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Posts Tagged ‘FBI’

EXPOSED: Biggest FBI Spy Scandal of the Year

Posted by M. C. on May 31, 2023

But will Congress finally stop the federal spying spree on Americans? As I tweeted on December 27, 2012, “FISA Renewal: Only a fool would expect members of Congress to give a damn about his rights and liberties.” Without radical reform, FISA should be renamed the “Trust Me, Chumps!” Surveillance Act.

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/exposed-biggest-fbi-spy-scandal-of-the-year/

by Jim Bovard

jpb photo mass anti spying demonstration dsc 0867 scaled

A Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court opinion released last week revealed that the FBI violated the constitutional rights of 278,000 Americans in 2020 and 2021 with warrantless searches of their email and other electronic data. For each American that the FISA court permitted the FBI to target, the FBI illicitly surveiled almost a thousand additional Americans. This is only the latest federal surveillance scandal stretching back to the years after 9/11.

The FISA law was enacted in 1978 to curb the rampant illegal political spying exposed during the Richard Nixon administration. After the 9/11 attacks, the George W. Bush administration decided that the president was entitled to order the National Security Agency to vacuum up Americans’ emails and other data without a warrant. After The New York Times exposed the surveillance scheme in late 2005, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales announced that “the president has the inherent authority under the Constitution, as commander in chief, to engage in this kind of activity.” Gonzales apparently forgot the congressional impeachment proceedings against President Nixon. The Bush White House also asserted that the September 2001 “Authorization to Use Military Force” resolution Congress passed entitled Bush to tap Americans’ phones. But if the authorization actually allowed the president to do whatever he thinks necessary on the homefront, Americans had been living under martial law.

Federal judges disagreed with Bush’s prerogative to obliterate American privacy. The result was a 2008 FISA reform that authorized the feds to continue commandeering vast amounts of data. But under Section 702 of that law, the FBI was permitted to conduct warrantless searches of that stash for Americans’ data only to seek foreign intelligence information or evidence of crime.   

President Barack Obama responded to the new law by sharply expanding the NSA’s seizures of Americans’ personal data. The Washington Post characterized Obama’s first term as “a period of exponential growth for the NSA’s domestic collection.” Obama’s Justice Department thwarted court challenges to the surveillance, thereby permitting the White House to claim that it was respecting Americans’ rights and privacy.

Edward Snowden blew the roof off the surveillance state with his disclosures starting in June 2013. But there was no reason to presume that federal crime sprees were not occurring before Snowden blew the whistle. Professor David Rothkopf explained in 2013 how FISA’s Section 702 worked:

“What if government officials came to your home and said that they would collect all of your papers and hold onto them for safe-keeping, just in case they needed them in the future. But don’t worry…they wouldn’t open the boxes until they had a secret government court order…sometime, unbeknownst to you.”

The 2008 FISA amendments and Section 702 snared vast numbers of hapless Americans in federal surveillance nets. The Washington Post analyzed a cache of 160,000 secret email conversations/threads (provided by Snowden) that the NSA intercepted and found that nine out of ten account holders were not the “intended surveillance targets but were caught in a net the agency had cast for somebody else.” Almost half of the individuals whose personal data was inadvertently commandeered were U.S. citizens. The files “tell stories of love and heartbreak, illicit sexual liaisons, mental-health crises, political and religious conversions, financial anxieties and  disappointed hopes,” the Post noted. If an American citizen wrote an email in a foreign language, NSA analysts assumed they were foreigners who could be surveilled without a warrant.

Snowden also leaked secret court rulings that proved that the FISA Court had “created a secret body of law giving the National Security Agency the power to amass vast collections of data on Americans,” The New York Times reported in 2013. FISA judges rubberstamped massive seizures of Americans’ personal data that flagrantly contradicted Supreme Court rulings on the Fourth Amendment. The Times noted that the FISA court had “become almost a parallel Supreme Court, serving as the ultimate arbiter on surveillance issues,” and almost always giving federal agencies all the power they sought.

