Big Business & The Government
Today is the third "drop" of what Elon Musk has dubbed "The Twitter Files" since acquiring the company, seeing what he's described to be misleading and oppressive behavior by the giant social media company, and then turning over untold volumes of internal communications to a couple of journalists to slow walk on the platform itself. Musk's motives for doing this notwithstanding, one of the most disturbing parts of what I've read so far is the undeniable fact that the company had a relationship with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The emphasis being on the word "relationship."
I have been an operator, administrator or engineer on bulletin board system networks and Internet sites since 1992 and professionally since 1996. I lived through the days of the dot-com boom and bust days going into 2001 (well chronicled by Phillip J. Caplan's blog--before they were calling them blogs--called f*ckedcompany; a take-off of the magazine Fast Company, including a book that detailed the most spectacular examples of the "early days" of trying to strike it rich on the net). What I can tell you about my experience in working in and around this industry is that it is and has been full of some not so great people. Arrogant sales and marketing types that play fast and loose with ethics, arrogant tech types that saw themselves as overlords of their domain... Most technology companies got by on young people who were excited about the tech, the industry and the promise of the future, and then making them work hard, long hours with plenty of overtime (on salary of course), complete with "pager duty" where you get to be on-call 24-hours a day.
The semi-well known reputation of the tech world is well-earned. "Cool, hip, laid-back" work "spaces" (we don't call them offices, and no more cubicals--enjoy your noisy open floor plan). Everyone ditched ties and other pro attire for Converse shoes, jeans and t-shirts... Once laptops started getting powerful enough to work on, things got even more chill with couches and bean bag chairs all over the place, or just go work outside if you wanted since Wi-Fi started liberating people from their desks. And then once HipChat and then Slack ushered in the era of chat rather than business over the telephone, working at an actual desk was slowly fading away. The 2020 lockdowns that traumatized many businesses not set up for remote work with VPNs and hoping employees had always-on, reliable Internet access at home were not much of a big deal for tech giants like Facebook ("Meta"), Apple, Google ("Alphabet") or the rest. But even before then, the perks were just ridiculous... I never worked at these cash-rich tech giants overflowing with money to the point that things like catered lunches, company-sponsored-everything (daycare, yoga, whatever else) was a thing, but had colleagues recruited into those places and heard about it, like many others had.
The reason for talking about the lifestyle and culture of businesses like these is to set the context for the kind of disconnected world much of Big Tech exists in. Throw away any dated, tired references to old white men in wood-paneled offices at big conference tables smoking cigars, getting around by private jets and limousines like you'd find in any "big evil corporation" stereotype from a 1980s movie. TODAY'S "big evil corporation" are guys who look like Lt. Cmdr. Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation in T-Shirts that give key note speeches with headsets about how they're going to improve the future by "disrupting" this or that while selling your personal data to the advertisers. Data they found algorithms for exploiting the dopamine cycle in your brain to induce you into providing on your own, addictively.
These folks were pampered, privileged and entitled with no sense of what the real world is like outside of places like San Francisco, Santa Monica/Venice Beach in Los Angeles or Manhattan. Obviously, politically, they aren't right-of-center, they are often Atheist or even anti-theist in many cases (except for most of the cheap labor they brought in on H1B Visas from overseas that is). So most of what's being described in "The Twitter Files" is very, very far from surprising to me. But I am forced to think introspectively on the most disturbing aspect of it all... The FBI connection, because, at the end of the day, this is the most threatening to all of our civil liberties. Forget being banned or censored on a website. If you open up an account on some website that runs phpBB, say something the admin doesn't like, he or she and ban you too. Nobody cares because that site probably has a couple of hundred subscribers while Twitter has hundreds of millions of users, but to me, it's honestly the same thing. Them lying about it and pretending like they weren't Far Leftists curating content for a Far-Left Audience to protect their ill-gotten common carrier status, though, was--while typical for this business--still disgusting.
