TSN Open Mic for the week of 12/19/2022
There’s a phenomenon where someone writes an essay about this or that but someone else wants to discuss something that has not yet made it to Ten Second News.
This is unfair to everybody involved. It’s unfair to the guy who wrote the original essay because, presumably, he wants to talk about his original essay. It’s unfair to the guy who wants to talk about his link because it looks like he’s trying to change the subject. It’s unfair to the people who go to the comments to read up on the thoughts of the commentariat for the original essay and now we’re talking about some other guy’s links.
So!
The intention is to have a new one of these on the Sidebar every week. If you want to talk about a link, post it here! Or, heck, use it as an open thread.
And, if it rolls off, we’ll make a new one. With a preamble just like this one.
I prefer to have my BS high school plays happen in my Superbowls, but one takes what one can get:
Report
Favorite part? ‘Pardon me while I use your chest to cushion my step on my way to the end-zone’Report
I guess there’s a reason why Mac doesn’t play defense.Report
Probably worthy of an Andrew Donaldson “Read the full text for yourself” sort of post.
Jan. 6 committee refers Trump to Justice Department for prosecution
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2022/12/19/jan-6-committee-hearings-live-updates/#link-T762KFWVKJCBRFGPC6O2F4CLTY
Back when I was a kid, this sort of thing was considered big news.Report
All if the MSM nightly news programs led with it. So clearly we shouldn’t trust the referral.Report
Even FOX News!
https://www.foxnews.com/video/6317513663112Report
Monday Night News Dump:
This is the one that deals with the FBI’s relationship with Twitter.
Some seem to think that the interesting part is the part where the FBI gives Twitter millions of dollars.
Report
And for those of you who enjoy stuff from the archives, here’s “Twitter is a Business, Not the Government“.Report
Jesus Christ, this format of story in tweets is almost incomprehensible.
Is this moronic thread of tweets intending to show anything besides the ‘Twitter blocked links to the far-right’s Post’s story for literally one day’, aka, the thing we all already knew?
I can’t even keep up with the conspiracies anymore, they keep having ‘explosive’ content that is basically ‘Twitter, worried a this story was crazed propaganda, kept it suppressed for a day, like basically _all_ social networks did’.
I love how dumb some of these tweets are. The one where Chan asks if anyone at Twitter has a security clearance, is told Jim Baker does, and says ‘I don’t know how I forgot him’ is cited as…something? Yeah, that _was_ a silly thing to forget…but he apparently did? What’s the conspiracy here: Man forgets things and asks question that he probably should know the answer to?Report
I think the entire thing is best summed up by this nonsense:
“And yet it’s inconceivable Baker believed the Hunter Biden emails were either fake or hacked. The @nypost had included a picture of the receipt signed by Hunter Biden, and an FBI subpoena showed that the agency had taken possession of the laptop in December 2019.”
Oh! A receipt! And the FBI did, indeed, take possession of the laptop handed over the FBI!
Well, that proves everything! Twitter should have immediately believed the story!
EDIT: A reminder: This entire thing is literally about Twitter suppressing links to a specific story for 24 hours, and then deciding to stop after other media outlets covered it. This entire thing was a stupid and extremely short-term decision that impacted almost nothing, in fact, it made the story more visible. This entire premise is nonsense.Report
I think that the information that is being revealed is not the whole “OMG, this one event that didn’t impact the election happened!” but “holy cow, there’s an entire relationship between Twitter and the FBI” thing.
Do you think that there’s a relationship between Facebook and the FBI?
Is that just an unfounded conspiracy theory?Report
This isn’t a revelation to anyone here at OT.
I say this because we’ve all discussed it before.
Do you have an opinion on this?Report
On whether the FBI and Facebook have an established relationship?
My opinion is that it is not an unfounded conspiracy theory.
I also think it’s interesting that the speed between “that’s a conspiracy theory” and “that’s old news” is surprising.Report
I believe that everyone here at OT is saying the same thing.
So now what?Report
I certainly don’t know of anyone who is not saying this.Report
Wait, we all knew that the FBI was selecting individual tweets for disinformation to be taken down? No warrants? Not part of some sort of criminal investigation? Just plain surveillance with a viewpoint, and pre-positioning known *false* Russian dis-info narratives during a campaign? And paying the provider fees for ‘training’?
We all knew that? We discussed that? Here? Links? This was common knowledge. No.
But, let it be noted, the “everyone knew” checkbox may be checked… let us proceed to “and it is good” phase.
Heh, I remember when Apple told the FBI to pound sand on cracking their encryption on iPhones for actual domestic terrorists.Report
And this is the part where the story on Twitter blatantly lies by jumping things and you missed it. The ‘false narratives’ that the FBI supposedly interjected were not, in fact, related to any sort of laptop at all. Just Hunter Biden.
There was a part of the FBI saying, for month: There is likely to be disinformation from Russia about Hunter Biden.
Which was actually true, we already did have that mis-information, both from Russia and domestic political operatives aimed at Hunter. In fact, it happened _after_ that, too, with allegations of things on the laptop that were not on the laptop. Saying ‘Be careful about poorly-sourced and uncorroborated information about Hunter Biden.’ was an entire reasonable thing for the FBI to prep people for.
There is no evidence at all that this was, in any way, related to the ‘Let us look at this laptop we were just given that is supposedly Hunter’s and see if there are any crimes by Hunter on it’ thing that was going on at the FBI. (The thread hilariously claims that the FBI must have validated it immedaitely, which is…a weird claim. Even if true, it doesn’t mean that FBI found _crimes_ immediately.)
The fact that, if you squint, the warnings about Russian disinformation somewhat (but not really) look vaguely like the legit Hunter laptop story doesn’t actually mean there was a conspiracy. It just means that sometimes non-fraudulent things look like fraud and can match warnings given by law enforcement about fraud.
