If anyone thought the Twitter Files drops that have been happening for over a week now would lead with the bombshells and then trickle out nothingburgers, think again. Today’s drop may very well be the biggest of them all because it exposes just how involved our government has been in censoring Americans. Prima facie, this is a direct attack against the 1st Amendment rights of American citizens.
How closely aligned were Twitter and the FBI? They were practically family, as Matt Taibbi’s latest drop reveals.
I will post the text from each of his Tweets here, edited only for formatting. The actual Tweets are below, including referenced images, followed by my commentary.
THREAD: The Twitter Files, Part Six TWITTER, THE FBI SUBSIDIARY
The #TwitterFiles are revealing more every day about how the government collects, analyzes, and flags your social media content. Twitter’s contact with the FBI was constant and pervasive, as if it were a subsidiary.
Between January 2020 and November 2022, there were over 150 emails between the FBI and former Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth. Some are mundane, like San Francisco agent Elvis Chan wishing Roth a Happy New Year along with a reminder to attend “our quarterly call next week.” Others are requests for information into Twitter users related to active investigations. But a surprisingly high number are requests by the FBI for Twitter to take action on election misinformation, even involving joke tweets from low-follower accounts.
The FBI’s social media-focused task force, known as FTIF, created in the wake of the 2016 election, swelled to 80 agents and corresponded with Twitter to identify alleged foreign influence and election tampering of all kinds. Federal intelligence and law enforcement reach into Twitter included the Department of Homeland Security, which partnered with security contractors and think tanks to pressure Twitter to moderate content.
It’s no secret the government analyzes bulk data for all sorts of purposes, everything from tracking terror suspects to making economic forecasts. The #TwitterFiles show something new: agencies like the FBI and DHS regularly sending social media content to Twitter through multiple entry points, pre-flagged for moderation.
What stands out is the sheer quantity of reports from the government. Some are aggregated from public hotlines.
An unanswered question: do agencies like FBI and DHS do in-house flagging work themselves, or farm it out? “You have to prove to me that inside the fucking government you can do any kind of massive data or AI search,” says one former intelligence officer.
“HELLO TWITTER CONTACTS”: 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.
Twitter personnel in that case went on to look for reasons to suspend all four accounts, including @fromma , whose tweets are almost all jokes (see sample below), including his “civic misinformation” of Nov. 8.
Just to show the FBI can be hyper-intrusive in both directions, they also asked Twitter to review a blue-leaning account for a different joke, except here it was even more obvious that @clairefosterPHD, who kids a lot, was kidding.
“Anyone who cannot discern obvious satire from reality has no place making decisions for others or working for the feds,” said @ClaireFosterPHD, when told about the flagging. Of the six accounts mentioned in the previous two emails, all but two – @ClaireFosterPHD and @FromMa – were suspended.
In an internal email from November 5, 2022, the FBI’s National Election Command Post, which compiles and sends on complaints, sent the SF field office a long list of accounts that “may warrant additional action”. Agent Chan passed the list on to his “Twitter folks”. Twitter then replied with its list of actions taken. Note mercy shown to actor Billy Baldwin. Many of the above accounts were satirical in nature, nearly all (with the exceptions of Baldwin and @RSBNetwork) were relatively low engagement, and some were suspended, most with a generic, “Thanks, Twitter” letter.
When told of the FBI flagging, @Lexitollah replied: “My thoughts initially include 1. Seems like prima facie 1A violation 2. Holy cow, me, an account with the reach of an amoeba 3. What else are they looking at?”
“I can’t believe the FBI is policing jokes on Twitter. That’s crazy,” said @Tiberius444.
In a letter to former Deputy General Counsel (and former top FBI lawyer) Jim Baker on Sep. 16, 2022, legal exec Stacia Cardille outlines results from her “soon to be weekly” meeting with DHS, DOJ, FBI, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
The Twitter exec writes she explicitly asked if there were “impediments” to the sharing of classified information “with industry.” The answer? “FBI was adamant no impediments to sharing exist.”
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This passage underscores the unique one-big-happy-family vibe between Twitter and the FBI. With what other firm would the FBI blithely agree to “no impediments” to classified information? At the bottom of that letter, she lists a series of “escalations” apparently raised at the meeting, which were already “handled.”
About one, she writes: “Flagged a specific Tweet on Illinois use of modems to transmit election results in possible violation of the civic integrity policy (except they do use that tech in limited circumstances).”
Another internal letter from January, 2021 shows Twitter execs processing an FBI list of “possible violative content” tweets. Here, too, most tweets contained the same, “Get out there and vote Wednesday!” trope and had low engagement. This is what the FBI spends its time on.