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The FBI just got caught in yet more massive, outrageous FISA abuses

Posted by M. C. on May 24, 2023

The FBI also routinely conducted warrantless searches on individuals listed in police homicide reports, including victims, next-of-kin, witnesses, and suspects.”

Even the Justice Department complained those searches were improper.

https://nypost.com/2023/05/21/the-fbi-just-got-caught-in-yet-more-massive-outrageous-fisa-abuses/

By James Bovard

https://nypost.com/2023/05/21/the-fbi-just-got-caught-in-yet-more-massive-outrageous-fisa-abuses/

Like the casino gambling scene in “Casablanca,” the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court is “shocked, shocked” that the Federal Bureau of Investigation continues to ravage the privacy of vast numbers of Americans.

For each American the FISA court permitted the FBI to target, the bureau illicitly surveilled almost 1,000 additional Americans.

The court’s just-revealed ruling signals the FBI presumed any American suspected of supporting the Jan. 6, 2021, protests forfeited their constitutional rights.

FISA was enacted in 1978 to curb the rampant illegal political spying exposed during the Nixon administration.

After the 9/11 attacks, the George W. Bush administration decided the president was entitled to order the National Security Agency to vacuum up Americans’ and foreigners’ emails and other data without a warrant.

Federal judges disagreed, and the result was a 2008 FISA reform that authorized the feds to continue commandeering vast amounts of data.

But under Section 702 of that law, the FBI was permitted to conduct warrantless searches of that stash for Americans’ data only to seek foreign intelligence information or evidence of crime.

The FBI had conducted 278,000 improper searches of Americans in 2020 and early 2021.
The FBI had conducted 278,000 improper searches of Americans in 2020 and early 2021.

The heavily redacted 2022 opinion finally released Friday revealed the FBI conducted 278,000 improper searches of Americans in 2020 and early 2021.

Incredibly, the bureau conducted roughly 3.4 million warrantless searches of Americans in 2021 via Section 702.

The day before, Thursday, an FBI whistleblower revealed in congressional testimony that FBI headquarters pressured agents to treat anyone who attended the Jan. 6 protests as a criminal suspect.

The FISA court opinion reveals the FBI wrongfully cast a far broader net.

Roughly 2,000 protesters supporting President Donald Trump (including an unknown number of undercover agents and informants) entered the Capitol that day.

But an FBI analyst exploited FISA to unjustifiably conduct searches on 23,132 Americans citizens “to find evidence of possible foreign influence, although the analyst conducting the queries had no indications of foreign influence,” according to FISA Chief Judge Rudolph Contreras.

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Hope He Isn’t Looking For Me

Posted by M. C. on May 20, 2023

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End the FBI | Mises Wire

Posted by M. C. on May 18, 2023

In a 2020 essay, Angelo Codevilla examined the rot at the core of the FBI. He goes far too easy on the FBI in early decades, but he was right enough when it came to the present state of the agency. He wrote:

Thus FBI officers became standard bureaucrats who learned to operate on the assumption that all Americans were equally likely as not to be proper targets of investigation. They replaced the distinctions by which they had previously operated with the classic bureaucratic imperative: look out for yourselves by making sure to please the powerful.

https://mises.org/wire/end-fbi

Ryan McMaken

Special counsel John Durham on Monday released his report on the FBI’s role in investigating the 2016 Donald Trump campaign’s alleged collusion with Russia. This investigation, codenamed “Crossfire Hurricane,” had been—according to Durham’s report—”swiftly” opened as a full-blown investigation in response to “unevaluated intelligence information” by FBI personnel “without ever having spoken to the persons who provided the information.”