—
But, hey, let’s play devil’s advocate here and assert that the FBI always does know what it is doing, and the warnings about Hunter were literally due to the laptop.
So the hypothetical here is that the FBI, having been given a laptop of Hunter’s under weird circumstances, might be worried that this might precede a dump of _false information_ about what is on that laptop?
You know, like what actually happened? Remember those made up reports of child porn on it?
You would think if there _was_ a conspiracy to suppress the story, the FBI would be involved in the _actual suppression_ of the story once it happened. Contacted Twitter, made some claims about national security, something.
As it is, and I have to keep point this out, this supposedly conspiracy accomplished literally nothing except _maybe_ delay the story for 24 hours and actually made the information more visible.
Or maybe the argument is that the FBI should have called Twitter and said, about an active investigation: Hey, some of that story about the laptop is true. We do have a laptop of his, we cannot collaborate or comment on any crimes.
Do any of us think that’s how the FBI works?Report
“As it is, and I have to keep point this out, this supposedly conspiracy accomplished literally nothing except _maybe_ delay the story for 24 hours and actually made the information more visible.”
You think Twitter’s actions made the story more visible? I don’t see how anyone could make that claim. That’d be like saying Twitter highlighted false claims about covid by disallowing them. They may have driven those stories underground and made them more credible in some conspiracy circles, but made them more visible? Of course not.Report
We’re talking about the story right now, aren’t we?
It’s possible to argue they were success at keeping the story out of the mainstream consciousness for 24 hours, although not only do I disagree with that, I think it’s pretty inarguable that the cable news _also_ sitting on the story during that time had a much greater effect.
But regardless whether they were good at suppressing the story _during_ that 24 hour span, their suppression resulted in the story exploding once they stopped.Report
OK, yes, Twitter suppressing the story made it bigger two years later after they got bought out. Is that the moral of the story? That suppressing a news story then getting bought out will give the story a higher profile two years later?Report
I’m really finding the outrage at the FBI for _politely asking_ that misinformation come down, if it violated Twitter rules, to either be be hilariously disingenuous, or possibly the people on the right are hilarious naive about the behavior of the FBI.Report
I didn’t just accuse you of being disingenuous above, so don’t accuse me of being disingenuous now. But yeah, I’m with Marchmaine on this, that I don’t think it was universally accepted that the FBI did and should target specific Twitter accounts for censorship if they weren’t breaking the law.Report
No, I’m pretty sure the information being revealed is that ‘most people have literally no idea of what the FBI does’.
Yes, because I am not a small child.
The FBI has a relationship with basically all media publishers…sometimes a hostile one, sometimes a completely one-way-one that is merely ‘The FBI spying on them’. But a relationship nevertheless.Report
What you basically need to know is that Elmo has become a far-right activist with the personality of a 12-year old edgelord, he selectively feeds news to “journalists” who decided Democrats were “winemom cringe ewww” and think that being anti-establishment means supporting Alex Jones, harasser of parents of murdered children. JB is working out his own issues with being a sentient version of a New York Times Pitchbot tweet from Doug J Balloon Juice.Report
What is the “relationship” supposed to be? And what of it? Apparently, Twitter complied with certain information requests from the FBI and was paid under what is called a “statutory right of reimbursement” for its time and expense. Were the requests unlawful or otherwise inappropriate? If so, that’s a problem but nobody seems to be saying so.
I am unfamiliar with any statute concerning reimbursement, and have none of the usual incentives to research the question, but it’s entirely plausible that some such statute exists, and it wouldn’t be the least bit unusual. Putting private parties not themselves the subject of investigation to the expense of producing information is an imposition, and it would be only fair to reimburse at least unusual expenses.
If any of the above is even remotely true, it’s entirely possible that other social media sites, maybe even Facebook, have relationships with the FBI. Whether those relationships are a matter of concern depends on a lot nobody seems to know.Report
Like Donald Trump, Elon Musk regularly humiliates his fans.
Had he remained silent and let Taibbi and Weiss do their thing, these files might have been able to make an impact.
But Musk’s own bizarre and capricious behavior has only made the previous regime look like paragons of wise and public spirited leadership.Report
Lost in the Twitter hate is questioning whether the FBI requests were legitimate and, if legitimate do they represent an FBI Charter that we want them to have. And if we want them to have it, are we sure it’s been granted? And, if granted… like FISA courts/warrants are we satisfied that the due process that binds the FBI is being properly observed?
Saying, “Of course Twitter/FB/Google/Apple simply comply with FBI requests” is missing the shift into asking whether the FBI is making requests of Social Media that are appropriate in a Liberal Democracy.Report
I think this was an anti-Trump conspiracy theory (and therefore media-approved) a few years back, that he had an enemies list and something or other. Wasn’t it part of the “there is no Swamp – in fact, Trump controls the Swamp” period?Report
Excellent questions. They sound, in fact, a lot like mine.
Until we have answers, there isn’t much else to say.Report
This is precisely the question that we should be asking.
And it relates to my comment on “free speech” where the important question is, “What sort of speech do we want to suppress?”
For clarity, the word “suppress” has several meanings:
1. Suppress via government punishment or prior restraint;
2. Suppress via social ostracism like shunning and firing;Report
The origin of the FBI is the Bureau of Investigation, and _that_ included the General Intelligence Division, which literally existed to spy on American’s political beliefs and meddle in that. Hoover reformed the agency into the FBI and continued doing exactly that for decades, waging war on specific political beliefs. The ACLU sued in 2005 and proved the FBI was still spying on it.
You just don’t know any of this because the political group that was spied on, and in fact still is spied on the most, is the left.
