, the Secretary of HUD, and the heads of the DEA, FEMA, and EEOC and numerous federal agencies.
The FBI won’t name other social media companies it pays
By Cindy Harper | Reclaim The Net | December 25, 2022
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has refused to indicate the exact social networks it has paid. This follows recent revelations verifying that the bureau paid Twitter at least $3.5 million.
Representatives for the FBI already spoke to Fox News and said that the substantial Twitter payment was a “reimbursement” for expenses and costs of its requests. The representatives indicated that the payment was to compensate the social media platform for acting in accordance with legal “requests.”
The FBI stated that the group had compensated social media platforms beyond Twitter as well. The news network requested the names of other companies that the FBI had paid for these purposes. The federal agency, however, was not willing to provide further information regarding the matter. The representatives did say, though, that the FBI has to offer reimbursement for any and all reasonable expenses that tie in with the acquisition of information that is essential for legal processes.
“While we are not able to speak to specific payments, the government is required to provide reimbursement for reasonable expenses directly related to searching for, assembling, reproducing, or otherwise providing the information responsive to the legal process. This requirement is set by federal law and the courts are the final arbiters of what is reasonable compensation,” the FBI officials said.
FBI Infiltration of Big Tech put US on fast track to Neofascist Technocratic Autocracy
By Ekaterina Blinova – Samizdat – 24.12.2022
The recently released sixth and seventh batches of the Twitter Files shed light on the FBI’s instructions to censor specific tweets and accounts for “violating” the company’s terms of service.
The internal documents also lifted the veil of secrecy on how the bureau launched an apparent damage control operation prior to the publication of the New York Post’s bombshell concerning Hunter Biden’s laptop.
On top of that, an email by Twitter’s former Deputy General Counsel Jim Baker revealed that the platform collected a staggering $3 million from the bureau at least on one occasion.
“My opinion – based on the evidence available – is the FBI did this because the FBI is fundamentally corrupt,” Jason Goodman, a US investigative journalist and founder of Crowdsource the Truth, told Sputnik. “Failure to investigate Hunter Biden based on the evidence on the laptop is bad enough. Evidence being revealed now by Twitter’s new management suggests the FBI actively worked to protect Hunter Biden from public scrutiny and hide their own lack of enforcement action. Broad knowledge of the evidence on Hunter Biden’s laptop would certainly have led to public outcry at least for further investigation. We have never witnessed such a brazen criminal act by a US government agency so nakedly exposed. For the past two years, any individual who even debates these facts online loses access to the major social media platforms.”
The Twitter Files exposure apparently hit the FBI’s raw nerve as the bureau issued an official statement claiming that “the men and women of the FBI” were doing their job, while “conspiracy theorists and others are feeding the American public misinformation with the sole purpose of attempting to discredit the agency.”
While commenting on the bureau’s statement, one prominent legal expert remarked that it is not clear “what is more chilling: the menacing role played by the FBI in Twitter’s censorship program or its mendacious response to the disclosure of that role.”
How It All Began
Make no mistake, this started long ago, noted Goodman: in fact, the groundwork was laid after September 11, 2001, with the passage of the Patriot Act.
“Prior to that, Americans were protected from undue search and seizure by the fourth amendment of the constitution,” the journalist explained. “In the newfound ‘war on terror’ the Patriot Act was sold to the American public as increased security. But it introduced several unconstitutional new laws and new law enforcement tools that removed our constitutional protection. One such tool was the National Security Letter (NSL).”
Goodman has drawn attention to the fact that prior to the advent of NSLs, investigators needed to get a warrant from a judge and had to have probable cause supported by some kind of evidence before they could lawfully investigate a person or their property, including electronic accounts, like email or Twitter.
However, with the Patriot Act, the FBI could simply write up an NSL under the suspicion that an individual was a national security threat and launch a probe into them, according to the journalist. “No warrant or evidence was required,” Goodman added. Moreover, the bureau could also reject the requests of those asking for proof on the basis that the evidence would risk revealing sources and methods and was also a national security threat, according to the journalist.
“These newfound powers were quickly and consistently abused,” Goodman continued. “Former FBI General Counsel Valerie Caproni was admonished by both the House and the Senate for gross abuses of NSLs and other unconstitutional acts.”