Durham shows that the investigation had been pushed forward largely by FBI agent Peter Strzok, a man known to be politically hostile to candidate Trump. Durham also notes a curious difference between the FBI’s enthusiasm for investigating Trump, and the agency’s more cautious procedures used in investigating the Hillary Clinton campaign:

The speed and manner in which the FBI opened and investigated Crossfire Hurricane during the presidential election season based on raw, unanalyzed, and uncorroborated intelligence also reflected a noticeable departure from how it approached prior matters involving possible attempted foreign election interference plans aimed at the Clinton campaign.

Durham went on to conclude that

An objective and honest assessment of these strands of information should have caused the FBI to question not only the predication for Crossfire Hurricane, but also to reflect on whether the FBI was being manipulated for political or other purposes. Unfortunately, it did not.

Rather, the FBI engaged in a “lack of analytical rigor, apparent confirmation bias, and an over-willingness to rely on information from individuals connected to political opponents.”

All in all, the Durham report paints a picture of a highly unprofessional FBI that apparently greenlights investigations based on agents’ political agendas and on politically convenient rumors. Durham sums it up: The FBI and Justice Department “failed to uphold their mission of strict fidelity to the law.”

The report was so damning that even CNN’s Jake Tapper admitted it is “devastating to the FBI,” and that the report’s conclusions serve as additional reminders that FBI agents—including many in leadership—played key roles in promoting the “Russiagate” myth. 

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The Rise of the American Gestapo: Has It Already Happened?

Posted by M. C. on May 18, 2023

Much like the Gestapo spied on mail and phone calls, FBI agents have carte blanche access to the citizenry’s most personal information.

Posted byKlark Barnes

Looking at the present, with each passing day, I see a very probable future: a new despotism creeping slowly across America. Faceless oligarchs sit at command posts of a corporate-government complex that has been slowly evolving over many decades.

In efforts to enlarge their own powers and privileges, they are/were willing to have others suffer the intended or unintended consequences of their institutional or personal greed. For Americans, these consequences include chronic inflation, recurring recession, huge unemployment, the poisoning of air, water, soil, and bodies, and, more important, the subversion of our constitution. More broadly, consequences include widespread intervention in international politics through economic manipulation, covert action, or military invasion…

I look at present members of the Establishment or people on its fringes who, in the name of Americanism, betray the interests of most Americans by fomenting militarism, applauding rat-race individualism, protecting undeserved privilege, or stirring up nationalistic and ethnic hatreds. I see pretended patriots who desecrate the American flag by waving it while waiving the law.

In Nazi Germany, the Gehieme Staatspolizei, or Gestapo, was literally the Homeland Police (Security). It was the MOTHERLAND in the USSR, the FATHERLAND in Nazi Germany, and now the HOMELAND in Nazi America! Homeland Security and the FBI are the American Gestapo.

In the months after Hitler took power, the SA and Gestapo agents went from door to door looking for Hitler’s enemies. Socialists, Communists, trade union leaders, and others who had spoken out against the Nazi Party were arrested, and some were killed. By the middle of 1933, the Nazi Party was the only political party, and nearly all organized opposition to the regime had been eliminated. Democracy was dead in Germany.

This will be the fate nowadays of gun owners, anti-vaccine advocates, freedom activists, self-sufficient people, and everyone against the current diabolical regime that got in place by stealing, lying, and cheating.

Many different groups, including the SA and SS, set up hundreds of makeshift “camps” in empty warehouses, factories, and other locations all over Germany where they held political opponents without trial and under conditions of great cruelty.

Quick Note: If the FEMA camps don’t ring you any bells…it should.
Do You Live Near Any Of These FEMA Camps? Christians, Gun Owners, Veterans, Tea Partiers, Homeschoolers, etc., Are The Targets In The New World Order

Despite the finger-pointing and outcries of dismay from those who are watching the government discard the rule of law at every turn, the question is not whether Joe Biden is the new Adolf Hitler, but whether the American Police State is the new Third Reich.