But if you get banned from a forum about cats, you don't have to worry about real repercussions to your life. However, if Twitter is sifting through DMs and then sharing them with the FBI, what does that mean for our civil liberties as Americans? I'm beyond the point of counting on organizations whose sole purpose in life is to protect those things since the ACLU, Human Rights League and others demonstrated their utter worthlessness during the egregious lockdowns thrown down by the likes of Gavin Newsom, Andrew Cuomo and the other tyrants. So holding my breath for any kind of real, legal accountability for those that conspired with a federal law enforcement agency to carry out psy-ops against millions of people on several critical issues isn't happening.
But I have to think about what it must have been like to be at a company like Twitter when they first made that phone call or e-mail or however the FBI made its first contact with this company. I wonder what that was like. Because, being in the webhosting business at both small and somewhat bigger companies, I remember both when they were small and when they were big. Small in the early days where all anyone cared about was making enough money each month to pay for the T-1 line coming into the data center providing Internet to all the servers. And then eventually grown big enough to for the company to have "executives," and were planning SEC filings to go public. And during that point, you start to see the company have its own legal people, and start drafting policies around what to do if contacted by the media, or by law enforcement.
I was always prepared for if we were ever to be contacted by a police department or even the FBI in case one of our dial-up accounts, e-mail accounts or dedicated servers were used to carry out some sort of abuse... Credit card fraud. Stalking. Malicious unauthorized network access attempts, etc. You kind of understand that eventually, you might be contacted by such an agency and data as well as even hardware could become evidence in a crime, possibly a potentially serious one involving a felony or federal offenses.
The reason why I'm explaining this is because my own mindset as a Linux systems engineer in my 20s and early 30s was that (as a generally pro-law enforcement person), if I was contacted by such an agency who was, in the commission of a criminal investigation, looking to obtain information about an incident as part of that investigation, I would cooperate. Without hesitation. I'd never think (not then anyway) that anything else was going on at all. Especially if there was a search warrant involved and due to a court order, some evidence or other material had to be turned over.
But at the same time, even then I wasn't so naïve as to think that my eager cooperation was even relevant. At the end of the day, whether I think it's a good idea or not doesn't matter. They are the ones with guns and handcuffs, so my cooperation in that case is ultimately not optional. Right? And so by the fact that it's a government agency acting in a law enforcement capacity getting in touch with you, by itself, carries with it a sense of obligation and a bit of intimidation as well.
So I am imagining myself an employee at Any level of the company being contacted by the FBI. Once again; the two points are a) they're the feds and I'm not even going to think of being a problem for them and b) why would I? After all, the reason for them reaching out likely has to do with trying to investigate a crime. In the wake of 9/11 and intelligence failures leading to once of the worst mass killing events in American history since the bombing of Pearl Harbor, my attitude was always, "whatever they want, I'll make sure they get it."
I never in a million years would have believed or forecast that the Federal Bureau of Investigation would ever engage in any activities outside of the scope of the active investigation into either a terrorist threat or criminal activity--past or ongoing. Right? This whole policing of speech thing is something you would expect out of the KGB. Working as an enforcer for the political enemies of one particular political party is something you would expect out of the old Soviet Union or what the national police service does for the Communist Chinese Party. Not America.
So as I read these conversations and exchanges, what I have been looking for is the tone and attitude of the people who have been having these conversations with people from the Federal Bureau of Investigation. I feel like some of the Libertarian bosses and managers I've had over the years would have had a very reluctant posture in this. Saying, "we have to do this, make sure not to do anything that would get us into legal trouble. Questions? Contact our legal team. Refer any direct contact by anyone from the FBI to these representatives on task for managing our dealings with them." That sort of thing. But instead, these were on-going meetings with senior ranking officials regarding the content of messages posted by Twitter users that never approached the level of a 9/11 conspiracy.