In this March, 2021 email, an FBI liaison thanks a senior Twitter exec for the chance to speak to “you and the team,” then delivers a packet of “products”.
The executive circulates the “products,” which are really DHS bulletins stressing the need for greater collaboration between law enforcement and “private sector partners.”
The ubiquity of the 2016 Russian interference story as stated pretext for building out the censorship machine can’t be overstated. It’s analogous to how 9/11 inspired the expansion of the security state.
While the DHS in its “products” pans “permissive” social media for offering “operational advantages” to Russians, it also explains that the “Domestic Violent Extremist Threat” requires addressing “information gaps”.
FBI in one case sent over so many “possible violative content” reports, Twitter personnel congratulated each other in Slack for the “monumental undertaking” of reviewing them.
There were multiple points of entry into Twitter for government-flagged reports. This letter from Agent Chan to Roth references Teleporter, a platform through which Twitter could receive reports from the FBI.
Reports also came from different agencies. Here, an employee recommends “bouncing” content based on evidence from “DHS etc”. State governments also flagged content.
“WHY WAS NO ACTION TAKEN?” Below, Twitter execs – receiving an alert from California officials, by way of “our partner support portal” – debate whether to act on a Trump tweet.
Here, a video was reported by the Election Integrity Project (EIP) at Stanford, apparently on the strength of information from the Center for Internet Security (CIS).
If that’s confusing, it’s because the CIS is a DHS contractor, describes itself as “partners” with the Cyber and Internet Security Agency (CISA) at the DHS.
The EIP is one of a series of government-affiliated think tanks that mass-review content, a list that also includes the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Laboratory, and the University of Washington’s Center for Informed Policy.
The takeaway: what most people think of as the “deep state” is really a tangled collaboration of state agencies, private contractors, and (sometimes state-funded) NGOs. The lines become so blurred as to be meaningless.
Twitter Files researchers are moving into a variety of new areas now. Watch @BariWeiss, @ShellenbergerMD, and this space for more, soon.
Here are the actual Tweets:
1. THREAD: The Twitter Files, Part Six
TWITTER, THE FBI SUBSIDIARY— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022
3. Twitter’s contact with the FBI was constant and pervasive, as if it were a subsidiary.
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022
5. Some are mundane, like San Francisco agent Elvis Chan wishing Roth a Happy New Year along with a reminder to attend “our quarterly call next week.” Others are requests for information into Twitter users related to active investigations.
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022
7. The FBI’s social media-focused task force, known as FTIF, created in the wake of the 2016 election, swelled to 80 agents and corresponded with Twitter to identify alleged foreign influence and election tampering of all kinds.
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022
9. It’s no secret the government analyzes bulk data for all sorts of purposes, everything from tracking terror suspects to making economic forecasts.
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022
11. What stands out is the sheer quantity of reports from the government. Some are aggregated from public hotlines: pic.twitter.com/cm9JjEXUSm
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022
“HELLO TWITTER CONTACTS”: 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: pic.twitter.com/LjgB6fxENo
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022
15. Just to show the FBI can be hyper-intrusive in both directions, they also asked Twitter to review a blue-leaning account for a different joke, except here it was even more obvious that @clairefosterPHD, who kids a lot, was kidding: pic.twitter.com/uLxHayY11C
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022
17.Of the six accounts mentioned in the previous two emails, all but two – @ClaireFosterPHD and @FromMa – were suspended.
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022
19.Agent Chan passed the list on to his "Twitter folks": pic.twitter.com/eXaZnC3I7y
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022
21.Many of the above accounts were satirical in nature, nearly all (with the exceptions of Baldwin and @RSBNetwork) were relatively low engagement, and some were suspended, most with a generic, “Thanks, Twitter” letter: pic.twitter.com/0S0XoqhwYD
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022
23.“I can't believe the FBI is policing jokes on Twitter. That's crazy,” said @Tiberius444.
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022
25.The Twitter exec writes she explicitly asked if there were “impediments” to the sharing of classified information “with industry.” The answer? “FBI was adamant no impediments to sharing exist.”
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022
https://t.co/dtvy82pfce the bottom of that letter, she lists a series of “escalations” apparently raised at the meeting, which were already “handled.”