February 22, 1933, SS and SA become auxiliary police units
Less than a month after Adolf Hitler is appointed chancellor of Germany, he calls on elements of the Nazi Party to act as auxiliary police. The SS, initially Hitler’s bodyguards, and the SA, the street fighters or Storm Troopers of the Nazi Party, now have official police power. This further increases the power of the Nazi Party in German society.

With every passing day, the United States government borrows yet another leaf from Nazi Germany’s playbook: Secret police. Secret courts. Secret government agencies. Surveillance. Censorship. Intimidation. Harassment. Torture. Brutality. Widespread corruption. Entrapment. Indoctrination. Indefinite detention.

These are not tactics used by constitutional republics, where the rule of law and the rights of the citizenry reign supreme. Rather, they are the hallmarks of authoritarian regimes, where the only law that counts comes in the form of heavy-handed, unilateral dictates from a supreme ruler who uses a secret police to control the populace.

I know you already guessed and you are right, that danger is now posed by the FBI, whose laundry list of crimes against the American people includes surveillance, disinformation, blackmail, entrapment, intimidation tactics, harassment and indoctrination, governmental overreach, abuse, misconduct, trespassing, enabling criminal activity, and damaging private property, and that’s just based on what we know.

Whether the FBI is planting undercover agents in churches, synagogues, and mosques; issuing fake emergency letters to gain access to Americans’ phone records; using intimidation tactics to silence Americans who are critical of the government; recruiting high school students to spy on and report fellow students who show signs of being future terrorists; or persuading impressionable individuals to plot acts of terror and then entrapping them, the overall impression of the nation’s secret police force is that of a well-dressed thug, flexing its muscles and doing the boss’ dirty work of ensuring compliance, keeping tabs on potential dissidents, and punishing those who dare to challenge the status quo.

Consider the FBI’s far-reaching powers to surveil, detain, interrogate, investigate, prosecute, punish, police, and generally act as a law unto themselves—much like their Nazi cousins, the Gestapo—and then try to convince yourself that the United States is still a constitutional republic.

Just like the Gestapo, the FBI has vast resources, vast investigatory powers, and vast discretion to determine who is an enemy of the state.

Today, the FBI employs more than 35,000 individuals and operates more than 56 field offices in major cities across the U.S., as well as 400 resident agencies in smaller towns, and more than 50 international offices. In addition to their “data campus,” which houses more than 96 million sets of fingerprints from across the United States and elsewhere, the FBI has also built a vast repository of “profiles of tens of thousands of Americans and legal residents who are not accused of any crime.

All of this is made possible by the agency’s nearly unlimited resources (its minimum budget alone in fiscal year 2015 was $8.3 billion), the government’s vast arsenal of technology, the interconnectedness of government intelligence agencies, and information sharing through fusion centers—data collecting intelligence agencies spread throughout the country that constantly monitor communications (including those of American citizens), everything from internet activity and web searches to text messages, phone calls and emails.

Much like the Gestapo spied on mail and phone calls, FBI agents have carte blanche access to the citizenry’s most personal information.

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DHS and FBI Depict Vegan Activists as Potential Domestic Terrorists

Posted by M. C. on May 16, 2023

The national security state continues to hound and prosecute a group of animal rights activists.

https://www.leefang.com/p/dhs-and-fbi-depict-vegan-activists?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

LEE FANG

Imagine a young woman named Jane who recently adopted a vegan lifestyle after learning about factory farming in college. She discusses animal welfare and begins attending protests.

For most, Jane’s experiences sound remarkably benign.

But for the Department of Homeland Security, the young woman is following a “path of potential radicalization,” according to new documents released through a public records request.

The scenario was one of several depicted in a violence prevention workshop from the DHS Office for Targeted Violence and Terrorism Prevention, a division of the agency that works to counter domestic terrorism.

Jane’s supposed path towards violence — as featured in the DHS workshop — is composed of little more than everyday experiences that many Americans take as they embrace activism.