Right? Like as early as 2002, I was writing elsewhere that if an ISP wants to forward "private" emails to the FBI because they've become aware of that al Qaeda is using their e-mail service to plan the next attack on the United States, I would absolutely support that act. Similarly, if people are in Twitter DMs coordinating a mass casualty event at any number of public places in the country, and a Twitter employee somehow becomes aware of the fact, cooperation with the FBI (perhaps for an extended period of time--to learn more about other covert actors) to me would seem warranted and justified.
Obviously what went down in 2020 was completely different from that. "The Twitter Files" are still dropping, so I don't know if this is true yet but for now, I haven't seen anything like: "Oh hey guys, we just got a subpoena or a warrant to cooperate with the United States Department of Justice, so we'd better cooperate. Otherwise, we're looking at all kinds of fines and probably a whole bunch of us going to jail." Right? Because then you could argue: OK, maybe these guys didn't have a choice. But let's think about even that scenario.
(And, BTW, I don't purport have any answers here. I am just writing my thoughts because what we're reading about is very radical. Very un-American stuff. A serious departure from the previously held fantasies of a fair and impartial federal law enforcement system, or that conspiracies between big business and the government were either the stuff of fiction novels or movies, or Strictly in the realm of third-world countries and banana republics. Not the United States of America. So this is really worth thinking about, because it's fucking serious.)
On the one hand, if Twitter was over there chomping at the bit and Jonesin' for the chance to leverage their new, cozy relationship with the feds to silence the people they hate (which is 99% of the Right is focusing on right now), then obviously that's bad, and they suck, and all the rest of that. And we're seeing how between their former top lawyer that Musk fired pretty much right after buying Twitter, and the hidden camera video from Project Veritas of Twitter employees and leadership pretty much bragging about de-boosting and de-amplifying Conservatives on the platform, there definitely was a powerful contingent within the company that was like, "oh hell yea, Fed Bois, let's get those Alex Jones/Q-Anon wackos. I hated those assholes anyway."
But when you read these exchanges, there's a lot of people asking questions like, "is this right? Under what circumstances do these messages violate our Terms of Services?" There are examples of teams being Asked by the leadership to Remove labels meant to discredit Tweets or the people who wrote them when they were applied to Democrats. It's almost as though there were some honest people at Twitter.com trying to do their jobs, and do it correctly and ethically. And you can see this based on how calm, measured and even rational sounding this feedback has been at times. Contrast that with the frothing-at-the-mouth, flaming libtard you might encounter On Twitter attacking "MAGAts" and so blinded by seething hatred for Donald Trump that you can't even mention his name and expect any kind of a coherent response. I'm not saying he had fans at Twitter (likely not many) but there may have been a few people who weren't so completely consumed by raging hatred so as to fail to question what was going on. Having the presence of mind to even ask if some application of the ToS didn't exactly make sense suggests that to me.
Given that there may have been some fairly reasonably-minded people at Twitter, I have my own beliefs as to how things got started between them and the FBI. Again, based on my own attitudes and understanding about who and what they are, and if I had have been working at the company when they established contact. First of all, Twitter, like any company, had reached a certain sized and had obtained a large enough audience, eventually found itself on the FBI's radar. I bet Every single major business in the World with a large enough pool of people is on their radar. Verizon, AT&T... NBC News. The Wall Street Journal. I think it would be naïve to believe that any company currently listed on NASDAQ or the Dow Jones does not have on-going, two-way communication with the Fibbies. So once Twitter had the dubious distinction of joining that club of "big businesses," they reached out. Likely on the basis of a perfectly reasonable pretext at first. There was probably a major event (like a mass shooting or something) and the FBI got in contact to try and learn more about the suspect's social media activity. From there, the names and contact information of key players at Twitter were in the Rolodex. So when it came time to make more phone calls not about a serious criminal threat or investigation, there were people at Twitter that already knew who they were, and would be open to talking to the feds about "whatevs."