Meanwhile, the FBI ‘spies’ on the completely public Twitter via public means and asks Twitter politely about posts that violate Twitter rules and the right freaks out.Report
But hey, let’s get a specific ruling here: Should the FBI be allowed to look at publicly visible things happening on private property and tell the property owners ‘We think this is against your rules for the use of your property?’
Thousands of sex workers that the FBI has decided to go after by asking various publishers and financial processors crack down on them await your answer.Report
If I may answer: the FBI should follow evidence in the investigation of crimes.Report
And that’s all? It shouldn’t attempt to prevent crimes?
What about domestic counterintelligence, something the FBI is also in charge of?
Because, right now, attempting to prevent foreign intelligence operations from succeeding, like the hypothetical it was talking about with Russian dumping misinformation to influence elections, is very much under the remit given to it by law.
The allegations is that the FBI decided to ‘prime Twitter to think real information was misinformation’. I.e., they used an actual power they have to influence politics in an non-permitted way.(1)
If you want to assert ‘the FBI should not be allow to communicate at all with people about likely crimes they might get entangled in, and should only be allowed to investigate crimes that already exist’, that’s an entire different level.
Or, to ask specifically, is the FBI causing this article to exist something that should be allowed or not: https://www.msn.com/en-us/travel/news/fbi-warns-tis-the-season-for-holiday-scams-here-s-what-you-need-to-know/ar-AA15cs4W
1) And by ‘non-permitted’, we mean in any way that does not harm the left. Because _that_ sort of influence happens all the time and is literally never commented on by anyone.Report
For example:
FBI warns of online ‘sextortion’ cases targeting teens
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/03/24/fbi-warns-online-sextortion-scams-target-teens/
Should the social media companies cooperate with the FBI in cases like this? As in, reporting specific users and suppressing certain forms of speech?
(fourth time I’ve asked this question)Report
Were they politely asking or were they preventing crimes? Do you get why those two depictions give vastly different impressions?
two quick asides: the FBI should definitely not be causing that article to exist, and your last sentence is kind of hystericalReport
By the same reasoning, you’d be ok with police beating up black people because they’ve always done stuff like that?Report
I didn’t say anything about what I’d be ‘okay with’.
What I pointed out is that one of the premises of the founding of the FBI, and in fact a _huge_ section of what it did for decades, was to suppress communism and socialism. And any liberal policy J. Edgar Hoover didn’t like. Via incredibly harsh means resulted in the destruction of quite a lot of lives.
Which makes ‘Lost in the Twitter hate is questioning whether the FBI requests were legitimate and, if legitimate do they represent an FBI Charter that we want them to have.’ completely hilarious.
Oh no, not ‘politely asking corporations things’, that violates the pure and good FBI charter, an entity literally set up to investigate ‘radicalism’ and ‘subversion’! How dare the FBI do something that might vaguely look political!
If you want to get into what I would be okay with, I’m of the firm opinion that almost all law enforcement in this country, and that includes the FBI despite the sheen of professionalism they’ve been working so hard at, is essentially a tool designed to protect wealth from non-wealth by legitimizing violence against anyone who wishes to change the system , and all of it should be dismantled.Report
I assume everyone here knows some of the history of the FBI acting as a political tool. It’s not a secret. I’m sure no one here defends it. If it’s still happening, it should be taken seriously, not because of which side benefits from it but because it’s abuse of power. I don’t think you’re consciously ok with this because it’s targeting your opponents, but you’re pooh-poohing it which isn’t that different.Report
Anyone who says ‘If it’s still happening’ cannot be taken seriously on this topic at all.
Yes, it is still happening. Yes, it is massively and disproportionately pointed at the left and leftist organizations, as it has always been. The FBI infiltrates completely peaceable leftist organizations, to spy on them and occasionally figure out ways to manipulate them into commiting crime, and has been doing so the entire time it exists.
This only ends up anywhere near the news when the FBI happen to occasionally do the same thing to the organizations on the right, usually ones that actually are already violent.
It doesn’t make the news at all when they spy on the ACLU for decades.
Well, I lie: Every decade or so we got to a news story about how the FBI used to spy on all these left organizations, but presumably, implicitly, they’ve now stopped, until a decade later when it’s revealed that they’ve continued to do that
These are pretty basic facts for anyone involved in this topic at all.Report
But this article explains it better than I can:
https://theintercept.com/2019/10/22/terrorism-fbi-political-dissent/
So, do I think there was some sort of political bias at the FBI against Trump, a person who, after all, directly attacked the FBI repeatedly? Is it possible that they sat on the Hunter Biden laptop story until after the election for that reason?
Maybe. I mean, we’ll actually never know that, and all the information is way too circumstantial.
But if they did, it’s pretty much the one time in history that they’ve decided that the right has gone too far, as opposed to all the times they decided that the left went too far by holding signs against a war or for higher wages, and had to figure out illegal ways to subvert that.
So people building this conspiracy theory, on a very thin evidence, when we have actual real documented evidence of the political bias that they’ve had for literally their entire existence, and what they’ve done with that bias, is wearing a little thin.
Hell, I suspect that if the FBI had a serious bias against Trump, he’d actually BE IN JAIL BY NOW. Or they would have done what they did to Hillary, and at least announced investigations into him right before his re-election.Report
Were the requests unlawful or otherwise inappropriate?
How’s this? “Were the requests lawful or otherwise appropriate?”
There.
If any of the above is even remotely true
Oooh, nice one. The relationship between the FBI and Twitter is alleged.Report
You do recognize that those are the same questions, don’t you? (In Introductory Logic you no doubt were taught the difference between sentences and propositions.)
And that you don’t have anything that gets us any closer to an answer.Report
Eh, it’s more that I’m shifting the burden of proof from me (“explain how this was inappropriate!”) to you (“nope, the burden of proof is on you. Explain how it was appropriate”).