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Private Spies Hired by the FBI and Corporate Firms Infiltrate Discord, Reddit, WhatsApp

Posted by M. C. on May 12, 2023

Leading “threat intelligence” firms are creating fake online personas to gain access to every corner of the web.

U.S. intelligence agencies also have a record of coming up empty after infiltrating private, online spaces, raising the possibility that the security justifications for the current incursions are weaker than the agencies are claiming. The documents leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden revealed that FBI and CIA spies had created fake personas to hunt for potential terror plots discussed in online games, such as World of Warcraft and Second Life, as well as on platforms like Xbox Live. Those initiatives fizzled after the intelligence agencies found little to no evidence of terror communications.

https://substack.com/inbox/post/119946213

LEE FANG

That anonymous internet persona with an anime cartoon avatar in your Discord chat might actually be a contractor sent to spy on you. 

Enter the world of “threat intelligence.” 

It’s the term of art for a growing set of surveillance and security firms that create fake online personas to infiltrate and scrape data from private corners of the internet. The industry provides corporate and government clients with insight into conversations on private, invite-only Discord chats, WhatsApp groups, Reddit forums, and dark web message boards to help those powerful customers keep tabs on a variety of potential threats, from political hacktivists to the illegal markets that traffic in stolen passwords and intellectual property. 

I spoke to representatives of ZeroFox, DarkOwl, Searchlight Cyber, Recorded Future, CyberInt, Flashpoint, and other threat intelligence firms at RSA Conference 2023, an annual convention for cyber security professionals from across the world that is held in San Francisco. 

“We have personnel who already have established credentials in these environments so that we’re able to go in and look for things,” said A.J. Nash, the vice president of intelligence at ZeroFox, a leader in the threat intelligence industry that is based in Baltimore, Maryland.

Nash confirmed that the company is active in Discord, an audio and video group chat app popular among young video-game players.

“We can do the same thing with Discord,” Nash added. “It’s hard to infiltrate a small group because everybody knows everybody. But some of the groups that are larger, yeah, we have the ability to get into some opportunities.”

An executive at DarkOwl, a Denver-based threat intelligence firm that provides clients with a special database of information from its snooping, explained that the company creates fake identities and usernames to gain admission to many of the private platforms and chatrooms that it uses to collect information. 

“What we do, we work with personas,” said Magnus Svärd, a director at DarkOwl. “We’ve done this at scale since 2018 so there’s some trust in the personas that we’ve built up, whether they’re on Discord, on Telegram, or wherever.”

Searchlight Cyber, a British firm that specializes in dark web message boards, similarly uses internet personas to gain access to private online forums and chat platforms.

“We actually get invited to those. We have human actors and get invited. We obviously don’t identify as Searchlight on them,” said Peter Ritter, a sales manager at the firm. “Then we see what’s going on there.”

CyberInt, an Israeli threat intelligence firm, advertises how its team of analysts uses fake personas to thwart hackers, retail fraud, hacktivists, and other cyber security threats.

In one video posted by CyberInt, an analyst for the firm discusses her approach to go into online communities and “detect threat actors when they are young or starting out at 14 or 15, that’s when I start observing and documenting their malicious activities.” At that age, they are “more careless and open,” the analyst said.

In another CyberInt marketing video, the firm walks a potential client through the process of using a fake online alias to contact a hacker over the messaging app Telegram and “get as much information as we can.”

Danny Miller, a director of marketing at CyberInt, confirmed to me that his firm has analysts infiltrating Discord servers, among other platforms.

Many of these firms maintain close ties to law enforcement and government agencies. Several are currently under contract with the Federal Bureau of Investigation or military intelligence.

