HOW SOCIAL NETWORKS BECAME THE “DAUGHTER” OF THE FBI AND THE CIA

The US Congress last tried to deal with what the country’s bloated security services were doing almost half a century ago. In 1975, the Church Committee managed to take a fleeting, though far from complete, snapshot of the underworld, in which agencies such as the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the National Security Agency (NSA) operate.

After the Watergate scandal, a Congressional committee and other related investigations found that the country’s intelligence services had extensive surveillance powers and were involved in a number of illegal or unconstitutional actions.

They secretly undermined and killed foreign leaders. They have engaged hundreds of journalists and many media outlets around the world to spread false narratives. They spied and infiltrated political and human rights groups. And they manipulated public discourse to protect and expand their powers.

Senator Frank Church himself warned that the power of the intelligence community could at any moment “turn against the American people, and no American will have any privacy left, such is the ability to monitor everything… there will be nowhere to hide.”

Since then, the technological possibilities for invading privacy have increased dramatically, and the capabilities of the intelligence services, especially after September 11, have expanded in ways that Church could never have foreseen.

That’s why it’s high time to create a new church committee. And finally, in the most contradictory circumstances and for the most biased reasons, some kind of revival can finally happen.

The protracted struggle within the Republican Party over the election of Kevin McCarthy as the new speaker of the House of Representatives last month forced him to yield to the demands of the right wing of his party. Last but not least, he agreed to create a committee on what is called “arming” the federal government.

It held its first meeting last week. The group said its task would be to address “the politicization of the FBI and the Department of Justice and encroachments on American civil liberties.”

Earlier, in his speech to the House of Representatives about the new committee, Republican Representative Dan Bishop said it was time to cut out the “rot” in the federal government: “We pay attention to the deep state. We’re coming for you.”

Democrats have already condemned the committee as a tool that will be used in the interests of Donald Trump and his supporters, saying that right-wing Republicans want to discredit the security services and hint at abuses in the treatment of the former president.

A snowball of power

But while the committee will almost certainly end up being used to settle political scores, it could still shed light on some of the appalling new powers that the security services have acquired since the Church Committee report.

The extent to which these forces have grown should be obvious to everyone. Documents released by whistleblower Edward Snowden ten years ago testify to illegal mass surveillance at home and abroad by the NSA. And Julian Assange’s transparency organization Wikileaks has published dossiers revealing not only US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, but also a huge global hacking program of the CIA.

It is noteworthy that both Assange and Snowden have suffered terrible consequences, which may be a sign of the ability of security agencies to retaliate against those who challenge their might.

Snowden was forced to leave Russia, one of the few jurisdictions where he cannot be extradited to the United States and locked up in custody. Assange has been jailed because the US authorities are seeking his extradition, so he can disappear in a maximum security prison for the rest of his life.

Now, in an unexpected turn of events, the billionaire has opened another window for covert manipulation by the security services — this time in relation to social media platforms and the electoral process in the United States. The key players this time are the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), created by the administration of former President George W. Bush after the September 11 attacks.

After Elon Musk bought the social network Twitter last year, he gave several independent journalists access to its corporate archives. In an ongoing series of investigations called “Twitter Files”, published as long streams on the platform, these journalists found out what happened under the previous owners of Twitter.

The bottom line is that after Trump’s election, the US security services — with the help of political pressure, especially from the Democratic Party — aggressively penetrated the decision-making processes on Twitter. It seems that other major social media platforms have taken similar measures.

“Nothing burger”?

The Twitter files suggest a rapidly emerging but covert partnership between government intelligence agencies, Silicon Valley, and traditional media to manipulate the nationwide dialogue in the U.S. as well as much of the rest of the world.

The sides of this alliance justify to each other their interference in US politics — hidden from public view — as a necessary response to the rapid growth of a new populism . Trump and his supporters began to dominate the Republican Party, and a left-wing populist led by Senator Bernie Sanders made limited penetration into the Democratic Party.

