Facebook spied on 2020 election doubters on FBI orders

According to former FBI agent Jonathan Gilliam, it is very difficult to reform the intelligence agencies unless the president can fire at will.

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José Carlos Rodríguez

Published September 16, 2022, 3:01 AM ET

2 minutes read

The New York Post reported that Facebook spied on citizens and groups that showed doubts about any of the recounts in the 2020 presidential election. Mark Zuckerberg's company sent reports to the FBI on these social network users' comments.

The source, who brought this information to the New York newspaper’s attention asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation, added that all of this "was done outside the legal process and without probable cause. Facebook provides the FBI with private conversations which are protected by the First Amendment without any subpoena" to do so.

Spying only on the right

According to the same source, it was:

Conservative right-wing individuals. They were gun-toting, red-blooded Americans [who were] angry after the election and shooting off their mouths and talking about staging protests. There was nothing criminal, nothing about violence or massacring or assassinating anyone. As soon as a subpoena was requested, within an hour, Facebook sent back gigabytes of data and photos. It was ready to go. They were just waiting for that legal process so they could send it.

Facebook was forced to respond in a statement:

These claims are false because they reflect a misunderstanding of how our systems protect people from harm and how we engage with law enforcement. We carefully scrutinize all government requests for user information to make sure they’re legally valid and narrowly tailored, and we often push back. We respond to legal requests for information in accordance with applicable law and our terms and we provide notice to users whenever permitted.

On this occasion, they did not reject the government’s requests for information from users. Facebook spokeswoman Erica Sackin, who has worked for Planned Parenthood and 'Obama for America,' said:

These claims are just wrong. The suggestion we seek out peoples’ private messages for anti-government language or questions about the validity of past elections and then proactively supply those to the FBI is plainly inaccurate and there is zero evidence to support it.

However, that statement does not negate what the information says. What sources point out to the NYP is not that Facebook acted proactively, but that they spied on their users, without legal cover, at the request of the FBI.

Reform of intelligence agencies

On the other hand, and in statements granted to Breitbart, former FBI agent Jonathan Gilliam said that the United States intelligence agencies have a serious politicization problem.

It’s a real cause of concern, not just among regular folks, but [among] people who served in these agencies. The infection in these organizations is not just the political appointees. It’s basically everyone from mid-grade-level and up, if not lower because they’re all the recipients of a super-liberal education. They just graduate from college with this really bizarre worldview, for the most part.

Reforming the system so that agencies work for the citizenry as a whole, and not in the service of a partisan agenda, is not going to be easy, Gilliam adds:

Unfortunately, I kind of agree with the idea of breaking them up because I don’t really see how they can be reformed in any kind of a meaningful way unless the president has the power to basically fire every federal employee at will.

The responsibility lies, in part, with the Republican Party:

Republicans have never played the long game. In ten years, those people will start to make rank, and in 15 years, they will be at the top, and then they can change the divisions of recruits. ... It is not a short game. We are never going to have someone who is going to be a president who is going to depoliticize the FBI or the CIA.

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