The role of ZeroFox’s collaboration with the FBI, in particular, came to light in documents unearthed by the special House committee investigating the U.S. Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021. In a Jan. 3, 2021, email exchange between FBI officials preparing for the right-wing protests slated to occur, one official noted that the FBI team charged with monitoring groups due to assemble at the Capitol had just signed on with ZeroFox days earlier.  The official said that the agency  was still learning how to use the software to monitor social media posts from political extremists headed for Washington on Jan. 6, 2021.

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It Appears that the US Government Is Totally Corrupt

Posted by M. C. on May 11, 2023

If you don’t believe the FBI is corrupt, consider the Hunter Biden laptop.  The information on the laptop revealing clear criminal behavior has been known for years, and nothing has been done about it.  The corrupt FBI even declared the laptop to be a Russian plant in an effort to influence a US election.  Really.

Paul Craig Roberts

“It doesn’t make much sense to investigate the guy who brings you the allegation rather than the allegation.” — Former Federal Prosecutor Bud Cummins

On October 4, 2018, Bud Cummins brought evidence to the attention of US Attorney Geoff Berman of criminal behavior by Vice President Joe Biden.  Instead of investigating Biden, Berman investigated Cummins.  This is the Department of Justice today.  The DOJ is just as corrupt as the FBI, which is part of DOJ, the CIA, NSA, FDA, and all the rest.  Try to find an honest federal agency or institution.

If you don’t believe the FBI is corrupt, consider the Hunter Biden laptop.  The information on the laptop revealing clear criminal behavior has been known for years, and nothing has been done about it.  The corrupt FBI even declared the laptop to be a Russian plant in an effort to influence a US election.  Really.

The corrupt FBI refuses to release information, thus blocking the House Oversight Committee from oversight and revealing, yet again, the utter weakness of the legislature in holding the executive branch accountable. Basically, Congress is powerless.  All the federal government needs to do is to utter the words “national security” and Congress collapses.

The FBI’s coverup of the Biden father-son crimes enables the corrupt Democrats and their media whores to allege that the reports of Biden family crimes are “anonymous innuendo.”  But, of course, the information on the laptop is not anonymous and neither is former federal prosecutor Cummins. 

To protect Democrats from real crimes federal officials commit perjury, and to falsely accuse President Trump they commit perjury again.  One wonders if Republicans understand the fight they are in.  

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12058485/Joe-Bidens-bribery-allegations-brought-DOJ-2018.html

https://sputnikglobe.com/20230507/there-is-more-to-already-impeach-biden-than-anything-dems-had-on-trump-1110171953.html

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How The FBI Helps Ukrainian Intelligence Hunt ‘Disinformation’ On Social Media

Posted by M. C. on April 29, 2023

The FIB spending your tax dollars to give free stuff to one of the most corrupt entities on the planet.

https://open.substack.com/pub/leefang/p/how-the-fbi-helps-ukrainian-intelligence?utm_source=direct&r=iw8dv&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

LEE FANG

The Federal Bureau of Investigation pressures Facebook to take down alleged Russian “disinformation” at the behest of Ukrainian intelligence, according to a senior Ukrainian official who corresponds regularly with the FBI. The same official said that Ukrainian authorities define “disinformation” broadly, flagging many social media accounts and posts that he suggested may simply contradict the Ukrainian government’s narrative.

“Once we have a trace or evidence of disinformation campaigns via Facebook or other resources that are from the U.S., we pass this information to the FBI, along with writing directly to Facebook,” said llia Vitiuk, head of the Department of Cyber Information Security in the Security Service of Ukraine.

“We asked FBI for support to help us with Meta, to help us with others, and sometimes we get good results with that,” noted Vitiuk. “We say, ‘Okay, this was the person who was probably Russia’s influence.'”

Vitiuk, in an interview, said that he is a proponent of free speech and understands concerns around social media censorship. But he also admitted that he and his colleagues take a deliberately expansive view of what counts as “Russian disinformation.”