The special services were particularly concerned about social networks, as they were seen as a means of causing this wave of popular discontent. According to the Intercept, one of the FBI employees last year noticed that “subversive information on social networks can undermine the support of the US government.”

It seems that the national security state viewed the alliance with the big tech private sector as an opportunity to protect the old guard of politics, especially in the Democratic Party. Figures such as President Joe Biden and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi were considered a reliable pair of hands capable of preserving the legitimacy of turbocharged neoliberal capitalism and eternal wars, which were the lifeblood of the intelligence community.

This partnership has served all parties well. Silicon Valley has been the chosen career for many liberals who believe that progress is best achieved through technological means dependent on social stability and political consensus. Populism and the polarization it generates naturally cause them discomfort.

And both intelligence agencies and more centrist politicians in the Republican and Democratic parties understand that they are in the firing line in populist politics due to years of failures: the growing polarization of wealth between rich and poor, the creaking US economy, depleted or non-existent social security services, the ability of the rich to buy political influence, the constant loss of treasure and lives in seemingly meaningless wars that are being waged in distant countries, and the media, which rarely touch on the problems of ordinary people.

Instead of focusing on the real causes of the growing anger and sentiment against the establishment, the security services offered politicians and Silicon Valley a more comforting and convenient narrative. Populists — both on the right and on the left — did not express dissatisfaction with the failure of the US political and economic system. They worked to sow social discontent in the interests of Russia.

Or, as recorded in the minutes of the DHS meeting last March, a new emphasis was placed on curbing “subversive data used to drive a wedge between the population and the government.”

This strategy reached its climax with Russiagate, years of unsubstantiated hysteria promoted by the intelligence community and the Democratic Party. The main claim was that Trump was able to defeat his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential election only because of collusion with Moscow and Russian influence operations through social networks.

As in the game “Hit the Mole”, any signs of illegal actions or criminal actions on the part of the special services or systemic failures of the US political class were now regarded as “Russian disinformation”.

Snowden’s expulsion to Russia — the only choice left to him — was used to discredit his denunciations of the NSA. And the disclosure by Assange and Wikileaks of war crimes and violations of the law by the intelligence community was actually negated by the alleged collusion with “Russian hackers” in uncovering corruption in the Democratic Party during the 2016 elections.

In practice, statements about “Russian disinformation” simply further polarized US policy.

The key issues raised by the Twitter files — the collusion of the state with the technology and media industry, interference in elections, as well as manipulation and distortion of the narrative — were classified as political bias and obscured by them.

Interest in Twitter files has been mostly limited to the right. Reflexively, the Democrats mostly dismissed the revelations as “nothing burger.”

Climate of fear

Perhaps coincidentally, after taking over Twitter, Musk turned from a liberal favorite—because of his Tesla electric cars -into almost an outcast. In October, the Biden administration denied reports that it was considering vetting his business for national security in the face of Musk’s “increasingly friendly stance.” His status as the richest man in the world quickly collapsed along with his reputation.

The irony is that the same special services that fanned the hysteria around the “Rashagate” are now being exposed in Twitter files as guilty of the very interference they accused Moscow of.

It was reported that during the 2016 presidential election, Russia colluded with Trump and helped him, using social networks to sow discord and manipulate the American electorate. The subsequent official investigation by Robert Mueller did not confirm these allegations.

Instead, I believe that the Twitter files indicate that not Russia, but the FBI, DHS and CIA — the very agencies claiming that Russia threatens the political order in the United States — aggressively and secretly sought to influence American public opinion.

The Twitter files suggest that the real threat to democracy in the US is the US security state, to a much greater extent than Russia. The atmosphere of fear fueled by these agencies over alleged “Russian disinformation” not only influenced public opinion, but also gave the intelligence community even more leverage over social networks and an additional license to accumulate more power. Whether it’s Russiagate, Skripal or Syria, the media has lost touch with reality

Statesmen are increasingly responsible for deciding who is allowed to be heard on social media — even Trump was banned when he was president — and what can be said. These decisions are often made not to prevent crimes or enforce laws, or even for the public good, but to tightly control political discourse in order to marginalize serious criticism of the establishment.