Then along comes the "Trump was helped by Russian interference or possibly collusion" hoax. Along comes the "Hunter Biden Laptop is Russian Disinformation" hoax. Crank tweets by people with under a few hundred or a couple of thousand followers wasn't getting anyone's attention but you had "conservative voices" (i.e., anyone right-of-center at north of 100k followers) going against the narrative. I'm going to guess that's when the FBI picked up the phone and made a few phone calls. And then things just kind of grew from there.
And by things I mean this creepy weekly (or whatever it was) meeting with the FBI. They were having just on-going chit-chats with the Fibbies about whatever they wanted to discuss. They had a direct line into Twitter, and would drop stuff in whenever they felt like it. Oh they didn't like what this large-audience user Tweeted about in politics? Twitter would (as you can see by reading the files) get contacted about something the FBI didn't like, and they'd just mindlessly act upon it.
And again, when you really think about it, why wouldn't they? Why wouldn't any company? More to the point: What was or could have been the penalty or punishment for failure to cooperate? And this is the part that I'm getting at.
How do you say no to the FBI if you're Any of these companies? People tried to give Fox News shit for its coverage of the election during November, 2020 (and I mean the Right wing did). "They called it early!" or something like that. And all I can say is... Fox News is like all the other companies I just named. Big. So I'm going to guess that they got spoken to just like all the rest did. Now how they handled getting contacted by the feds like this, and how far any cooperation went or goes even to this day? I don't know. I think few people really know. I don't think most of us will ever really know just how deep the feds have their hands inside of corporate America. But these communications dumps in these so-called Twitter Files gives us a very queasy peak into what it looks like when that connection is there and it exists.
Everyone, especially on the right, is Rightfully getting loud about Twitter doing the FBI's bidding in a whole host of what appears to be outrageous abuses of the 1st Amendment rights of at least American citizens. What other games they've been playing on Twitter with political speech concerning other countries has heretofore remained undiscussed. However, it is highly unlikely that the same manipulations and man-behind-the-curtain mind games weren't being done where it concerned the politics of other countries either. But again, I am wondering, even if Twitter wanted to push back (someone at higher levels because I'm sure some random SRE or Infrastructure Engineer definitely didn't like it, if they knew about it)... What could they do?
And I ask this question--again--very seriously. Because, there is a pretty bad track record of going up against these guys. Former award-winning CBS News journalist Sharyl Attkisson was able to prove (with the help of former three-letter-agency agents) that there was illegal, unwarranted intrusions and spying involving not only her personal computer equipment but that even of CBS News' at the time. She ultimately has filed a lawsuit with the bureau, which has been pending for over a decade. Now granted, Twitter likely has the financial resources far exceeding that of even Attkisson's to take a government agency to court, but you gotta realize/understand something about how leadership thinks at American businesses (or probably businesses anywhere in the world), which is that they are constantly managing a number of risks and threats to the ability of the company to exist, be competitive, and hopefully profitable. Being sued and filing lawsuits is like getting into a knife fight on the street. Someone's going to get hurt, the only question is how badly. But someone is going to bleed as an eventuality. So most companies are going to do whatever it takes to avoid having the fight in the first place.
Fighting a suit is something most businesses just don't want to do and if it has to involve the government, it is all-but-certainly out of the question, completely. There are very few exceptions to this. This is the reason why most of the time, most cases end in a settlement. This is why if a company does pursue legal action against anyone, it's usually in a case where they are owed (or defrauded) out of a great deal deal of money. Either by a customer, a vendor, a partner business or an employee. Winnable battles with arguably the fiduciary responsibility to pursue such action. I can't see company attorneys taking the FBI to court over adverse actions taken against a company that did not voluntarily playball, and submit to cooperating with arbitrary "requests," especially where they--again--did not concern an active criminal investigation.
So I will be keeping a close eye on these comms as they continue to come out. Because I want to gauge not just the level of eagerness that Twitter had in collaborating to suppress speech deemed "undesirable." But also because I want to try to see if I can identify any signs of coercion or sense of danger on the part of Twitter should they decide they didn't want to be a team player anymore.