However, it appears that the US Congress’ attempts to rein in the bureau have not borne any fruit and the FBI has only grown more brazen in the years since.
“By alleging that the FBI was engaged in a counterintelligence investigation, they no longer had to adhere to the same rules or obey the constitutional protections that existed previously,” said Goodman. “This is exactly how the FBI began their shambolic investigation into the so-called Russian collusion with Trump.”
Hunter’s and Hillary’s Emails & APT28
Meanwhile, the story of the FBI’s attempts to shield Hunter Biden evokes strong memories of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) leak amid the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. The disclosure of Hunter’s bombshell emails was downplayed and smeared as a “hack” and “disinformation” by “Russian APT28” just as the 2016 DNC email leak was.
According to Shellenberger, the bureau took Hunter Biden’s “laptop from hell” from Mac Isaac, a Delaware repair shop owner, on December 9, 2019. By August 2020, Isaac still had not heard back from the FBI, even though he had found alleged evidence of criminal activity on the device. So Isaac contacted lawyer Rudy Giuliani, “who was under FBI surveillance at the time,” and provided him with a copy of the laptop’s hard disk. In early October, Guiliani gave the disk to the New York Post.
On October 13, 2020, a day before the Post planned to release its bombshell, “FBI Special Agent Elvis Chan sent ten documents to Twitter’s then-Head of Site Integrity Yoel Roth through Teleporter, a one-way communications channel from the FBI to Twitter,” Shellinberger revealed citing internal Twitter documents. On October 14, 2020, the bombshell article saw the light of day but soon was banned and suppressed by major Silicon Valley giants, including Twitter.
But that is not all. According to Yoel Roth’s testimony, during all of 2020, the FBI warned him about the forthcoming Russian “hack and leak” operation “involving Hunter Biden” prior to the 2020 election. The bureau particularly referred to APT28, claiming that it’s a group of Russian hackers linked to Moscow’s intelligence services. In one of his recent interviews, Roth said that when Hunter’s emails finally emerged “it set off every single one of my finely tuned APT28 hack-and-leap campaign alarm bells.”
The “laptop from hell” posed a challenge to Hunter’s father, the Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden, as the bombshell suggested that the latter not only knew but also participated in his son’s murky financial schemes.
Similarly, the 2016 DNC leak threatened the Clinton campaign, demonstrating, in particular, that the party’s primaries were rigged in favor of Hillary. It was Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann who requested cyber security firm CrowdStrike’s help in investigating the alleged DNC hack.
CrowdStrike “detected” and “attributed” the alleged breach of DNC servers to Russia during the 2016 election cycle. The company claimed that the perpetrators were “two Russian espionage groups”: Cozy Bear (APT29) and Fancy Bear (APT28), suggesting with a “low” to “medium”-level of confidence that they may be affiliated with Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) and Main Intelligence Department (GRU), respectively. Moscow denied the claim as absurd.
For its part, the FBI relied on CrowdStrike’s conclusions, although the bureau has never physically examined the DNC servers and has only been provided with their “digital copies” instead.
According to Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS), a group of former US intelligence officers working within the CIA, the FBI and the NSA, there had been no hack: it was an inside job. Moreover, CrowdStrike President Shawn Henry admitted under oath in 2017 that the company does not have “concrete evidence” that the alleged “Russian hackers” exfiltrated any data from the servers.
The story of the DNC “hack” played a big role in smearing Russia and linking Donald Trump to Moscow. The Dems claimed that Moscow “hacked” the emails to help Trump win the 2016 elections. In summer 2016, the FBI launched Operation Crossfire Hurricane on the pretext of alleged “collusion” between Trump and the Kremlin. However, Special Counsel Robert Mueller investigation found no evidence to back the allegations, which were rubbished by Moscow from the very start as nonsensical.
“The true origin of the Russiagate hoax has not yet been revealed but it is becoming increasingly clear that top executives in the FBI have been involved in an ongoing coverup for a very long time,” said Goodman. “APT28 is likely a concoction of Dmitri Alperovitch’s Crowdstrike, which itself is an obvious FBI cutout. Crowdstrike co-founder Shawn Henry left the FBI to create the company, then shortly thereafter received $150 million from Google. Sounds fair enough but think about that for a moment. Google cannot easily hand $150 million to the FBI, but they can invest whatever they want in a startup tech company.”