The fact that the collusion between the social media platforms and these agencies was secret in itself indicates the nefarious nature of what is happening.

Latent pressure

The Twitter files open a window into a phenomenon that seems to be playing out across all social networks. Traditionally, liberals have defended the use of censorship on social media on the grounds that these platforms are private companies that can do whatever they want. Their behavior allegedly is not a violation of the First Amendment to the protection of freedom of speech.

However, the reality revealed by the Twitter files is that networks have often responded to covert pressure either directly from the federal government or through its intelligence agencies by limiting what can be said. As it was repeatedly noted in the Files, Twitter, like other social networks, began to function not so much as a private company, but as “a kind of subsidiary of the FBI.”

In 2017, at the height of the panic around the “Rashagate”, the FBI created a Task Force to study foreign influence, the number of which soon increased to 80 agents. His alleged job was to keep in touch with various networks to stop alleged foreign interference in the election.

Soon, Twitter executives began meeting and communicating regularly with senior FBI officials, while receiving an endless stream of demands for the removal of content to prevent “Russian disinformation.” It seems that the CIA also attended the meetings under the pseudonym OGA or “another government agency.” Although the task of the task force was foreign influence, it reportedly became “a channel for many internal requests for moderation, from state governments and even from local police.”

It is reported that under growing behind-the-scenes pressure from intelligence agencies and publicly from politicians, social networks have begun to compile secret blacklists using information from security services to restrict access to accounts or stop the appearance of topics. The effects were often hard to miss since Trump said he was investigating the practice in 2018.

In response, Twitter executives publicly denied that they practiced a “shadow ban” — a term denoting when posts or accounts are difficult or impossible to find. In fact, Twitter just came up with another phrase for exactly the same speech suppression mode. They called it “visibility filtering.”

Such censorship was applied not only against accounts suspected of bots, or those who spread obvious misinformation. Even prominent public figures who had the right to speak on the topic were secretly persecuted if they challenged the key narratives of the establishment.

Stanford epidemiologist Jay Bhattacharya, for example, suffered from “visibility filtering” during the Covid-19 pandemic after criticizing blockages for harming children. He was put on the “black list of trends”.

Due to recent mass layoffs on Twitter, Middle East Eye was unable to contact the company for comment on these and other allegations made in Twitter files. The CIA had not responded by the time of publication, while the FBI sent a response stating: “The correspondence between the FBI and Twitter shows nothing but examples of our traditional, long-standing and ongoing obligations of the federal government and the private sector… As can be seen from the correspondence, the FBI provides important information to the private sector so that they can protect themselves and their clients.”

The files found that other leading doctors who questioned the government’s orthodoxy were also suspended from Twitter, often under direct pressure from the White House or lobbyists for vaccine companies.

But the most notable victim of the Twitter censorship regime was Trump himself. He was banned on January 8, 2021, although employees reportedly agreed behind the scenes that they could not base such a decision on any direct violation of their rules.

Russian “influence”

The consequences of the “Rashagate” further dragged Twitter into the arms of the special services. In early 2018, Republican Representative Devin Nunes submitted a secret memo to the House Intelligence Committee detailing alleged abuses by the FBI while monitoring a figure associated with Trump.

The FBI allegedly relied on the so-called Steele dossier, which was partially funded by Clinton and the Democratic Party, but was initially presented to the media as an independent intelligence investigation confirming collusion between the Trump team and Moscow.

The news of the memorandum provoked a storm on social media among Trump supporters, giving rise to a viral hashtag: #ReleaseTheMemo. Nunes ‘ allegations were confirmed almost two years later by a Justice Department investigation . However, at that time, Democratic politicians and the media were quick to ridicule the memorandum, describing any demand for its publication as a “Russian influence operation.”