It has to do with the starting point.Report
You raise the issue, you provide the back-up.Report
Sure. Um. The 1st and 4th Amendments. They should have had a warrant if they were going to interfere with speech/press issues.
I suppose the counter-argument could be something like “hey, you read the TOS. Private companies can do whatever they want.”Report
You’re going down the warrant rabbit hole again. You may not like the law, but it is what it is.Report
Yeah, I’m going to need you to explain how it was appropriate, though.
“It was not technically illegal.”
“That wasn’t the question.”
(And that’s without getting into questions of whether a thing can be legal but unconstitutional.)Report
You’re the one who brought up the First and Fourth amendments and warrants, which made it a legal question, whatever it’s convenient to claim now. As for what’s appropriate, I didn’t choose to address it and don’t plan to because your expressed “need” is your business, not mine.Report
Actually, bringing up the First and Fourth made it a *CONSTITUTIONAL* question rather than strictly a legal one.
And now you can, again, point out that it wasn’t technically illegal.Report
There you go again. Try talking about things you actually understand.Report
Well, I’m one of those laymen who knows that stuff can be legal for years (or decades!) without being Constitutional. And, one day, a case makes it to the Supreme Court and the Supreme Court says “hey, this ain’t Constitutional!”
And the debate then becomes over whether it wasn’t Constitutional the day before as well or whether the Constitution is just a game of Calvinball and the Supreme Court is Mom&Dad hammering down what is actually a rule.
But if you’re into the whole interpretation that says “no, it was actually unconstitutional the day before” (as I am), you can see how something can be legal and unconstitutional at the same time.
But, in any case, the original discussion was over whether it was appropriate or not for the FBI to have a relationship like this with Twitter.
And I’m saying “it’s not”.
And I am going to need you to actually shoulder the burden of proof for this one and either argue “it is appropriate” or something boring like “whether it’s appropriate is beyond the scope of my argument that you read the TOS and private companies can do whatever they want.”Report
I am going to need you to actually shoulder the burden of proof…
Or else what?
A guy in Colorado Springs will think this was wrong?
On behalf of all liberals everywhere, your offer is acceptable.
See, this entire episode is already rapidly being forgotten, and overridden by more interesting events.
The status quo is that the social media companies are cooperating in various ways with the national security and law enforcement agencies.
And the public is largely supportive of this, as the legacy of the War On Crime and War On Terror.
And conservatives have refused to mount any sort of political effort against this.
No coherent political ideas or theories, no arguments suggesting any sort of alternative have been put forward here, or anywhere else.
So the status quo remains unchallenged. By next week the entire episode will be forgotten.Report
So we’ve officially moved from “this is a conspiracy theory” to “this is old news that nobody cares about”.
That took less time than I thought it would.Report
Yeah, that happens when you can’t muster an argument.
For one brief moment conservatives had everyone’s attention, but when anyone asked for a coherent argument, they just flapped their arms and made fart noses.
You can understand why people move on right?
But fear not. Republican Senator Mike Lee plans to introduce a bill requiring social media companies to block porn (to protect children from groomers dontchaknow) so between now and then maybe you guys can put something together.Report
I am now beginning to understand why police reform never took off.Report
Mmm-Hmm.
BREAKING: Ron Paul Calls for the FBI to be Abolished
As we learn more and more from the “Twitter Files,” it is becoming all too obvious that Federal agencies such as the FBI viewed the First Amendment of our Constitution as an annoyance and an impediment. In Friday’s release from the pre-Musk era, journalist Matt Taibbi makes an astute observation: Twitter was essentially an FBI subsidiary.
Maybe Defund The FBI will be a winning message for the conservatives.
ETA
Paul isn’t the only one to call for dismantling the FBI. Kari Lake, the Arizona gubernatorial candidate known for her America First views, did so as well, saying, during an appearance on Stephen Crowder’s “Louder with Crowder” podcast, that she would support defunding the FBIReport
Only crazy people wouldn’t trust the authorities.
Have we even seen any evidence of any inappropriate behavior?Report
Please conservatives.
Don’t run on defunding the FBI.
We would be so owned.Report
Who’s on board with even investigating it?
Is it only the crazies?
Well, I think it’s far safer for the Liberals to stand in lockstep with the establishment Republicans, don’t you?Report
Just now? After decades of prime-time television programming and a steady drumbeat of law and order politicos in every election since at the latest 1964?Report
Well, that, and the whole “well, they’re not coming after people that *I* like” mistake.
(Though some don’t even see it as a mistake.)
(And did you notice that Chip immediately went to “defund” rather than something like “investigate” or “reform”?)Report
Another reason well-known long ago. But, as Felix Frankfurter once said: “Wisdom too often never comes, and so one ought not to reject it merely because it comes late.”
As for what Chip said, I’ll take it up with him if it interests me.Report
Kari Lake said Dismantle.
https://www.azcentral.com/story/opinion/op-ed/laurieroberts/2022/08/11/kari-lake-calls-dismantling-fbi-steven-crowder/10300727002/
Now, it is Margorie Taylor Green who is saying “Defund The FBI”, and selling tee shirts to that effect, so I stand corrected.Report
Well, you’d better argue for maintaining the status quo.
The last thing in the world you want is to agree with one of them.
How unfashionable would *THAT* be?Report
So I can file this under “Not Even Wrong” and be done with it.Report
Okay, so let’s take a step back from the ‘Did the FBI use their relationship with Twitter for political ends’ question (Which does not really seem to be answerable and any evidence pretty circumstantal) and question the concept of the relationship itself.
The very first thing we need to do is remove Twitter from this, because this is basically the relationship that the FBI has with all social websites and big websites, or at least the sort of relationship it _aims_ for. It has the same sort of relationships with banks and telephone companies and _everyone_ who is big enough.