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022
29.Another internal letter from January, 2021 shows Twitter execs processing an FBI list of “possible violative content” tweets: pic.twitter.com/Dwad3lGM4j
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022
31. In this March, 2021 email, an FBI liaison thanks a senior Twitter exec for the chance to speak to “you and the team,” then delivers a packet of “products”: pic.twitter.com/POOpYrd9q8
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022
33.The ubiquity of the 2016 Russian interference story as stated pretext for building out the censorship machine can’t be overstated. It’s analogous to how 9/11 inspired the expansion of the security state. pic.twitter.com/GSaEzM0aYo
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022
35.FBI in one case sent over so many “possible violative content” reports, Twitter personnel congratulated each other in Slack for the “monumental undertaking” of reviewing them: pic.twitter.com/rt5WzhfCga
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022
37.Reports also came from different agencies. Here, an employee recommends “bouncing” content based on evidence from “DHS etc”: pic.twitter.com/5DP8DEFZiO
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022
39.Twitter for instance received reports via the Partner Support Portal, an outlet created by the Center for Internet Security, a partner organization to the DHS.
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022
https://t.co/4zD4nEkDdW, a video was reported by the Election Integrity Project (EIP) at Stanford, apparently on the strength of information from the Center for Internet Security (CIS): pic.twitter.com/kJfJ6gDrb1
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022
43.The EIP is one of a series of government-affiliated think tanks that mass-review content, a list that also includes the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Laboratory, and the University of Washington’s Center for Informed Policy.
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022
45. Twitter Files researchers are moving into a variety of new areas now. Watch @BariWeiss, @ShellenbergerMD, and this space for more, soon.
— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022
What does all this mean? While many if not most of us were aware that direct government influence, including from the Deep State, has huge impacts on our freedoms on social media platforms, it would seem the conspiracy theorists who claimed the Deep State essentially had carte blanche were correct. Twitter employees were giddy to be doing the bidding of government to stifle American citizens.
As a non-government entity, Twitter has always enjoyed a certain level of control over what they allow on their platform. Many of us have argued that their Section 230 protections mean they cannot suppress legal speech, but thus far that avenue of attack against censorship has yielded limited fruit.
These Twitter Files may be a gamechanger in the fight. Government may not participate in quashing free speech and the revelations here demonstrate they are breeching our constitutional rights. But it’s actually worse than that, if one can imagine. They have used their control over Big Tech companies to influence the results of elections and to steer sentiment to the left in many regards. Taibbi attempts to highlight that attacks by the Deep State against free speech included attacks on leftists, but it’s crystal clear the lion’s share of censorship was distributed against conservatives.
Corporate media won’t cover this. Democrats will ignore it. Unfortunately, most Republican lawmakers won’t lift a finger either. Hopefully, someone in government with courage and a conscience will start holding the corrupt FBI accountable.
Five Things New “Preppers” Forget When Getting Ready for Bad Times Ahead
The preparedness community is growing faster than it has in decades. Even during peak times such as Y2K, the economic downturn of 2008, and Covid, the vast majority of Americans made sure they had plenty of toilet paper but didn’t really stockpile anything else.
Things have changed. There’s a growing anxiety in this presidential election year that has prompted more Americans to get prepared for crazy events in the future. Some of it is being driven by fearmongers, but there are valid concerns with the economy, food supply, pharmaceuticals, the energy grid, and mass rioting that have pushed average Americans into “prepper” mode.
There are degrees of preparedness. One does not have to be a full-blown “doomsday prepper” living off-grid in a secure Montana bunker in order to be ahead of the curve. In many ways, preparedness isn’t about being able to perfectly handle every conceivable situation. It’s about being less dependent on government for as long as possible. Those who have proper “preps” will not be waiting for FEMA to distribute emergency supplies to the desperate masses.
Below are five things people new to preparedness (and sometimes even those with experience) often forget as they get ready. All five are common sense notions that do not rely on doomsday in order to be useful. It may be nice to own a tank during the apocalypse but there’s not much you can do with it until things get really crazy. The recommendations below can have places in the lives of average Americans whether doomsday comes or not.
Note: The information provided by this publication or any related communications is for informational purposes only and should not be considered as financial advice. We do not provide personalized investment, financial, or legal advice.
Secured Wealth
Whether in the bank or held in a retirement account, most Americans feel that their life’s savings is relatively secure. At least they did until the last couple of years when de-banking, geopolitical turmoil, and the threat of Central Bank Digital Currencies reared their ugly heads.
It behooves Americans to diversify their holdings. If there’s a triggering event or series of events that cripple the financial systems or devalue the U.S. Dollar, wealth can evaporate quickly. To hedge against potential turmoil, many Americans are looking in two directions: Crypto and physical precious metals.
There are huge advantages to cryptocurrencies, but there are also inherent risks because “virtual” money can become challenging to spend. Add in the push by central banks and governments to regulate or even replace cryptocurrencies with their own versions they control and the risks amplify. There’s nothing wrong with cryptocurrencies today but things can change rapidly.
