FLASHBACK: The US Intelligence Community’s effort to penetrate Twitter
On Dec 20, 2019, Elvis Chan, the FBI’s liaison to social media companies, emailed a Twitter executive. “My colleagues at the Fort had a query for you.”
“The Fort” is IC slang for Fort Meade, Maryland, where the National Security Agency (NSA), the IC agency focused on spying through signals intelligence, is located.
Chan’s NSA colleagues wanted to know if Twitter would please change a security policy so that NSA could better use Twitter data.
The request immediately raised red flags from Twitter’s Head of Site Integrity, Yoel Roth.
“My sense is that a call directly with the IC on this isn’t a great idea,” said Roth. “We’re threading a needle on this one—where we both want to keep law enforcement and the IC engaged on election integrity issues while maintaining our strong anti-surveillance stance on the data front.”
The request bothered others at Twitter.
“We have seen a sustained (If uncoordinated) effort by the IC to push us to share more information and change our API policies,” said Carlos Monje, Twitter’s Director of Policy, in response to Roth.
But the IC’s "sustained effort" may have been more coordinated than it appeared.