It’s why large companies have policies precisely about turning private data over to the FBI…because those relationships exist and the corporations want to be able to justify saying no. Because there’s been outrage by consumers in the past.
But besides that one specific thing of ‘need a warrant’, companies generally work with the FBI as much as the FBI wants to work with them. There’s literally summits about it:
https://www.fbi.gov/news/speeches/the-fbi-and-corporate-directors-working-together-to-keep-companies-safe-from-cyber-crime
It’s usually under the guise of ‘cyber crime’, but actually read that press release:
I actually _do_ want to discuss this. I am all for discussing this. The left has been discussing this for _ages_.
Let’s see if the right and the center actually cares or not.Report
I’m sure that the right and the center will end up caring exactly as much as the left does.
In practice, I mean.
(I don’t mean, you, of course.)Report
I mean, it depends on who ‘the left’ is there.
The liberals who vaguely, barely, sorta supported BLM and sorta muttered under their breath when ‘defund the police’ showed up? No.
The actual left, yeah, this is actually the sort of thing that is the cause of ‘defund the police’…because the police, and all law enforcement, actually do a lot of ‘community outreach’ that is just complete fascist bulls***, but they do it by politely asking corporations to do it.
Or, even more fun, asking corporations to ask politicians to do it. I.e., why we have laws against banks profiting from marijuana, which means credit card processors can’t operate near now-legal dispensaries. It’s a nice little fascist circle-jerk.
It’s not just the actual overt fascist behavior…or, rather, that _is_ overt fascist behavior, there’s a reason that Mussolini defined fascism as ‘the merging of the state and the corporation’. It’s just we don’t pay any attention to that.
…except when, apparently, a situation happens where the FBI might have decided that Trump’s presidency is itself too dangerous and might have decided to do something about that.
BTW, I love how we’ve all forgotten that we have very good evidence that some FBI agents sat on Anthony Weiner’s laptop and then _deliberately_ introduced a bunch of ‘but her emails’ at the last second in the 2016 election, to the point that Comey, panicked, had to desperately attempt to fix the problem, and didn’t, and it almost certainly tipped the election.
We all know this. This is a real fact we all know.
We didn’t ever do anything about this. We didn’t even bother investigating, as far as I can tell. It was just ‘Someone in the FBI leaked misleading and irrelevant information in an active investigation to political operatives to successfully sway an election…whoopsie!’
It really seems it would be relevant in _this_ discussion, being, ya know, a much much much more overt and obvious example of what we’re talking about, where we can pretty clearly trace out exactly what happened, but…nope. Because that’s the direction the FBI is supposed to lean in.Report
So we’re relying on only The True Scotsmen?
I hope that there are enough of them to field a softball team this year.Report
Jaybird, I love how you think that pointing out that there’s this mushy liberal middle that mouths platitudes but actually doesn’t do anything, and thus can’t be really be considered ‘the left’, is somehow ‘no true Scotsman’.
We all saw what happened with Defund the Police, right? We were all standing there and saw how the entire left rose up as one and said ‘Yeah, we need to do something about this, our police reforms do not actually work and we need to seriously think about solving this problem in a more permanent way!’, and then literally didn’t do anything about it. You were there, I remember it.
How do you want me to describe this fact? The way I do it as I use ‘liberal’ to describe the population that thinks we should be nice to Black people and gay people, and generally leave everything as it is, and leftist to mean leave people who actually want to alter things, the socialist and communist and even union promoters and things like that.
Do you have some other words that you think are better, or are you just nitpicking for no reason, because you don’t want to admit that stuff like ‘how the law enforcement community basically can just tell corporations what to do even if such a thing would be illegal for them to order’ and other things like that is something the actual left has been concerned about for literally the entire time it is existed, because the entire time the actual left has existed it has been under attack by law enforcement. In fact, that is almost the dividing line I would draw between the left and liberals.
I guess in your book all political divisions don’t exist, because trying to sort people is no true Scotsman?Report
“Try talking about things you actually understand.”
if only we had a lawyer here to actually explain this instead of some dude being a shithead here because he can’t do it openly to his clients’ facesReport
My clients genuinely want to know and understand things they know they don’t understand, so I explain them to them. Generally to their satisfaction, if what they and judges and juries say afterward is any indication.
We have a few folks here, and they know who they are, who don’t know what they don’t know, spout off anyway, and resist any attempt at explanation. Trying to get through to them makes me empathize with lawyers approached to represent Donald Trump, who doesn’t listen and won’t pay.
As for the matter at hand, Em, whose bread and butter is criminal law, could get into more detail on the 4th Amendment/warrant issues, but I could lay out the basics, though it would be rather long. And in the absence of traditional incentives, I’m not inclined to bother unless asked by someone I can believe really wants to know.Report
Face Recognition Tech Gets Girl Scout Mom Booted From Rockettes Show — Due to Where She Works.
From the article:
I believe we have already established that private companies can do whatever they want.Report
I think I would like to hear more about this from someone other than the person who says it happened to her.Report
The owners of venue admitted to using facial recognition as one of several routine “security measures and to having a policy for a while of barring lawyers – all lawyers – from any firm they are in litigation against. They say they are doing it – she said they did it. What else would you care to know?Report
RE; The Twitter files, you know it’s entirely possible there are actual issues with twitter and the fbi AND that the con’s are so wildly over inflating the issues. As they say this cost trump the election though this is highly questionable. But that sure as hell sounds like the laptop story is all about influencing the election.
Remember the provenience of the latptop was uncertain for a while and we still don’t know if all the emails on it are his. Last i saw there are many emails which can’t be confirmed at hunters. That would seem to make the entire thing fishy and not a good faith effort.Report
Cops (federal, state, and local) have used Twitter data to monitor protesters in this country for over a decade. I assume absolutely no one is surprised by this.