It is not clear if the US public understands the legal games the FBI can play, according to the journalist.
“The FBI’s infiltration of Twitter is the tippy top of tip of the upper edge of the tip of the iceberg,” Goodman remarked. “We need to understand just how many private companies and non-profit organizations are secretly working with or for the incredibly dangerous and subversive US ‘Intelligence’ community. This hidden-in-plain-sight network of government agencies, non-profit organizations, and private industry is what is spoken of as the ‘Deep State’.”
Operation Mockingbird and Church Committee
The FBI’s attempts to control and infiltrate the work of social media giants resembles nothing so much as the US intelligence Operation Mockingbird which was first mentioned by CIA Director William Colby during his briefing to the Justice Department on December 31, 1974.
Later, the issue was touched upon by Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein in Rolling Stone in 1977. Bernstein revealed how numerous journalists, including Pulitzer-prize winners, wrote fake stories and disseminated propaganda at the CIA’s behest during the Cold War. The scale of the CIA’s huge international media network was described by one CIA official as ranging from Radio Free Europe to a third‐string guy in Quito who could get something in the local paper. According to the US mainstream press, the program has never been officially discontinued.
“It is essentially an extension of Operation Mockingbird,” Goodman said about the US intelligence community’s collusion with Big Tech. “The revelations of the Church Committee showed us the CIA’s intention. There is no reason to believe they would change. We see these ‘retired’ intelligence people on the news all the time. It should be obvious to anyone looking at the evidence if the FBI or any law enforcement or intelligence agency is doing anything other than tracking dangerous criminals on Twitter, they should not be doing it.”
The Church Committee was a US Senate select committee that investigated abuses by the CIA, NSA, FBI, and IRS in 1975.
Presently, it’s not a matter of the FBI getting away with what it has done (they already have), this is “an inflection point like none other in American history,” according to the journalist.
“We are in a dangerous moment,” Goodman warned. “The United States has become a neofascist technocratic autocracy. The new Congress must take bold steps to shut this down immediately and begin the journey back to the constitutional republic that was established in 1776 or it will only get worse (…) Another thing the Patriot Act created that most people are not aware of is the National Cyber Investigative Joint Task Force. It is an interagency intelligence-sharing operation overseen by the FBI. Critics say it eliminates the compartmentalization that is in place to prevent the types of abuses that are commonplace today. Without oversight, who knows what these interagency operations are capable of.”
FBI accuses ‘conspiracy theorists’ of weaponizing Twitter Files
RT | December 22, 2022
Correspondence between the FBI and senior Twitter staff, revealing how the agency pressured the platform to suppress certain narratives, is not evidence of wrongdoing, the Bureau said in a statement on Wednesday, adding that “conspiracy theorists” are presenting their activities in a nefarious light.
The files turned over to journalists by Twitter CEO Elon Musk “show nothing more than examples of our tradition, longstanding and ongoing federal government and private sector engagements,” the FBI statement claims.
“It is unfortunate that conspiracy theorists and others are feeding the American public misinformation with the sole purpose of attempting to discredit the agency,” the statement concludes, reminding its critics that “the men and women of the FBI work every day to protect the American public.”
Messages appearing to show FBI agents pressuring Twitter staff to classify legitimate stories such as the Hunter Biden laptop revelations as foreign influence operations are, according to the Bureau merely examples of the FBI “provid[ing] critical information to the private sector in an effort to allow them to protect themselves and their customers.” Internal communications among platform employees suggest otherwise.
In communications published as part of the Twitter Files, staff repeatedly point out there is “no evidence” to substantiate FBI claims of foreign disinformation and express discomfort with the bureau’s meddling. Twitter’s former policy director observed a “sustained (if uncoordinated) effort by the IC [intelligence community]” to push Twitter to share more information against its own policies, while the FBI ultimately paid Twitter more than $3.5 million in taxpayer dollars to prioritize its censorship requests.
