Twitter's recruitment drive among federal agents

The main activity of senior FBI and spooks alike has always been extortion. What exactly is done with it varies. For FBI, it may include coercing aid to recruit into &quot;terrorist cells&quot; that may then be prosecuted, or coercing false testimony, i.e. perjury, in criminal cases. Among spooks, coercion is used to operate networks of &quot;assets&quot; for information gathering or covert action, often for official purposes, but not at all necessarily so. &quot;Classified&quot; offers a big tent.<p>So, Twitter&#x27;s interest in FBI and spooks will be to leverage their skills operating on information Twitter has unique access to. This could be a much more lucrative business than advertising. Of course this makes Twitter useful directly to the spook agencies for their own purposes, another revenue source.

On the other hand, federal employees are not paid very well and live in a high-cost area. Some are true believers, making their country or the world better by being a public servant and will stay for 40 years. Many leave because they&#x27;ve made their contribution or checked that box and move on to get a job that can better put their kids through college.

&gt; one sign of a growing “revolving door” between the FBI and the entities it seeks to regulate.<p>The FBI does not regulate social media.

&gt; Many former FBI officials hold influential roles within [ <i>insert company name</i> ].<p>&gt; For instance, in 2020, Matthew W. left a 15-year career as an intelligence program manager at the FBI to take up the post of senior director of product trust at [ <i>insert company name</i> ]<p>I would certainly hope so, it&#x27;d be a waste of talent if people with that much experience behind them didn&#x27;t end up with significant roles elsewhere.

&gt;This story originally appeared in MintPress News<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;MintPress_News" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;MintPress_News</a>

Dozens hired of a &gt;7500 workforce amounting to ~0.5%. Is that alarming?

Intelligence agencies would be negligent if they weren&#x27;t putting their people in key positions at large tech companies. I can guarantee that nobody affiliated with any ABC agencies has any influence on my Mastodon server.

I’m surprised these folk so readily advertise the roles they had before Twitter. If you are going through a foreign airport then your name might be on a watchlist to see if a foreign nation detains you. No longer being a federal agent means you’re just like the rest of us. Forgotten and expendable.

Who is the FBI hiring? Have to say netflix shows have shaped my view of the world and I can&#x27;t believe anyone would want to go work there in 2022.

This looks like a right wing disinformation site. The implication is that Twitter (in readers&#x27; minds the incarnation of oppressive liberal media) is somehow colluding with FBI deep state chimera to stifle freedom of speech. This is what conservatives in America resort to: allying themselves with white supremacists doesn&#x27;t help them win elections, so when they lose, it&#x27;s always supposedly the fault of fraud, federal government rigging the scales, and coastal elites. Aside from the fact that FBI does not regulate media (nor anyone in the US either TBH) I&#x27;m quite sure that on balance, there are more FBI agents going to traditionally right wing businesses with lots of political influence as well (energy, military contractors, etc.). In insurgency terms, this is textbook sapping of institutions, and honestly I say f these f&#x27;ers.

It would be very interesting to see a parallel universe version of this thread where the subject was a Chinese company and a Chinese intelligence agency.

IIRC there are actual documents&#x2F;comms between the current administration and twitter regarding the request for removal of content and contributors. I believe that this makes twitter a de facto NGO and therefore they should be subject to the enforcement of the first amendment.