And it’s not just in the U.S. Foreign governments, legally or illegally, have used Twitter and other social media to attain data on individuals and groups. We know, for example, that the Saudis infiltrated Twitter to spy on dissidents, including Khāshqujī, revealing to the Saudi government the real names and locations of those dissidents. Twitter working wiReport
We know, for example, that the Saudis infiltrated Twitter to spy on dissidents, including Khāshqujī, revealing to the Saudi government the real names and locations of those dissidents.
This is a conspiracy theory.
Everybody knew that they did this.
I’m going to need you to explain how this was inappropriate.Report
Has there been any recent info/analysis on which emails are authentic and which are questioned?
The last i saw said thousands of emails can’t be confirmed as authentic . Of course this makes the story a bit different if the laptop actually has planted info from foreign spys.
Where are we at with the contents of the laptop?Report
What I find interesting about the thread dedicated to the relationship between Twitter and the FBI regarding the laptop isn’t the laptop nor the contents of the laptop but the whole relationship thing.
I suppose we could get into more issues with the stuff that Hunter said and whether the photos found on the laptop were authentic and whathaveyou.
Easier to just deny, deny, deny and then shift the burden of proof.
But the relationship between Twitter and the FBI? Golly! That’s interesting!
Do you think that the Facebook has such a relationship too? Or are we to “everybody knows that Facebook and the FBI are working together”?Report
On one hand i agree and on the other my god what utter bad faith. Yes as i said the close contact between the Feds and social media is an actual issue. Yes.
If the laptop is part of a foreign intell op against us then that is an actual thing the FBI is supposed to investigate and also shows why there was such caution around it.
And yes we have known for years that the feds work with social media. That is not news.Report
Well, if you want to talk about the laptop, the thread has what appears to be Twitter’s perspective on it.
The questions about whether it was part of a foreign intel operation seems to be answered by tweets 14-17. I’d also point you to 20.Report
You can google the NYT article which authenticates them.
Here’s a quote/link from Reason since I don’t pay for NYT.
“But that was then. A year and a half later, the Times thinks the emails it viewed as suspect before Joe Biden’s election are now newsworthy. “People familiar” with a federal investigation of Hunter Biden, it reports, “said prosecutors had examined emails” between him, his former business partner Devon Archer, “and others” regarding “Burisma and other foreign business activity.” Those emails “were obtained by The New York Times from a cache of files that appears to have come from a laptop abandoned by Mr. Biden in a Delaware repair shop.” The messages “were authenticated by people familiar with them and with the investigation.””
https://reason.com/2022/03/17/the-new-york-times-belatedly-admits-the-emails-on-hunter-bidens-abandoned-laptop-are-real-and-newsworthy/Report
I’ve seen that. Also found a CBS report that said the emails have been verified and also notes there have been mult copies of the hard drive going around which have had data added.
Which brings me back to there was an intel op using the hard drive though we dont’ know when it started. We didn’t know that then and the entire thing ( mult HD’s) is sleazy. Of course investigate Hunter, which is currently happening.Report
I can’t parse this, because it’s replying not to me, but to people whom I’m likely not paying attention to on this topic.Report
It’s mocking the whole evolution of the official denials.
“I’m going to need you to prove that this happened.”
(proof surfaces)
“I’m going to need you to demonstrate that this is interesting rather than something that everyone has known about for years.”
(demonstration made)
“I’m going to need you to show how this is bad, though.”
So Twitter and the FBI have a relationship and the FBI can ask Twitter to do stuff and moderate content without a warrant.
Allegedly.
When I was a kid, we would have seen this as bad. Like, and that would have been the fundamental assumption. Maybe people could have assumed that Twitter would have given information up if the FBI had a warrant and nobody would have batted an eye.
Well, maybe the pinkos who were constantly upset about “government intrusion” or whatever would have said something but they constantly have their knickers in a twist about the FBI for one reason or another.
From what I understand, we’re in “everybody knows that they do this” territory now.
Perhaps we will get to “but it’s good, though” by the end of the week.Report
To be clear, I think it’s bad.
I don’t know why anyone would think it is good, and if the laptop story makes more people think it’s bad, I’m all for it, though I suspect that’s not what’s actually happening.Report
I don’t know why anyone would think it is good
It depends on who is opposed to it.Report
Part of my point: I’m sure that the people who are suddenly very upset about the laptop don’t care about any of the stuff they don’t like being suppressed. That’s why the fact that we’ve known that Twitter has these sorts of relationships, and does these sorts of things, for many years is relevant.Report
Well, so long as we’re maintaining a “you’re only allowed to care about this thing if you cared about that other thing” stance, we’re good.
You don’t even need to demonstrate that the other person didn’t care about that other thing.
We know that there are enough people that didn’t that the criticism stands.Report
My point is has nothing to do with only allowed, or even whether anyone should care about the laptop. I’m simply pointing out that I do not believe the laptop is going to produce a long-term (or medium term) uproar about government influence on Twitter or other social media platforms, beyond the laptop issue itself. I will be happy if I’m wrong. Meanwhile, I’m gonna ignore the laptop discourse.Report
Well, as I’ve indicated before, my interest in the laptop discourse is not The Laptop but “holy crap, the FBI has an established relationship with Twitter?!?”
And, of course, this is something that everybody knows.Report
People didn’t know it because it hadn’t affect them or issues they care about. Now it has. Let’s see if they care next week when it is definitely no longer affecting issues they care about, but is still affecting a log of stuff they don’t.
If you are confident they will, in fact, suddenly care that Twitter suppresses content in service to, or provides information about its users to, governments foreign and domestic, because of the laptop, then I hope you’re right. I’m not confident they will.