The White House has thus far refused to comment on the Twitter Files, referring reporters to the FBI, and the media establishment have largely ignored them. However, former Republican congressman Ron Paul argued they are proof the FBI colluded with Twitter to deprive Americans of their constitutional right to free speech.
A lawsuit filed earlier this year by the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana alleges that the FBI was not alone, and that officials from no fewer than 12 government agencies met weekly with representatives of Twitter, Facebook, and other Big Tech firms to decide which narratives and users to censor, with topics ranging from alleged election interference to Covid-19.
Why was the FBI paying Twitter millions of dollars?
By Dan Frieth | Reclaim The Net | December 20, 2022
The latest batch of Twitter Files, released by independent journalist Michael Shellenberger on December 19, revealed that the FBI paid Twitter millions of dollars to process the bureau’s requests.
“I am happy to report we have collected $3,415,323 since October 2019!” wrote an employee at Twitter’s Safety, Content, & Law Enforcement (SCALE) team, in an email sent in February 2021.
“In 2019 SCALE instituted a reimbursement program for our legal process response from the FBI,” the email continued. “Prior to the start of the program, Twitter chose not to collect under this statutory right of reimbursement for the time spent processing requests from the FBI.”
The payout to Twitter, like many other things revealed through the Twitter files, is disturbing. However, Twitter’s “Guidelines for law enforcement” has a section titled “Cost reimbursement,” which states that “Twitter may seek reimbursement for costs associated with information produced pursuant to legal process and as permitted by law (e.g., under 18 U.S.C. §2706).”
The email suggests that the FBI’s reimbursement program for paying companies to process requests was there long before Twitter began accepting the payments. That means that other social media companies were also likely getting paid. What is not clear is which companies, how much the FBI has spent, and for how long it has been making the payments.
The amount spent to pay Twitter could be seen as bribing the company more than compensating it for the extra resources required to process the requests for information or simply buying information on users.
‘Twitter Files’ Make it Clear: We Must Abolish the FBI
By Ron Paul | December 19, 2022
As we learn more and more from the “Twitter Files,” it is becoming all too obvious that Federal agencies such as the FBI viewed the First Amendment of our Constitution as an annoyance and an impediment. In Friday’s release from the pre-Musk era, journalist Matt Taibbi makes an astute observation: Twitter was essentially an FBI subsidiary.
The FBI, we now know, was obsessed with Twitter. We learned that agents sent Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth some 150 emails between 2020 and 2022. Those emails regularly featured demands from US government officials for the “private” social media company to censor comments and ban commenters they did not like.
The Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF), a US government entity that included the FBI as well as other US intelligence agencies expressly forbidden from domestic activities, numbered 80 agents engaged regularly in telling Twitter which Tweets to censor and which accounts to ban. The Department of Homeland Security brought in outside government contractors and (government-funded) non-governmental organizations to separately pressure Twitter to suppress speech the US government did not like.
US Federal government agencies literally handed Twitter lists of Americans it wanted to see silenced, and Twitter complied. Let that sink in.
This should be a massive scandal and likely it would have been had it occurred under a Trump Administration. Indeed, Congress would be gearing up for Impeachment 3.0 if Trump-allied officials had engaged in such egregious behavior. But since these US government employees were by-and-large acting to suppress pro-Trump sentiment, all we hear are crickets.
What is interesting about these Twitter revelations is how obsessed the FBI and its government partners were with satire and humor. Even minor Twitter accounts with small numbers of followers were constantly flagged by the Feds for censorship and deletion. But knowledge of history helps us understand this obsession: in Soviet times the population was always engaged in joking about the ineptitude, corruption, and idiocy of the political class. Underground publications known as samizdat were rich with satire, humor, and ridicule.
Tyrants hate humor and cannot withstand satire. That is clearly why the FBI (and CIA) was determined to see a heavy hand raised against any American poking fun at the deep state.
There is good news in all of this, however. As Constitutional Law Professor Jonathan Turley wrote over the weekend, a new Harvard CAPS/Harris Poll found that even though the mainstream media has ignored the “Twitter files,” Americans have not. Nearly two-thirds of respondents believe that Twitter was involved in politically-motivated censorship in advance of the 2020 election. Some 70 percent of those polled believe Congress must take action against this corporate/state censorship.