The heat was scored on Big Tech. Twitter’s own investigations failed to reveal any Russian involvement, suggesting that the hashtag was trending naturally thanks to VIT – very important tweeters.

But Twitter executives weren’t in the mood for a fight. Instead of engaging in a fight with the Democratic Party — and, most likely, the FBI, concerned about the revelations of the memorandum — Twitter followed a “slavish scheme not to challenge Russia’s statements in the protocol,” said Matt Taibbi, one of the journalists who worked on this report. Twitter files.

Soon, major media outlets blamed Russia for all the embarrassing hashtags that went viral, such as #SchumerShutdown, #ParklandShooting and #GunControlNow. As Russiagate’s campaign of statements intensified, Twitter came under increasing pressure to act. In 2017, he manually checked about 2,700 accounts marked as potentially suspicious. The vast majority have been cleared. Twitter blocked 22 accounts as possible Russian, and another 179 were found with “possible links” to these accounts.

Democratic politicians were outraged, apparently relying on intelligence sources to confirm their claim that social networks were flooded with Russian bots. Twitter responded by creating a “Russia task force” to investigate further, but again found no evidence of a Russian influence campaign. All that was discovered were a few lone posters who spend limited money on advertising.

Nevertheless, Twitter plunged into a PR crisis, and politicians and official media accused it of inertia. Congress has threatened to pass draconian legislation that would deprive Twitter of advertising revenue. Twitter’s inability to find accounts of Russian influence led to an accusation from Politico: “Twitter deleted data potentially important for investigations against Russia.” Twitter’s initial investigation of 2,700 accounts sparked ridiculous claims in the media that a “new network” of Russian bots had been discovered.

In the midst of this firestorm, Twitter suddenly changed course, publicly stating that it would remove content “at our sole discretion,” but in fact it was much worse. As Taibbi reported in one of the Twitter files, this happened when the company privately decided to “take off board” everything that was “identified by the US intelligence community as a state-sponsored organization conducting cyber operations.”

Twitter was increasingly under siege. A Twitter file published last month claims that a well-known online lobby called Hamilton 68, with ties to the intelligence community, committed “fraud” against Russian disinformation.

The site caused endless headlines in the American media after a report that it revealed a campaign of Russian influence on social networks, in which hundreds of users participated. The media published these claims as proof that social networks are flooded with Russian bots. Hamilton 68 employees were even invited to testify before senior Congressional politicians.

However, despite this furore, Hamilton 68 has not released a list of bots that, according to her, were discovered. Internal Twitter investigations revealed that almost all of those on the list were regular users.

The Alliance for Securing Democracy (ASD), which hosted Hamilton 68 and its successor Hamilton 2.0, published a “help” in response to Twitter files refuting the allegations and suggesting that its data was “constantly misunderstood or misrepresented” by the media and lawmakers, despite “extensive efforts to correct misconceptions at that time.” ASD noted that they never assumed that all the bots were Russian, but tracked some of them.

It is noteworthy that Hamilton 68 was headed by a former senior FBI official. Twitter executives did not publicly resist the pressure of the media and faced being brushed off when they tried to privately express their concerns to journalists.

FBI “navel”

In a sign of how close the relationship between the FBI and Twitter has become, Twitter has hired James Baker, the former chief lawyer of the FBI, as legal counsel. Baker has been one of the central figures in attempts to paint a picture — now discredited again — of collusion between Trump and Moscow.

Many others who left the FBI went straight to Twitter. Among them was Dawn Burton, the former deputy chief of staff of the head of the FBI James Comey, who initiated the investigation of the “Rashagate”. In 2019 , she became Twitter ‘s director of strategy .

Similar connections existed with the British special services. Twitter has hired Gordon McMillan as its chief editorial adviser on the Middle East. This was a part-time position, as at the same time he was serving in the psychological warfare unit of the British Armed Forces, the 77th Brigade.