And now I’ve said this like 5 times, so I’ll stop. It strikes me that this is the sort of conversation that would discourage any writer, because not only is it not going anywhere, but it seems like the point of it is in fact for it to not going anywhere. I’m sure good writers and, frankly, the two of us, have better things to do.Report
I suppose it depends on who is still complaining about that.
And *THEN* we can pivot to “that’s old news”.
It does feel like the whole “suppressing content in service to governments foreign and domestic” thing is a development that we, as a society, would have cared about a lot more a couple of decades ago.
Maybe before 9/11, anyway.
I suppose it’s a pity that it’s collectively yawnsville.
I wonder when that changed.Report
Can you think of instances in which it is a good idea to “suppress content in service to governments foreign and domestic “?Report
Sure. Foremost: When they have power over you. Whether it be the ability to withhold carrots or deliver sticks, it’s *ALWAYS* a good idea to do what you are told.Report
See, this is why none of this Taibbi stuff is getting traction with normies.
The average low info voter on the street could answer that question easily.
Conservatives can’t pivot from this particular event to put together a coherent story about free speech or government power.
Snark, sure, zingers, of course.
But anything resembling a rational assertion?
Nah.
So by next week all of this will be forgotten.Report
I think comments like this would carry more weight (and not just from you), if we had accompanying evidence of speaking out against government backdoors into other communications software.
It’s fairly common knowledge that the gubmint has its fingers in a lot of software pies. Now it’s a big deal because it serves the political interests of the right?Report
Which would then lead to uncomfortable questions about how much ownership and control foreign governments like China and Saudi Arabia have over American tech companies.
What’s weird is that conservatives have convinced themselves that revelations about FBI domestic surveillance is Bigly Embarrassing for liberals.
Its our brier patch.Report
I’m not even talking about foreign influence. Our own government has daily contact with search engines, social media, etc. All done under the color of law, and all done with virtually no objection from anyone until their oxen start getting gored.Report
Yep.
I brought up the 2010 Wired article that documented how the NSA placed taps on the central phone switches with an algorithm that could even back then, scan every single email, tweet, text message for keywords relating to terrorism or whatever.
And subsequent articles have mentioned low level drug busts where the local prosecutor had information that could only have come from private communication meaning the firewall between foreign intelligence gathering and domestic law enforcement may have already been breached.
But none of this rises above the deafening din of “OUTTACONTROL CRIME”.Report
This is why the left (and increasingly, far right) have long been interested in government involvement with social media: they are directly affected. We know that Twitter and Facebook (and I assume other social media) work with law enforcement, for example, during protests, and they suppress certain types of information (Elon never even considered un-suspending certain types of “antifa” accounts, e.g.). I imagine that many of those upset with the Hunter laptop nonsense are quite happy with Twitter for doing suspending those accounts and working with law enforcement during, say, BLM protests.Report
Yeah, I guess I missed a real opportunity there for not doing more to speak out against East Germany when I had the chance.
Or China, more recently. Saudi Arabia. Canada.Report
The U.S., p’raps?
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/how-att-helped-the-nsa-spy-on-millions/Report
Oh, I guess I should have complained more about the government instead of defending it so much over the last decade or so.
I regret the error.Report
“What I think is interesting is how the conversation has shifted from [insert stupid comment from literally anyone on the internet] to [insert stupid comment from literally anyone on the internet]”
Works virtually any partisan point of view one wishes to make, and best of all, requires no assertions or arguments or logic.
It doesn’t even need to be addressed to the stupid person. It can be aimed at even people who never made either one of the statements.
Of course it has limitations.
Because it is a zinger, a partisan jab, it doesn’t advance any idea or argument, but does have the benefit of allowing the speaker to assume a posture of self righteousness.Report
Oh yeah. Definetly.
Also there have been significant hacks by foreign govs. Russia hacked the DNC in 16 and Burisma when hb hung around there.Report
It is like almost every accusation is a confession.Report
So after all these comments, I’m still at my first question.
What are the proper parameters of suppressing speech?
I’ll start by restating my position that certain forms of speech are properly suppressed by government such as libel, state secrets, credible threat or incitement.
Other forms are properly suppressed by social sanction, such as bigotry or misinformation.Report
Thursday Afternoon News Dump:
Finally! Something for the Right to defend and the Left to complain about!Report
Conservatives should hold a big rally get a bunch of googly eyed flat earthers to try to levitate the Pentagon.
That’s really wig out the squares, man!Report
One silver lining of the wave of book-banning, is the inevitable Streisand Effect.
How ‘Gender Queer: A Memoir’ became America’s most banned book
https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2022-12-21/how-gender-queer-maia-kobabe-became-most-banned-book
The crusade against “Gender Queer” has largely driven its popularity and increased the size of Kobabe’s royalty checks. The memoir has sold more than 96,000 copies and has been translated into Spanish, French, Polish and other languages. It’s on the racks in airports.
It occurs to me that censorship really only works when the censors are in the majority, or at least have effective control over the gates of information.Report
Streisand effect, how does it work?
What is interesting about this one is that I think there was a part of the memoir/graphic novel where I thought “okay I can see why this may be inappropriate for young children.”*
*IIRC this is the one with a graphic depiction of oral sex using a sex toy.Report
Going on a tangent-
What’s fascinating about internet porn is how it shatters a lot of beliefs people, including me, have had about young people and pornography.
If you had told my 15 year old self in 1975 that everyone could carry around a small device that had access to free nonstop 24/7 hard core porn, I would have replied that every teenage boy would spend every waking moment transfixed by it, to the point of madness and exhaustion.
Yet…this isn’t happening. For some reason, teenagers are modest and restrained in their consumption of porn. Some variations abound of course, but overall it seems that young people have some sort of internal boundaries or governors.