As Professor Turley points out, although the First Amendment only applies to the US government, “it does apply to agents or surrogates of the government. Twitter now admits that such a relationship existed between its former officials and the government.”
So now we have proof that the FBI (along with US intelligence agencies and the Department of Homeland Security) have been acting through “private” social media companies to manipulate what Americans are allowed to say when they communicate with each other.
Is there anything more un-American than that? Personally, I find it sickening.
We do not need the FBI and CIA and other federal agencies viewing us as the enemy and attacking our Constitution. End the Fed… and End the Federal Bureau of Investigation!
Copyright © 2022 by RonPaul Institute
Released files reveal how FBI grilled Twitter
RT | December 19, 2022
Twitter’s former safety chief has said he was baffled when the FBI grilled the company over assessed foreign influence threats on the platform, the latest trove of documents released by journalist Matt Taibbi and Twitter owner Elon Musk shows.
According to excerpts from internal communications that were published on Sunday, FBI agent Elvis Chan told Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth, in July 2020 to expect written questions from the Foreign Influence Task Force, adding that the intelligence community sought “clarifications” from the company.
The FBI then sent a list of detailed questions, asking Twitter to explain why, during an earlier briefing for US security and intelligence agencies, “you indicated you had not observed much recent activity from official propaganda actors on your platform.” At the end of their letter, the FBI attached references to several news articles about Russian and Chinese “propaganda” campaigns on social media.
Roth shared the questionnaire with other Twitter executives, saying that he was “frankly perplexed by the requests here, which seem more like something we’d get from a congressional committee than the Bureau,” according to screenshots published by Taibbi.
The former safety head added that he felt “not particularly comfortable” with the FBI demanding written answers on the matter. According to the released files, Roth wrote that the premise of the questions “seems flawed,” arguing that the intelligence community had “fundamentally misunderstood” Twitter’s position on disinformation.
“We’ve been clear that official state propaganda is definitely a thing on Twitter,” Roth wrote, suggesting he contact Chan over the phone as soon as possible.
The exchange took place when US officials, think tanks and media outlets were warning about alleged foreign meddling in the ongoing US presidential election campaign and disinformation related to the Covid-19 pandemic.
Musk, who finalized his acquisition of Twitter in October, promised more transparency at the company, and fired some of its top executives.
The files previously released by Taibbi with Musk’s blessing revealed how Twitter staffers struggled to rationalize the permanent ban of former US President Donald Trump, and the blocking of a story about the laptop belonging to Hunter Biden, President Joe Biden’s son.
Two-Thirds of Voters Believe Social Media Engaged in Politically-Motivated Censorship and Demand Congressional Action
By Jonathan Turley | December 17, 2022
The December Harvard CAPS / Harris Poll is out this week and Mark Penn and his colleagues have some interesting results to share. Despite the refusal of many in the media to cover the Twitter files, nearly two-thirds of voters believe Twitter shadow-banned users and engaged in political censorship during the 2020 election. Seventy percent of voters want new national laws protecting users from corporate censorship.
This week, the media continued to fulfill that common view of a de facto state media by ignoring new evidence of FBI coordination in censorship targets with Twitter in the latest news blackout.
On Friday, Twitter released additional information showing that the FBI and CIA actively pushed for censorship, supplying lists of accounts to be suspended or banned.
Journalist Matt Taibbi described Twitter as acting as a “subsidiary” of the FBI and wrote that “between January 2020 and November 2022, there were over 150 emails between the FBI and former Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth.”
The evidence continues to establish a system of censorship by surrogate or proxy. While the First Amendment applies to the government and not private corporations generally, it does apply to agents or surrogates of the government. Twitter now admits that such a relationship existed between its former officials and the government.
Once again, however, the major networks and newspapers have largely ignored the story. There has been a full mobilization of media, political, and business interests against Elon Musk and Twitter to oppose the restoration of free speech protections at the company. The media is heavily invested in suppressing this story after years of denials of any problems of censorship. Previously, they denied censorship was occurring. When such censorship became obvious, they denied that there was any involvement of the FBI and the government. Now that such involvement is confirmed, they are simply not covering the story.
