zlacker

Can you outline a scheme that would satisfy your needs for transparency while at the same time not result in compromising active investigations, tipping off the perps that they are under surveillance and so on? Because I don't see a practical way to achieve that ideal that would still work.

Having been on the receiving end of such requests I was pretty happy all of them were made in a confidential manner, it saved everybody a ton of headaches and reduce the amount of grip the various miscreants had on our community. Doing that in the open would have caused massive issues, some of these people were downright dangerous and others simply needed help, keeping their data and our interaction around that data confidential was - in my opinion - a good thing all around.

>>jacque+(OP)
At least give us a retrospective 2 years later on the accounts that were requested to be taken down and why. There are ways around this dilemma.

>>hacker+k
I'll give you one example: I was called up on my cell phone in the middle of the night by the police in NL that a person was attempting suicide on camera on our website. We fished their IP number out of the logs and passed it on which allowed LE (after contact with the relevant ISP) + medical assistance to get there in record time and help the person who ended up surviving and being quite happy that their attempt had failed (it's been more than a decade and I still have that image etched into my brain). There is no 'best before' date on something like that, just knowing the account name would be enough to cause trouble for that person all over again.

You would have to decide on a case-by-case basis which requests can cause harm and which don't, which given the volume of such requests would add a fairly unreasonable burden on a company that was already cash strapped.

The only reason people want to know about this stuff is some kind of morbid curiosity. What you could do is to come up with a set of workable rules for which requests would have to be made public and which not, but I don't think I would be capable of coming up with such a set of rules that would not in the future lead to issues. So to default to secrecy seems prudent.

In that light, the sale of Twitter and the subsequent exposure of all these interactions presumably has the effect of such communications becoming more opaque rather than less resulting in the opposite effect of what you desire.

>>jacque+(OP)
The problem is that there is this assumption that the FBI is working in good faith. There is a mountain of evidence that they have arbitrarily acted in the interests of the ruling class and not within the confines of the constitution.

Just look at COINTELPRO for the most egregious example.

Then there's Waco, Ruby Ridge, the campaign finance corruption, infiltration of latin American governments, and modern operations similar to COINTELPRO to take down various movements like occupy wall street.

They are a mafia, not some benign group that can be blindly trusted with secret carte blanche powers.

>>jacque+n1
> The only reason people want to know about this stuff is some kind of morbid curiosity.

Nobody has a problem with the FBI doing takedown requests for that kind of content. It's about political content (labelled "civic misinformation") on accounts like @RSBNetwork. The FBI isn't supposed to be taking sides and potentially influencing elections by encouraging social media companies to ban accounts of political actors.

Personally I'm of two minds about this whole thing. While I have concerns, the right-wing in the US at the moment are an authoritarian movement and social media companies are doing not nearly enough in the way of moderation. Ideally the FBI would have stayed out of it and Twitter would have upped their game.

> You would have to decide on a case-by-case basis which requests can cause harm and which don't, which given the volume of such requests would add a fairly unreasonable burden on a company that was already cash strapped.

I'd put the burden on the FBI. If they want to exclude all clearly non-political content (e.g. suicide videos) from the transparency report that's ok by me.

>>colord+y4
The bulk of the people in LE and the bulk of the people running the government are doing so with the best of intentions. They get it wrong, sometimes spectacularly so and a lot of stuff has been done that should have never ever happened.

But none of that seems to have any bearing on what happened here at Twitter, which is so far - to put it mildly, given the amount of noise made by Musk et al - underwhelming.

If you feel differently then that's fine but personally I think there are far bigger transgressions by the FBI than requesting that Twitter take down objectionable content and rabble rousers.

In NL Twitter was successfully weaponized by our most despicable - outright pro-Nazi - political party and the aftereffects are still felt today. Compared to what happened in the US it obviously pales but you have to wonder how the 6th of January 2020 would have ended if it weren't for the good contacts between the FBI and Twitter.

Not all such contacts are bad.

>>hacker+V5
I think in the end it will come down to a decision about workload. As soon as the matter is dealt with any further cycles are wasteful and since the ocean of work is endlessly deep they probably would prioritize newer cases over dotting the i's and crossing the t's on those cases that are already closed. This is not ideal, but having a moderately underfunded law enforcement institution is not necessarily a bad thing, it forces them to prioritize. If you don't then you end up with East Germany or some local equivalent.