Getting back to your comment, I’m of the opinion that young people, even children, aren’t as harmed by access to inappropriate material as we think; they self-censor things they aren’t interested in.Report
You can still pick up some wrong notions from porn. The fringe benefits of pizza delivery and pool cleaning jobs aren’t what porn watchers might think. And their fathers’ new trophy wives aren’t interested in f*****g them.Report
So lets recap, shall we, the Arya List of enemies conservatives insist must be purged of the woke mind virus or be destroyed:
1. Academia
2. Hollywood
3. Mainstream media
4. Woke corporations- Disneyland, Nabisco, et al.
5. Girl Scouts
6. Teachers
7. Librarians
8. Nurses
9. College educated women
10. LGBTQ people
11. “Urban” people (C’mon, you know what I mean.)
12. The Centers for Disease Control
13. Bureau of Land Management
14. The US Military
15. The FBI
16. Ukraine
Wow! That’s a big list! They must have to go to bed half an hour early just to recite them all.
I remember ten years ago when Dennis G over at Balloon Juice first made the case that the Republicans had morphed into a revolutionary, insurrectionist party which rejected the legitimacy of the existing order.
At the time it seemed strident, sort of a shocking condemnation.
But today, it is a badge of honor among conservatives, to see who can most vehemently play the white Malcom X.Report
House member-elect George Santos may have lied about nearly everything in his campaign bio: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/23520848/george-santos-fake-resumeReport
The FBI has released a statement about all of this. The term “conspiracy theorists” is involved.
Report
In fairness it isn’t a conspiracy when it is official government policy.Report
SEC has released its official complaint for SBF.
Report
And yet his parents paid his $250million bail.Report
I’m glad that they had $25 million on hand.Report
From the “American conservatives are the new Counterculture” files:
In response to Vladimir Zelensky’s visit to Congress, conservative Tucker Carlson overlaid criticism of Pentagon spending over videos of decay in American cities.
Donald Trump tweeted “Our country is SICK inside, very much like a person dying of CANCER. The Crooked FBI, the so-called Department of “Justice”, and “Intelligence”, all parts of the Democrat Party and System, is the Cancer. These Weaponized Thugs and Tyrants must be dealt with, or our once great and beautiful Country will die!!!Report
Apparently Kevin McCarthy wants to rumble Mitch McConnell over government spending:
https://www.newsweek.com/senate-republicans-call-kevin-mccarthy-bluff-after-threat-gop-civil-war-1769178?amp=1Report
Hey JB,
Maybe this is a better reason not to trust the media. A former ABC freelance journalist/producer was being paid under the books by corporate interests to go after politicians who questioned the environmental stances of those corporations.
Oh this doesn’t hurt the winemom libz, it must produce crickets
https://www.npr.org/2022/12/21/1142575872/abc-news-producer-corporate-operative-investigation?utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook.com&utm_campaign=npr&utm_term=nprnewsReport
HOW DARE YOU QUESTION OUR NEWS MEDIA THAT’S A CONSPIRACY THEORY
Yeah, our news media has been captured.
I recommend that you follow independent journalists, myself. You may run into problems when you get into arguments online, though. “Oh, you’re quoting an independent journalist? That’s crazy talk! You should instead quote journalists from *REAL* news sources!”
That sort of thing.Report
Why are independent journalists any more trustworthy than major media outlets? That is, what metric are you using to evaluate trustworthiness?
Without some metric of how to evaluate trustworthiness, all you’re doing is transferring blind faith from one entity to another.
Which is why I keep saying that sweeping a hand over “media” is foolish. All media outlets have differing levels of trustworthiness, and they all have different blind spots and errors.Report
Man, why do people claim that the NYT is corrupt and then other, different, people quote it all the time?
It really makes you think.Report
Can you explain what media sources you trust, and why?Report
I have no confidence that we’d be using “trust” in the same way.
But there are media sources that I am confident that I will need to do less research to confirm what they’ve said than others. Also media sources that bury the lede less often than others.
On top of that, there are media sources that result in fewer people arguing back “HOW DARE YOU QUOTE SO-AND-SO INSTEAD OF MY PREFERRED MEDIA SOURCES!!!”
So, generally, I find that the media sources that I trust are the ones that:
1. Have links to other sources that can confirm this or that piece of data
2. Tell me what happened instead of how I ought to think about what happened
And the ones that I like to quote are the ones that
1. Are likely to have been heard of by others (NPR, NYT, etc) and not get the “I can’t believe you quoted ABC news!” treatment.
And so I tend to post stories that fall into the overlap. I read a source that I trust and then I see how NPR or the NYT covers it. Then I link to that story.
It usually results in someone giving a speech about how crazy it is that nobody trusts the NYT but everybody quotes it, as if they’ve never encountered someone asking “how dare you quote ABC news!!!” before but, generally, it’s easy to deal with that.
And so, to answer your question, look at my points for 1 and 2 again.
If the media source does that, I tend to see it as temporarily trustable enough to do research on whatever they’ve said and confirm whether I ought to trust them on this or that particular story.
For the most part, any story that does the Who, What, When, Where, Why, and hoW gets bonus points for trustability right out of the gate. A story that says “A guy said X!” and then has quotes of the guy saying X is usually good enough for me to repeat that “A guy said X.”Report
So you do what pretty much all people do, is gather your news from a variety of sources and check them one against another to discern what is true or not.
Which is kinda my point. Trustworthiness is a gradient and every media outlet falls somewhere along it. Actually, they fall at different places along the trust gradient, depending on the subject and individual.
In Saul’s example, the freelance journalist hired by ABC was caught being untrustworthy about business stories.
So he isn’t trustworthy anymore, but ABC can still deliver good stories using other journalists.
Talking in general terms about “the media” doesn’t tell us anything useful.Report
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/onesixcomics/1-6-the-graphic-novelReport
To be sure, no one saw this coming:
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Christmas Eve news dump!
Report