Instead, the media is “all-in” on the doxxing suspensions (which Musk has now lifted). I have been critical of Musk’s response to the doxxing controversy. In part this is due to the scope of the suspensions and the fact that they occurred only 24 hours after the new policy was implemented. I would have preferred warnings and further clarity on the issue, particularly in what constituted doxxing in some of these tweets from journalists.
Despite the overwhelming coverage, there is little explanation of the media’s approach to the underlying doxxing question. Some have said that this is a “grey area” or may be below the threshold.
For years, the media has supported suspensions due to doxxing. In this case, the location of Musk’s plane may have been used by an individual to threaten his family. Most reports omit any discussion of whether the sending of such live locations information is doxxing. If it is, it has long been banned by most sites and journalists are not exempt.
Previously, figures connected with mainstream media from CNN to the Washington Post have been accused of doxxing. Liberal groups were accused of doxxing conservative justices and others, including dangerously posting information on the children of Justice Amy Coney Barrett. It does not seem to matter when the targets are conservative, Republican, or libertarian.
Writers who have long advocated the banning of others with opposing views are some of the loudest objecting in the wake of the doxxing controversy. The Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz expressed fear that she could be next. It may not be a groundless fear since Lorenz has been previously accused of doxxing others and described the reintroduction of free speech protections for others as the opening of “the gates of hell.”
Jack Sweeney, the creator of this site (using publicly available information), has expressed shock at being sued and suspended. However, these articles continue to tellingly omit one of the critical issues. Is it doxxing to supply people with the minute-by-minute movement of the plane used by Musk and his family? That would seem relevant to weighing the merits of these suspensions.
Such slanted coverage is clearly losing its hold on the public or its view of Twitter. Indeed, the media continues to write off a large percentage of readers and viewers with openly biased coverage. The public is not buying it. It is buying Twitter. Not only are users signing up in record numbers, but a recent poll shows a majority of Americans “support Elon Musk’s ongoing efforts to change Twitter to a more free and transparent platform.”
In the wake of the latest release, the FBI issued a statement that said that there was nothing to see here and that “the FBI regularly engages with private sector entities to provide information specific to identified foreign malign influence actors’ subversive, undeclared, covert, or criminal activities.”
The statement is notable for what it does not contain: any recognition of the seriousness of the allegations or pledge to conduct its own investigation in whether this relationship crossed over to de facto government censorship. According to some reports, as many as 80 FBI agents may have been tasked to assist in the censorship efforts. Yet, the FBI has offered little more than a shrug in the face of credible constitutional concerns.
According to the Harvard/Harris poll, the public believes that such censorship occurred and warrants action. The denials of the FBI and the dismissal of the mainstream media will only serve to magnify such calls for action.
State Attorneys General tell Twitter to preserve censorship evidence
By Dan Frieth | Reclaim The Net | December 14, 2022
Missouri’s Attorney General Eric Schmitt who, together with Louisiana’s Attorney General Jeff Landry, filed a lawsuit alleging collusion between the federal government and social media companies to censor certain speech, sent a letter to Twitter asking for the preservation of evidence related to communications between the company and federal government officials on content moderation and misinformation.
We obtained a copy of the letter for you here.
Schmitt, who was elected to the Senate in November, referenced the internal documents, dubbed “Twitter Files,” that are being released by CEO Elon Musk via journalists Matt Taibbi, Bari Weiss, and Michael Shellenberger.
The files showed that then-deputy legal counsel Jim Baker, who was at the FBI before joining Twitter, was involved in the decision to censor the Hunter Biden laptop story.
After the release of the first batch of the Twitter Files, it was revealed that Baker was vetting the documents being released to Taibbi and other journalists. Baker was fired immediately.
On Monday, Schmitt announced: “We sent a letter to Twitter asking the platform to look into whether any key documents were deleted.”
The letter asks Twitter to preserve evidence related to the lawsuit, adding that the platform should take the necessary steps to prevent the destruction of evidence that might have happened at the direction of Baker.
