by Tim Hains at RealClear Politics
MATT TAIBBI: I think the major revelation of the Twitter files so far is that we’ve discovered an elaborate bureaucracy of what you might call public-private censorship. Basically companies like Twitter have a system by which they receive ten tens of thousands of requests for action on various accounts. Typically through the DHS and FBI, but these requests for coming from basically every department in the government. We’ve seen them from the HHS, from the Treasury, from the DOD, even from the CIA. And they will send basically long lists of accounts in excel spreadsheet files and ask for action on those accounts.
And in many cases, Twitter is complying.
MARIA BARTIROMO: Yeah, we’ve been talking about the fact that the if FBI had a task force of 80 agents or 80 people at at the FBI who were tasked with just dealing with social media, but it was many more than that, right? You’re estimating up to a thousand people throughout government?
MATT TAIBBI: Right, because that foreign influence task force only refers to the people in the FBI, DHS and the Director of National Intelligence office. But actually, this includes people in a variety of agencies both federal and state. We’ve seen requests from basically all 50 states, most of those go through DHS to Twitter. So I would estimate that personnel somewhere between 500-1,000 people just based on what we’ve seen so far. It may be more than that.
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We found one incredible e-mail from former FBI general counsel Jim Baker
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