Any time the FBI “asks” a company to do something it’s immediately a form of coercion. Government law enforcement agencies shouldn’t be “asking” for anything unless it’s done under due process of law. Sorry but I 100% disagree.

> Any time the FBI “asks” a company to do something it’s immediately a form of coercion.

Strong disagree. I've been on the receiving side of many such requests and all of them came with reasons and citations to back up the request. I've never had a single LE request (including some from the FBI even though we were located in Toronto, Canada and in IJmuiden, NL meaning that we could have refused them simply on account of not being in their jurisdiction) that did not make perfect sense to me.

1. We're not talking about your company which probably had a different context. We're talking about the FBI telling Twitter to silence opinions and facts.

2. Whether you agree with the LE request has no influence on whether it's legal or not.

> 1. We're not talking about your company which probably had a different context. We're talking about the FBI telling Twitter to silence opinions and facts.

The context was quite comparable: live conversations, messages both public and private.

> 2. Whether you agree with the LE request has no influence on whether it's legal or not.

Twitter had an extensive legal team before Musk fired them all, I'm pretty sure they were well capable of determining which requests were legal and which were not.

Facts like the wrong election day? The day of an election is not an opinion but an objective fact.

> Any time the FBI “asks” a company to do something it’s immediately a form of coercion.

That's just obviously false. It was pretty clearly just a suggestion that Twitter investigate violations of its rules, not a demand.

Taibbi even presents clear evidence that Twitter did not take the FBI's reports as automatic cause for taking action.

That's not true. For example, from https://www.fbi.gov/how-we-can-help-you/safety-resources/sca...

"Create a strong and unique passphrase for each online account you hold and change them regularly. Using the same passphrase across several accounts makes you more vulnerable if one account is breached."

This is an ask from the FBI. But they obviously aren't coercing you not to use abc123 as your password.

>Any time the FBI “asks” a company to do something it’s immediately a form of coercion. Government law enforcement agencies shouldn’t be “asking” for anything unless it’s done under due process of law. Sorry but I 100% disagree.

By that logic, if there's a loud party in your apartment building, the police shouldn't be able to knock on the door where the party is going on to ask them to keep it down unless they already have an arrest warrant for disturbing the peace.

Does that sound about right? Because police should never be involved in anything unless there's a court order. Is that correct?

Exactly. Well put.

Given a large enough transgression they would have gone by a judge and probably gotten an enforceable order, but they chose to first ask nicely. But be assured that if you stonewall such a request and the matter is grave enough that you'll be served next, and rightly so.

This is just an optimization and a way to save everybody a lot of time and headaches, as well as a way to ensure that the genie gets put back into the bottle before something can grow legs and do a lot of damage. And with the degree to which social media has been weaponized that is a good thing.

I know there’s no easy answer to the question, but how can you be sure we’re not in “will no one rid me of this turbulent priest” territory here?

Because we can all read?

All these installments have done is confirm over-and-over again that this was pretty much the normal and expected kind of interaction.

I can read too, what do you mean when you say that?

I’m not sure how institutions can say “no” to the FBI without feeling fear of retribution, nor do I want the FBI putting pressure on corporations to be something that’s “normal and expected”.

Twitter said 'no' to the feds on multiple occasions (as was pointed out upthread) and you can bet that if they had received an illegal request they would have balked at it.

I'm sure there was some give-and-take but on the whole what I've seen so far is absolutely par for the course, if you were to look into Facebook, Google, Microsoft and any of the ISPs and email providers you would find the exact same thing.

Both Twitter and the FBI were pretty open about the FBI having limited access to Twitters' firehose and that there was constant interaction between the two parties. You can add to that that if you were to look at this internationally and at the state level that such contacts can be expected to exist as well. Any assumption to the contrary is hopelessly naive.

Do you understand why when a person in a position of authority or dominance makes sexual advances towards their subordinate, it is considered sexual assault and abuse of power?

That analogy should help you understand the difference between a random guy writing to Twitter "hey, I think these tweets violate your ToS" and the FBI doing the same thing.

That isn't reflected in the evidence posted.

And yet, despite unfettered access to Twitter's internal communications, evidence has yet to be posted by the journalists tasked with exposing that fact.