“Further, we asked Twitter to reveal who from the federal government communicated with Twitter to censor speech. Based on our recent depositions, we believe the previous list we received pursuant to a third-party subpoena was incomplete,” Schmitt wrote. “Lastly, we asked Twitter to provide responsive documents pursuant to our original third-party subpoena.”
Related: Elon Musk hints censorship docs may have been hidden or deleted
How the ‘Twitter Files’ have exposed a senior FBI official’s role in manipulating the outcome of the 2020 US election
By Felix Livshitz | RT | December 9, 2022
Internal Twitter documents and communications published by the journalist Matt Taibbi have provided devastating detail on a sweeping censorship operation conducted by the social network. They expose the central role played by a senior FBI agent in potentially influencing the outcome of the 2020 US election.
Immediate reaction to the Twitter Files was mixed, but overwhelmingly the mainstream American media has rushed to pour cold water on Taibbi’s bombshell disclosures, with, for example, The Washington Post branding them a “dud” and CNN claiming they “largely corroborated what was already known.”
Such responses are quite extraordinary given that the Twitter Files offers incontrovertible evidence of one of the largest, most influential global social networks taking extraordinary measures – usually reserved to prevent the dissemination of child pornography – to block information on its platform.
In particular, Twitter banned, both publicly and privately, the sharing of a New York Post article, based on the contents of a laptop owned by Hunter Biden, pointing to possible corruption on the part of his father, then-presidential candidate Joe Biden. The report reinforced existing concerns about Hunter’s role with Burisma, for which he received up to $50,000 per month from the Ukrainian energy giant over a five-year period for attending a handful of corporate events.
The material exposed by Taibbi shows that a decision was made by individuals at the highest levels of Twitter – with direct connections to Biden’s Presidential campaign – due to apparent fears the laptop contents had been hacked and/or had been released as part of a Russian information operation. This was despite there being zero evidence or even a vague suggestion that either was the case, and significant internal concerns.
The Twitter Files show how, among the top brass involved in the suppression of this hugely significant story was the social network’s legal vice president Jim Baker, a former FBI general counsel. He was coincidentally also fundamental to the Bureau’s multiple attempts to fraudulently concoct a link between Trump’s campaign and Russia, one way or another.
It’s clear that many staffers didn’t believe there were grounds to ban the New York Post story on the basis of Twitter’s policies on sharing hacked materials. One communications department official wrote that they were “struggling to understand the policy basis for marking this as unsafe,” while their superior fretted, “can we truthfully claim that this is part of the policy?”
However, their legitimate worries were overruled. Twitter later reversed this ban but by that point the false specter of Russian meddling had been so successfully cemented – including via a joint letter signed by over 50 senior US spies – that the story was largely discredited in the eyes of many Americans and, thus, ignored. It is only now, with Biden safely in the White House, that other outlets have begun to verify the laptop’s contents as not only real, but damaging.
Baker was central to overruling subordinates about the basis for banning the story. In an email published by Taibbi, he announced it was “reasonable for us to assume that they may have been” hacked.
It is not explained why it was “reasonable” to make this assumption, especially as Baker himself acknowledged there were instead indications that “the computer was either abandoned and/or the owner consented to allow the repair shop to access it for at least some purposes.” Which is, of course, a total contradiction in terms. So the ban went ahead, despite internal concern about the decision.
“Hacking was the excuse but, within a few hours, pretty much everyone realized that wasn’t going to hold,” an anonymous Twitter source told Taibbi. “But no one had the guts to reverse it.”
One of the reasons Baker’s intervention may have cut through initial misgivings, and no staffers then had the “guts to reverse it,” could’ve been his status as resident Russian “disinformation” expert at Twitter. He left the FBI in June 2018 on undisclosed grounds, although it was later confirmed he was the subject of a criminal Justice Department investigation due to alleged leaking to the media of scurrilous innuendo about Trump’s non-existent relationship with the Kremlin at the time.
Questions were also asked about whether, as General Counsel, Baker played any role in greenlighting or overseeing various failed FBI counterintelligence investigations into Trump’s election team. Known as Crossfire Hurricane, these related probes were built on extremely shaky foundations, and led to no evidence supporting suspicions of Trump-Russia ties being unearthed, but still remained open under internal pressure, in contravention of established investigative protocols.
