4 ms·

Once per week for three years is not constant to you? Weird.

croes 4y ago
Do you really think there are only 52 tweets per year that are relevant to the FBI? BTW every week is of course constant but so is one a year or once every ten years. It's constant but not often.
leoh 4y ago
>as if it were a subsidiary Having gone through an acquisition, I guarantee that our acquired org gets more than 150 emails from our acquirer every two years. Let alone each day. To call it a "subsidiary" is ludicrous.
- moralestapia 4y ago
  - roflyear 4y ago
    Read the OP please and don't converse in bad faith.
jcranmer 4y ago
For the amount that a police department would try talking to a major social media platform? That's shockingly low to me.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  Especially one the size of Twitter, if anything it seems so low that I think they missed whole raft of such communications.
  - jcranmer 4y ago
    Another possibility I considered is if Twitter had been so uncooperative with prior requests that the government stopped bothering sending so many.
    - jacquesm 4y ago
      That's a possibility, but unlikely. Twitter execs were probably well aware of the long arm of the law and that their ability to stay in business to a large extent depended on staying on the right side of the line legally. That's precisely why you see them arguing about this to such a degree in these articles, they are well aware of their position vis-a-vis the law. I've had some contact with the FBI over the years regarding stuff happening on one of my sites and they were - it has to be said - polite and arguing their case quite well, in no way did I feel like figuring out whether if I refused them what the next step would be, it felt like I would be the unreasonable party. But if they had made an unreasonable request I would have told them to fuck off.
  - notacoward 4y ago
    Not only have they missed a lot, but what they have presented is laughably devoid of context. So a user tweeted "mostly jokes"? What about the exceptions? Ten jokes and a death threat is still a problem. What about the DMs? What about the follow rings, building up social capital (including with jokes) for the accounts that did much worse? What about steganography? It's not like these are obscure tactics in modern disinformation campaigns. They're standard tools of the trade. It's absurdly easy for Musk and his cronies to cherry-pick which pieces of context they do or do not include, to make any user's behavior seem more benign or nefarious than it really was. Every time they reveal something, we should ask what they're leaving out. Anyone who fails to do so, whether they're a journalist or an HN commenter, is effectively doing Musk's dirty work for free.
astrange 4y ago
That's very low for how often law enforcement might contact a social media service. Sometimes it's because people report "illegal" posts to them instead of you. Sometimes it's just because they're old people and aren't going to go through your report form when they could email you. What controls when you have to respond to them is the law, not them. You'll know when that is, because it'll come with legal process.
- jacquesm 4y ago
  It's so low that I'm pretty sure they missed the bulk of the communications between LE and Twitter. But hey, more installments, more eyeballs, more outrage and so more money for Musk.
  - mc32 4y ago
    Are local LE contacting Twitter about possible ToS violations or rather reaching out for cooperation on suspected crimes? One is none of their business the other is expected.
    - jacquesm 4y ago
      Yes and yes. As well as things such as suicide attempts, missing kids and so on. To give you some numbers: I operated an international community with about 1 million members over the course of 20 years. During that time the number of requests were larger than the number of requests that have been detailed here regarding Twitter, which is one of the reasons why I believe that we are seeing a highly colored picture.
    - devindotcom 4y ago
      Extremely common
- Khaine 4y ago
  But this wasn’t the total amount of FBI contact. That was just the contact with the head of trust and safety.
Waterluvian 4y ago
It seems really tiny to me. With something like 30 million Americans on Twitter, the FBI only sent about one email a week to the person in charge of safety for that “town square.” It’s still very interesting data. Now I want to know how this compares to the other big tech companies.
- pigtailgirl 4y ago
  https://transparency.fb.com/data/government-data-requests/ https://transparency.fb.com/data/government-data-requests/ https://www.apple.com/legal/transparency/ https://www.apple.com/legal/transparency/ https://transparency.twitter.com/ https://transparency.twitter.com/
chomp 4y ago
We had a couple Us dedicated to the feds in our datacenter for their wiretap box, in addition to weekly emails. We had like 1/16 twitter’s revenue. That’s what I’d consider constant!
- pigtailgirl 4y ago
  -- yes - used to work for a small isp - multiple law enforcement contacts per day - the twitter scale seems tiny --
- lettergram 4y ago
  I mean, we know from the Snowden leaks that the NSA was already gathering all the data and the FBI had access to the shares data.
georgeg23 4y ago
And that's total emails, each communication on an issue is probably 3-4 emails at least, so 150 in that many years is incredibly small. It's more like one issue a month.
cratermoon 4y ago
News flash: your local newspaper is in contact with law enforcement and judiciary officials every day. It's part of being a media outlet.
UncleMeat 4y ago
How many tweets are published in a day? How many tweets are removed by automation in a day. How many tweets were removed yesterday for linking to mastodon? Surely more than 150.
ABCLAW 4y ago
Pop a few custodians worth of emails into Brainspace or any of the other tools to parse the information and you'll find that 300~ emails over 3 years is next to nothing (i'll double the number listed by Taibbi to be charitable). I'd expect that volume of contact in less than 2 days if there was a $100M construction project going on. And that's emails, not slack messages or other records. Just emails. Additionally an email isn't an individual issue; an email thread almost always has multiple replies, forwards, etc. On the low end, if we assume only 4 emails per topic between the parties, that means the FBI only approached twitter 75ish times in three years, or 25 issues per year. I can tell you from my time doing social media threat monitoring that I'd monitor and alert organizations of maybe 10-15 people per month for things like threatening to blow up buildings followed with active attempts to recruit people to support those efforts. And that's for relatively niche, unpoliticized, institutions. If the FBI is only identifying and acting on 25 instances of active recruitment for crime on twitter per year, it doesn't indicate that they're strong-arming twitter. It means they're asleep at the wheel. If the worst Taibbi can find is the FBI trying to take down a tweet trying to get republicans to vote on the wrong day, he's found fuck all.
- jimmygrapes 4y ago
  > I can tell you from my time doing social media threat monitoring that I'd monitor and alert organizations of maybe 10-15 people per month for things like threatening to blow up buildings followed with active attempts to recruit people to support those efforts. And that's for relatively niche, unpoliticized, institutions. > If the FBI is only identifying and acting on 25 instances of active recruitment for crime on twitter per year, it doesn't indicate that they're strong-arming twitter. It means they're asleep at the wheel. ... or it could be they're not wanting to identify and act on their own entrapment (oops I mean sting) operations.