As for physical precious metals, many Americans pay cash to keep plenty on hand in their safe. Rolling over or transferring retirement accounts into self-directed IRAs is also a popular option, but there are caveats. It can often take weeks or even months to get the gold and silver shipped if the owner chooses to close their account. This is why Genesis Gold Group stands out. Their relationship with the depositories allows for rapid closure and shipping, often in less than 10 days from the time the account holder makes their move. This can come in handy if things appear to be heading south.
Lots of Potable Water
One of the biggest shocks that hit new preppers is understanding how much potable water they need in order to survive. Experts claim one gallon of water per person per day is necessary. Even the most conservative estimates put it at over half-a-gallon. That means that for a family of four, they’ll need around 120 gallons of water to survive for a month if the taps turn off and the stores empty out.
Being near a fresh water source, whether it’s a river, lake, or well, is a best practice among experienced preppers. It’s necessary to have a water filter as well, even if the taps are still working. Many refuse to drink tap water even when there is no emergency. Berkey was our previous favorite but they’re under attack from regulators so the Alexapure systems are solid replacements.
For those in the city or away from fresh water sources, storage is the best option. This can be challenging because proper water storage containers take up a lot of room and are difficult to move if the need arises. For “bug in” situations, having a larger container that stores hundreds or even thousands of gallons is better than stacking 1-5 gallon containers. Unfortunately, they won’t be easily transportable and they can cost a lot to install.
Water is critical. If chaos erupts and water infrastructure is compromised, having a large backup supply can be lifesaving.
Pharmaceuticals and Medical Supplies
There are multiple threats specific to the medical supply chain. With Chinese and Indian imports accounting for over 90% of pharmaceutical ingredients in the United States, deteriorating relations could make it impossible to get the medicines and antibiotics many of us need.
Stocking up many prescription medications can be hard. Doctors generally do not like to prescribe large batches of drugs even if they are shelf-stable for extended periods of time. It is a best practice to ask your doctor if they can prescribe a larger amount. Today, some are sympathetic to concerns about pharmacies running out or becoming inaccessible. Tell them your concerns. It’s worth a shot. The worst they can do is say no.
If your doctor is unwilling to help you stock up on medicines, then Jase Medical is a good alternative. Through telehealth, they can prescribe daily meds or antibiotics that are shipped to your door. As proponents of medical freedom, they empathize with those who want to have enough medical supplies on hand in case things go wrong.
Energy Sources
The vast majority of Americans are locked into the grid. This has proven to be a massive liability when the grid goes down. Unfortunately, there are no inexpensive remedies.
Those living off-grid had to either spend a lot of money or effort (or both) to get their alternative energy sources like solar set up. For those who do not want to go so far, it’s still a best practice to have backup power sources. Diesel generators and portable solar panels are the two most popular, and while they’re not inexpensive they are not out of reach of most Americans who are concerned about being without power for extended periods of time.
Natural gas is another necessity for many, but that’s far more challenging to replace. Having alternatives for heating and cooking that can be powered if gas and electric grids go down is important. Have a backup for items that require power such as manual can openers. If you’re stuck eating canned foods for a while and all you have is an electric opener, you’ll have problems.
Don’t Forget the Protein
When most think about “prepping,” they think about their food supply. More Americans are turning to gardening and homesteading as ways to produce their own food. Others are working with local farmers and ranchers to purchase directly from the sources. This is a good idea whether doomsday comes or not, but it’s particularly important if the food supply chain is broken.
Most grocery stores have about one to two weeks worth of food, as do most American households. Grocers rely heavily on truckers to receive their ongoing shipments. In a crisis, the current process can fail. It behooves Americans for multiple reasons to localize their food purchases as much as possible.
Long-term storage is another popular option. Canned foods, MREs, and freeze dried meals are selling out quickly even as prices rise. But one component that is conspicuously absent in shelf-stable food is high-quality protein. Most survival food companies offer low quality “protein buckets” or cans of meat, but they are often barely edible.
Prepper All-Naturals offers premium cuts of steak that have been cooked sous vide and freeze dried to give them a 25-year shelf life. They offer Ribeye, NY Strip, and Tenderloin among others.
Having buckets of beans and rice is a good start, but keeping a solid supply of high-quality protein isn’t just healthier. It can help a family maintain normalcy through crises.
Prepare Without Fear
With all the challenges we face as Americans today, it can be emotionally draining. Citizens are scared and there’s nothing irrational about their concerns. Being prepared and making lifestyle changes to secure necessities can go a long way toward overcoming the fears that plague us. We should hope and pray for the best but prepare for the worst. And if the worst does come, then knowing we did what we could to be ready for it will help us face those challenges with confidence.