By 2020, when the pandemic broke out, other government agencies saw their chance to launch a parallel campaign against Twitter, focused on China’s alleged efforts to spread misinformation about Covid-19. The State Department’s intelligence arm, the Global Engagement Center, used federal government data to claim that 250,000 Twitter accounts were amplifying “Chinese propaganda,” once again sowing unrest. These accounts included the Canadian military and CNN.

Correspondence between Twitter executives shows that they had their own views on the goals of the campaign. State Department officials wanted to “fit in” with a consortium of agencies like the FBI and DHS that were allowed to delete Twitter content.

Significantly, Twitter objected to the inclusion of the State Department—and in terms that strongly contrasted with their approach to the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security. Executives viewed the staff as more “political” and “Trumpian.”

In the end, it was proposed that the FBI serve as a “navel” through which Silicon Valley would inform other government agencies. As a result, according to the Files, Twitter “accepted requests from every conceivable government agency,” often en masse. The platform has almost never refused to respond to requests to delete accounts accused of being Russian bots.

As Twitter became increasingly passive, even senior US politicians tried to intervene. Adam Schiff, then the head of the House Intelligence Committee, asked a journalist he doesn’t like to de-report. Although Twitter has been reluctant to agree to such requests, it is “deamplifying” some accounts.

As the 2020 election approached, the flood of security demands turned into a torrent that threatened to overwhelm Twitter. Many of them had nothing to do with foreign influence — an obvious target of the FBI task force. Instead, the submissions often concerned internal accounts. They rarely detailed threats of lawbreaking or terrorism, which appear to be the FBI’s primary area of interest, but instead focused on much less clearly defined violations of Twitter’s “terms of service.”

Often accounts were subjected to “digital execution” not because what was said was verifiable disinformation, but because the tweets crossed political red lines: noting the neo-Nazi problem in Ukraine or being too sympathetic to Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro or Russian President Vladimir Putin.

Laptop Revelations

It is reported that after the introduction of Big Tech, the security services used their powers to secretly form a nationwide dialogue around the 2020 presidential election.

Perhaps the biggest revelation so far, confirming the suspicions of the right, is that social networks and state security agencies played a role in hiding the so-called Hunter Biden laptop story a few weeks before the 2020 election.

On the eve of the vote, the FBI task force prepared the ground by telling Silicon Valley executives that Russia would try to “dump” hacked information in order to damage Democratic presidential candidate Biden. Presumably, this was a repeat of the 2016 election, when the publication of internal Democratic Party emails damaged then-candidate Hillary Clinton.

After Trump’s election, much of the “Rashagate” narrative grew out of unsubstantiated claims by the security services that these embarrassing emails pointing to political corruption in the leadership of the Democratic Party were hacked by Russia.

Evidence suggesting a different explanation— that the emails were leaked by a disgruntled insider—has been widely ignored. The furor caused by this story overshadowed the fact that the emails and their damning revelations about the Democratic Party were all too real.

Based on warnings from the intelligence community, social media platforms hastily blocked the Hunter Biden laptop story, which alleged problematic ties between the Biden family and foreign officials in Ukraine. Joe Biden’s officials denied any wrongdoing on the part of the then presidential candidate, and Hunter himself evaded the question.about whether the laptop belonged to him. The story, which was published by the right-wing New York Post newspaper, was immediately declared a Russian influence operation by dozens of former intelligence officers.

But in fact, the FBI knew almost a year before this story became public that the laptop belonged to Hunter Biden and that the information contained in it was unlikely to have been tampered with or hacked. The owner of a computer store in Delaware, whom Hunter Biden asked to repair his laptop, reported his concerns to the FBI. The agency even subpoenaed the device.

This chain of events raises questions about whether the FBI decided to pre-empt the impact of the laptop story, which threatened Joe Biden’s chances in the 2020 election, before the right-wing press could publish the information. It appears that they manipulated the media, including social media, to suggest that any story harming Biden before the election is Russian disinformation.

At the time, Big Tech had other reasons to believe that this story was probably true. The New York Post conducted the usual checks. Other reporters soon confirmed that the information came from Hunter Biden’s laptop.