A subsequent internal review found 17 separate “significant inaccuracies and omissions” in the FBI’s court submissions for warrants that it applied for to spy on campaign staffer Carter Page.
More recently, Baker testified at the trial of Michael Sussmann, a well-connected Washington DC lawyer tied to the Democratic party. He was charged by Attorney General John Durham with lying to the FBI when he presented to the Bureau falsified evidence of contact between Trump Tower and Moscow via Russia’s Alfa Bank, in the summer of 2016.
Sussmann claimed he was not representing a client in doing so, when in reality he was acting on behalf of the Democrats, and billed them for the service. Baker would’ve known anyway that this cover story was a lie, as he and Sussmann were longtime friends, but he recorded the delivery as the uninterested, selfless act of a concerned citizen. Quite why he wasn’t charged for procedural misconduct is not known.
It’s also not known why such dealings didn’t torpedo his professional credibility upon leaving the Bureau. Departing an organization like the FBI under such a dark cloud would normally mean the end of someone’s career. Instead, Baker was snapped up by Twitter to be the right hand man of Vijaya Gadde, the company’s head of legal.
Throughout her time at the social network, she was derided as its censor-in-chief, and leaked documents reveal she regularly consulted with the Department of Homeland Security on how best to restrict inconvenient facts online. It’s understandable why Baker would be such an attractive hire for Gadde.
He was by that point clearly an expert in perpetuating false claims of “disinformation” and “Russian meddling” for political purposes, to tremendous effect. The Russiagate hoax almost took down President Trump, and meant his term in office was spent ramping up tensions with Moscow rather than improving relations as he’d repeatedly promised on the campaign trail.
It could have been calculated within Twitter HQ that Baker would be willing to play a similarly destructive role the next time round, and prevent Trump from getting re-elected in the first place. Helping suppress the damaging material facts contained in the New York Post may have done just that.
Musk: Twitter Counsel Fired Over Concerns About His Role in Information Suppression
Samizdat – 07.12.2022
Elon Musk said in a tweet that he had fired Twitter’s deputy general counsel over concerns about his role in information suppression under the previous management.
“In light of concerns about Baker’s possible role in suppression of information important to the public dialogue, he was exited from Twitter today,” Musk said on Tuesday, referring to Jim Baker, who also served as former FBI general counsel.
Last week, journalist Matt Taibbi in collaboration with Musk published the so-called “Twitter Files” – Twitter’s internal communications to disclose links with political actors and with a focus on how the social network blocked stories related to Hunter Biden’s laptop in the lead-up to the 2020 US presidential election.
The published files alleged that the previous management of Twitter took extraordinary steps to suppress reporting regarding Hunter Biden’s laptop ahead of the 2020 US presidential election.
According to the Twitter Files published by Taibbi, Baker played a role in the discussion about whether the laptop story fell under Twitter’s “hacked materials” policy.
“I support the conclusion that we need more facts to assess whether the materials were hacked,” the documents published by Taibbi cited Baker as saying in one of the emails. “At this stage, however, it’s reasonable for us to assume that they may have been and that caution is warranted.”
Hunter Biden reportedly abandoned his laptop at Isaac’s repair shop in 2019, while his father, Joe Biden, was running to become US president. The contents of the laptop were later made public. Emails obtained by Western media from the laptop proved Russia’s claims that the US president’s son helped fund bioweapon research in Ukraine.
The Bidens have faced scrutiny and criticism from Republicans and others for their alleged misconduct in Hunter Biden’s foreign business dealings, which came into the public spotlight following the release of the emails.
Read more about James Baker in an article by Jonathan Turley.
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How Much of Science Is Reproducible?
BY NOAH CARL | THE DAILY SCEPTIC | DECEMBER 27, 2022
Reproducibility is the most fundamental yardstick in science. If a result can’t be replicated, it doesn’t count as science.
Yet in recent years, there has been much talk of a ‘replication crisis’. Many results that we assumed were robust simply cannot be replicated. The term is typically used in the context of psychology and medicine, though it may apply to other fields as well.
So how much of science is reproducible? One way of tackling this question is to select a large number of studies from a particular field and then attempt to replicate them. This has been done several times. … continue
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