Do you really think there are only 52 tweets per year that are relevant to the FBI? BTW every week is of course constant but so is one a year or once every ten years. It's constant but not often.

leoh 4y ago

>as if it were a subsidiary Having gone through an acquisition, I guarantee that our acquired org gets more than 150 emails from our acquirer every two years. Let alone each day. To call it a "subsidiary" is ludicrous.

moralestapia 4y ago
- roflyear 4y ago
  Read the OP please and don't converse in bad faith.

jcranmer 4y ago

For the amount that a police department would try talking to a major social media platform? That's shockingly low to me.

jacquesm 4y ago
Especially one the size of Twitter, if anything it seems so low that I think they missed whole raft of such communications.
- jcranmer 4y ago
  Another possibility I considered is if Twitter had been so uncooperative with prior requests that the government stopped bothering sending so many.
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    That's a possibility, but unlikely. Twitter execs were probably well aware of the long arm of the law and that their ability to stay in business to a large extent depended on staying on the right side of the line legally. That's precisely why you see them arguing about this to such a degree in these articles, they are well aware of their position vis-a-vis the law. I've had some contact with the FBI over the years regarding stuff happening on one of my sites and they were - it has to be said - polite and arguing their case quite well, in no way did I feel like figuring out whether if I refused them what the next step would be, it felt like I would be the unreasonable party. But if they had made an unreasonable request I would have told them to fuck off.
- notacoward 4y ago
  Not only have they missed a lot, but what they have presented is laughably devoid of context. So a user tweeted "mostly jokes"? What about the exceptions? Ten jokes and a death threat is still a problem. What about the DMs? What about the follow rings, building up social capital (including with jokes) for the accounts that did much worse? What about steganography? It's not like these are obscure tactics in modern disinformation campaigns. They're standard tools of the trade. It's absurdly easy for Musk and his cronies to cherry-pick which pieces of context they do or do not include, to make any user's behavior seem more benign or nefarious than it really was. Every time they reveal something, we should ask what they're leaving out. Anyone who fails to do so, whether they're a journalist or an HN commenter, is effectively doing Musk's dirty work for free.