“When people ask me, ‘How do you differentiate whether it is fake or true?’ Indeed it is very difficult in such an informational flow,” said Vitiuk. “I say, ‘Everything that is against our country, consider it a fake, even if it’s not.’ Right now, for our victory, it is important to have that kind of understanding, not to be fooled.”

In recent weeks, Vitiuk said, Russian forces have used various forms of disinformation to manufacture fake tension between President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and Valerii Zaluzhnyi, the four-star general who serves as commander-in-chief of Ukraine’s military.

Indeed, recent reports have focused on the relationship between the two Ukrainian leaders. The German newspaper Bild reported that Zelenskyy and Zaluzhnyi had argued regarding tactics deployed in the battle over Bakhmut. Vitiuk said that any notion of conflict between Zelenskyy and his military chief, however, is false.

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Pro-Censorship Democrats Whitewash the Federal Government’s Iron Fist | The Libertarian Institute

Posted by M. C. on March 13, 2023

But “disinformation” is often simply the lag time between the pronouncement and the debunking of government falsehoods.

Perhaps the biggest “lag time” is Americans learning how the feds are suppressing freedom of speech.

https://libertarianinstitute.org/articles/pro-censorship-democrats-whitewash-the-federal-governments-iron-fist/

by Jim Bovard 

jpb congress twitter files composite image sharpened

The House Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government held a hearing last Thursday on the Twitter Files. Elon Musk purchased Twitter last October and was aghast to learn how the feds had previously domineered his new company. “Twitter is both a social media company and a crime scene,” he tweeted on December 10. Musk chose a handful of journalists to go through Twitter’s records and expose how the feds domineered the company.

Prior to Thursday’s hearing, the Twitter Files revealed that the U.S. State Department had directly pressured Twitter to cancel almost 300,000 accounts (including those of journalists and foreign diplomats). In June 2021, a State Department contractor sent Twitter a list of “around 40k Twitter accounts that our researchers suspect are engaging in inauthentic behavior…and Hindu nationalism more broadly.” But the list was full of hapless Americans with no ties to India or its politics. The State Department sent Twitter a list of 5,500 names believed to be “Chinese…accounts” engaged in “state-backed coordinated manipulation.” The list was so sloppy that it “included multiple Western government accounts and at least three CNN employees based abroad,” according to a Twitter internal analysis. One Twitter executive ridiculed the presumption that “If you retweet a news source linked to Russia, you become Russia-linked.”

The FBI perpetually browbeat Twitter to suppress accounts, including Twitter parody accounts that only idiots or federal agents would not recognize as humor. Taibbi wrote, “The master-canine quality of the FBI’s relationship to Twitter comes through in this November 2022 email, in which ‘FBI San Francisco is notifying you’ it wants action on four accounts.” In a March 2022 meeting with top Twitter executives, FBI agent Laura Dehmlow “warned that the threat of subversive information on social media could undermine support for the U.S. government.” Dehmlow had a task force of 80 agents to curb “subversive data utilized to drive a wedge between the populace and the government.” Her team continually pounded Twitter headquarters with tweets and individuals they wanted suppressed.

Biden’s COVID policymakers were some of the most brazen censors of social media. The Biden White House browbeat Twitter into canceling the accounts of Alex Berenson and many other lockdown critics. A lawsuit is exposing how the Biden White House sought total suppression of any content on social media that raised doubts on the efficacy of the COVID vaccine. Twitter Files added new logs to the bonfire on the morning of the hearing with revelations of a federal contractor pressuring social media companies to suppress “stories of true vaccine side effects” and “true posts which could fuel [vaccine] hesitancy.”

Americans’ freedom of speech is increasingly targeted by a vast, federally funded Censorship-Industrial-Complex. The feds and their contractors are going on ever-more wild goose chases to suppress any views the Washington establishment disapproves.

Twitter Files reporters Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger were the witnesses at last week’s hearing. Though both are bestselling authors with long records of excellent reporting, they were treated as shameless grifters who basely smeared noble federal agencies.

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