However, Twitter hastily accepted the statement that this story violates its policy regarding the publication of hacked materials, repeating the FBI’s statement that this is Russian disinformation. Others, like Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, agreed with the FBI’s demands for trust too, as he later admitted.

Social networks have taken the unprecedented step of blocking attempts to share this story on their platforms, which could affect the outcome of the 2020 election — something that most right—wing Republicans consider a crime against democracy, and many supporters of the Democratic Party consider a crime against democracy.

Psychological warfare

Collusion between social media platforms and the US security service over the “Rashagate” was not a deviation from the norm. According to the files, Twitter gave the Pentagon special permission, in violation of its own policy, to create accounts to conduct a “digital execution.”

Twitter helped the military to whitelist 52 fake accounts in Arabic in order to “expand certain messages.” These accounts promoted U.S. military objectives in the Middle East, including reports of attacks on Iran, support for the Saudi-led war in Yemen, and claims that U.S. drones are striking Iran.

By May 2020, Twitter had discovered dozens more accounts that the Pentagon had not disclosed, which wrote in Russian and Arabic on topics such as Syria and the Islamic State. According to Li Fang, one of the journalists who worked on the Twitter files: “Many emails sent during 2020 show that high-level Twitter executives were well aware of the extensive network of fake accounts and covert propaganda [of the Ministry of Defense] and did not suspend the accounts.”

Another study revealed the Pentagon’s extensive propaganda network in other social media apps such as Facebook and Telegram.

Twitter’s leniency towards these secret Pentagon accounts stands in stark contrast to its treatment of the media and individuals accused of having ties to countries the US government considers hostile states. They are widely known as such, including Western dissident journalists and academics who allegedly worked with Russian, Chinese, Iranian or Venezuelan media.

According to a study by the FAIR media monitoring group, Twitter continues to conceal the nationality of accounts funded by the US government, including those that promote its propaganda goals in Ukraine and other countries. FAIR was unable to find any examples of accounts identified as “US state media” or accounts labeled as such in the UK or Canada.

The group concluded: “Twitter allows American propaganda agencies to maintain the appearance of independence on the platform, tacit approval of US soft power and influence operations… Twitter acts as an active participant in the ongoing information war.”

A dense veil of secrecy

After the Twitter files began to be dumped in December, the FBI responded not by verifying the authenticity of the documents, but by playing the same game as before. He accused the journalists of spreading “conspiracy theories” and “disinformation” aimed at “discrediting the agency.”

Hillary Clinton, an elder of the Democratic Party establishment, continues to blame Russian disinformation for her country’s troubles.

The truth is that both the security services and the political establishment have invested too much in their current secret arrangements with social networks to agree to changes.

And it is unlikely to increase while the United States continues to rush from crisis to crisis: from the “war on terror” to the Trump presidency, the Covid-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. All these crises — it should be noted that in different ways — are the legacy of political decisions made by the same actors, who now reject control and supervision.

These crises serve as a pretext not only for inaction, but also for ever closer and tighter control of the state over the digital public space — and not transparently, but under a dense cover of secrecy.

As Church warned almost half a century ago, the biggest threat facing the United States is the possibility that its security services will direct their huge forces inward, against American society. And this process is exactly what the Twitter Files document is.

They show that the intelligence community has come to reconsider its main role — protecting American society from external threats — and has included American society itself in this threat.

In 2021, one of the first priorities of the Biden administration was the promulgation of a National strategy to Counter domestic terrorism. It says the loss of faith in the government and extreme polarization is “fueled by a crisis of disinformation and misinformation, often channeled through social media platforms.”

It seems that the growth of discontent among US citizens is not the fault of a failed political leadership or an arrogant deep state. Instead, the same failed establishment considers the negative reaction of the population and discontent with voters solely for selfish purposes, as proof of foreign interference.

In the Twitter files, Musk opened a small window to show a little what’s going on behind closed doors. But even that window will close again soon. And then the darkness will return—unless the public demands their right to know more.