astrange 4y ago

That's very low for how often law enforcement might contact a social media service. Sometimes it's because people report "illegal" posts to them instead of you. Sometimes it's just because they're old people and aren't going to go through your report form when they could email you. What controls when you have to respond to them is the law, not them. You'll know when that is, because it'll come with legal process.

jacquesm 4y ago
It's so low that I'm pretty sure they missed the bulk of the communications between LE and Twitter. But hey, more installments, more eyeballs, more outrage and so more money for Musk.
- mc32 4y ago
  Are local LE contacting Twitter about possible ToS violations or rather reaching out for cooperation on suspected crimes? One is none of their business the other is expected.
  - jacquesm 4y ago
    Yes and yes. As well as things such as suicide attempts, missing kids and so on. To give you some numbers: I operated an international community with about 1 million members over the course of 20 years. During that time the number of requests were larger than the number of requests that have been detailed here regarding Twitter, which is one of the reasons why I believe that we are seeing a highly colored picture.
  - devindotcom 4y ago
    Extremely common
Khaine 4y ago
But this wasn’t the total amount of FBI contact. That was just the contact with the head of trust and safety.

Waterluvian 4y ago

It seems really tiny to me. With something like 30 million Americans on Twitter, the FBI only sent about one email a week to the person in charge of safety for that “town square.” It’s still very interesting data. Now I want to know how this compares to the other big tech companies.

pigtailgirl 4y ago
https://transparency.fb.com/data/government-data-requests/ https://transparency.fb.com/data/government-data-requests/ https://www.apple.com/legal/transparency/ https://www.apple.com/legal/transparency/ https://transparency.twitter.com/ https://transparency.twitter.com/

chomp 4y ago

We had a couple Us dedicated to the feds in our datacenter for their wiretap box, in addition to weekly emails. We had like 1/16 twitter’s revenue. That’s what I’d consider constant!

pigtailgirl 4y ago
-- yes - used to work for a small isp - multiple law enforcement contacts per day - the twitter scale seems tiny --
lettergram 4y ago
I mean, we know from the Snowden leaks that the NSA was already gathering all the data and the FBI had access to the shares data.

georgeg23 4y ago

And that's total emails, each communication on an issue is probably 3-4 emails at least, so 150 in that many years is incredibly small. It's more like one issue a month.

cratermoon 4y ago

News flash: your local newspaper is in contact with law enforcement and judiciary officials every day. It's part of being a media outlet.

UncleMeat 4y ago

How many tweets are published in a day? How many tweets are removed by automation in a day. How many tweets were removed yesterday for linking to mastodon? Surely more than 150.

ABCLAW 4y ago

Pop a few custodians worth of emails into Brainspace or any of the other tools to parse the information and you'll find that 300~ emails over 3 years is next to nothing (i'll double the number listed by Taibbi to be charitable). I'd expect that volume of contact in less than 2 days if there was a $100M construction project going on. And that's emails, not slack messages or other records. Just emails. Additionally an email isn't an individual issue; an email thread almost always has multiple replies, forwards, etc. On the low end, if we assume only 4 emails per topic between the parties, that means the FBI only approached twitter 75ish times in three years, or 25 issues per year. I can tell you from my time doing social media threat monitoring that I'd monitor and alert organizations of maybe 10-15 people per month for things like threatening to blow up buildings followed with active attempts to recruit people to support those efforts. And that's for relatively niche, unpoliticized, institutions. If the FBI is only identifying and acting on 25 instances of active recruitment for crime on twitter per year, it doesn't indicate that they're strong-arming twitter. It means they're asleep at the wheel. If the worst Taibbi can find is the FBI trying to take down a tweet trying to get republicans to vote on the wrong day, he's found fuck all.

jimmygrapes 4y ago
> I can tell you from my time doing social media threat monitoring that I'd monitor and alert organizations of maybe 10-15 people per month for things like threatening to blow up buildings followed with active attempts to recruit people to support those efforts. And that's for relatively niche, unpoliticized, institutions. > If the FBI is only identifying and acting on 25 instances of active recruitment for crime on twitter per year, it doesn't indicate that they're strong-arming twitter. It means they're asleep at the wheel. ... or it could be they're not wanting to identify and act on their own entrapment (oops I mean sting) operations.