Facebook reportedly spied on the private messages of “conservative right-wing individuals,” giving partially redacted data “leads” to the FBI’s domestic terrorism unit, according to the New York Post.
The social media giant has collaborated with the FBI for the past 19 months, the newspaper reported. Those singled out and reported to the FBI are Messenger users who questioned the results of the 2020 presidential election as well as expressed “anti-government” or “anti-authority sentiments.”
Read the story at this link.
“It was done outside the legal process and without probable cause,” a source told the Post. “Facebook provides the FBI with private conversations which are protected by the First Amendment without any subpoena.”
Facebook found the messages and sent with them to FBI field offices nationwide without subpoenas, according to the Post. The messages were framed as “leads,” the newspaper reported.
Facebook has issued a denial of the report, saying, “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.” It was a carefully worded statement.
“A compound denial like that often means that portions or slight variations of the statement are true. Thus, if Facebook is screening for something just a bit more alarming than “anti-government language or questions about the validity of past elections,” the denial is inoperative,” wrote Reason magazine, a libertarian publication.
The news follows a trail that goes back as far as 2018 at least, when a U.S. federal judge refused to unseal court paperwork that may have show how the FBI was pressuring Facebook to snoop on calls made through its instant-messaging app.
Judge Lawrence O’Neill rejected the petition from the American Civil Liberties Union to release the documents to the public because, he said, “the materials at issue in this case concern techniques that, if disclosed publicly, would compromise law enforcement efforts in many, if not all, future wiretap investigations.” The judge would not even allow partially redacted files to be released.
In August 2018, it was revealed that the Department of Justice had tried to force Facebook to give it access to voice-call conversations made via its Messenger app. When Facebook refused, the DoJ tried to hold the social media giant in contempt of court.
More about that case at this link.
