Undercover Video Ensnares Twitter: “More than happy to help the Dept. of Justice in their little investigation”
Twitter network engineer captured on camera suggesting the social media giant would readily hand Trump’s private twitter messages to the DOJ
Project Veritas’ latest undercover video captured Clay Haynes, network security engineer, for Twitter discussing the company’s alleged willingness to hand over Trump’s entire Twitter record: tweets, mentions, private messages, etc. if it would help the Department of Justice’s investigation.
Watch the video here:
In the undercover video, Haynes claimed he’s unaware of any current plan to turn over Trump’s Twitter record, but that he believes the company would readily comply if asked:
Twitter Sr Network Security Engineer, @dark_15 says what he can do is "terrifying," "very creepy Big Brotherish." He also says they plan to give @realDonaldTrump DMs to DOJ pic.twitter.com/7Qaexcs4Gn
— James O'Keefe (@JamesOKeefeIII) January 10, 2018
Which begs the question: has the DOJ or some other federal entity issued a subpoena? Twitter remains mum.
Haynes suggested Twitter held internal discussion about how to handle Trump’s tweets. He further claimed that because Trump’s tweets were deemed newsworthy, the social media platform left them alone.
In a separate conversation captured on undercover cameras, Haynes goes into more detail about the extensive digital record Twitter maintains on its users.
In their official response to the video, Twitter distanced itself from Haynes saying Haynes wasn’t speaking for the company:
TWITTER STATEMENT “The individual depicted in this video was speaking in a personal capacity and does not represent or speak for Twitter…" https://t.co/YLHLjGU6RQ
— James O'Keefe (@JamesOKeefeIII) January 10, 2018
What’s interesting about @jack statement is that he Doesn’t deny his what his Senior Networking engineer said into our hidden cameras. in fact, he seems to confirm he said what he said. pic.twitter.com/xf1ZerG0qN
— James O'Keefe (@JamesOKeefeIII) January 10, 2018
Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe has been publicly fighting with Twitter over their refusal to verify his account.
There are actually people on twitter impersonating me @jack — with over 357K followers and ten years of conducting over 100 investigations you chose not to “verify” me. Fine. But the whole point of verifying is to prevent impersonation. So what are you going to do about this? pic.twitter.com/lgNYOjsneU
— James O'Keefe (@JamesOKeefeIII) January 3, 2018
O’Keefe says his organization will release another, more damning video displaying Twitter’s alleged censorship of conservatives using the platform Thursday.
Stay tuned, because there's much more to come tomorrow. The next video shows how Twitter targets conservative voices and censors them. #ShadowBan pic.twitter.com/bgo7cAtCQI
— James O'Keefe (@JamesOKeefeIII) January 10, 2018
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Comments
I’m wondering if anyone in law enforcement can be trusted.
Clearly the DOJ/FBI are unAmerican and corrupt. From top to bottom.
If that were the case, DJT would be dead right now. Democrats have been encouraging talk of murder amongst themselves. Project Veritas picked it up, NPR is running it right now. If it weren’t for a very large number of white hats in both agencies, DJT would not have survived the campaign.
Hillary’s character assassination campaign worked for the political appointees, but not necessarily for the rest of government employees.
Just maybe there are a lot of sadists in those organizations who prefer the death of a thousand cuts.
Speaking of sadists, here’s a few more.
“Google and the Left Wing Cult”
“Based on the documentation provided as part of James Damore’s discrimination suit, Google operates as a cult of left-wing progressives who promote an environment of hostility against conservatives, Republicans, Trump supporters, and white men. The Federalist has a summary, but here’s a few to give the flavor of the thing….
[Google Manager Kim] Burchett once proposed creating a list she would personally manage of “people who make diversity difficult,” to include employees who did things like make statements “unsupportive of diversity.” She suggested the list could serve as a punishment that could incentivize “better” behavior among the offenders listed.
“You can’t support Donald Trump without also supporting his racism, misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia,” a Googler wrote in a lengthy communication on Trump supporters. “Or even worse, if you vote for Donald Trump because of his economic policy or because you feel the other party is corrupt, then what you’re saying is that economics is more important than the safety of your peers. This is where my tolerance ends: with intolerance.”
I don’t think this situation is unique to Google – it’s likely quite common at Silicon Valley tech firms. Google management actively encourages its left-wing progressive employees to gang up on those who don’t share their cult-like fixation on “diversity,” socialism and encouragement of sexual deviance. BadThink at Google will get an employee cut off from opportunities for advancement, but blacklisted in the insutry, and even threatened in their private lives. (Sounds more than a little bit like Scientology.)
Oh, by the way, the Progressive-Left wants all of society run according to this model. Discrimination against those who hold “politically incorrect” viewpoints (wrongthink)….
http://www.gaypatriot.net/2018/01/11/google-and-the-left-wing-cult/#comments
More along the same lines….
“Shock: Google’s New “Fact-Check” Feature… Only Fact-Checks Conservative Sites, and No Left-Leaning Ones
…
Google, the most powerful search engine in the world, is now displaying fact checks for conservative publications in its results.
No prominent liberal site receives the same treatment.
And not only is Google’s fact-checking highly partisan — perhaps reflecting the sentiments of its leaders — it is also blatantly wrong, asserting sites made “claims” they demonstrably never made.
http://acecomments.mu.nu/?post=373319
PS. If there were a lot of white hats, the plots would have been exposed much earlier, even of at the expense of their careers.
“Democrats have been encouraging talk of murder amongst themselves” – This would be a bloody form of suicide for the Democrat party, I can’t imagine people staying calm after a Trump assassination.
Since the MSM has gone so far to malign President Trump and so many shooters in the past 2 decades have been shown to be liberal hacks or hardcore Democrat supporters, people who automatically pinpoint the Democrats. It wouldn’t matter what the shooter or the evidence said, that wouldn’t be trusted. Liberals/Democrats would die in their thousands.
Twitter only responds to valid legal requests …
A den of electric weasels.
I’m reading “valid legal requests” but I’m not hearing those magic words “warrent” or “court order” … It requires no wild flight of fancy to imagine some crooked Obamite holdover at DoJ asking for any old thing, and Twitter regarding that as a “valid legal request”. Progressives are very “flexible”—no, “slippery”—about some concepts.
I like the Project Veritas approach:
1) Release a video
2) Watch the target go frantic and spin like a broken washing machine.
3) Release another video showing just what liars the target is.
Repeat until target has spun into a twisted knot.
Twitter’s official statement is not surprising. Their response is weak, poor, unapologetic and not believable. They used a patented leftist technique in building their response of separating the company from the employee, isolating the engineer but setting him up to be sheltered beneath First Amendment protection. It is what liberals do when they are exposed and caught colluding.
To use a chess analogy, Project Veritas captured Twitter’s Queen and placed the Company’s King in check with the same move. Twitter responds by frantically searching for a blocking move and is playing for a stalemate. Good luck with that losing strategy.
I think the bigger issue here is Twitter refusing to verify O’Keefes account.
All this other shit is a given. Of course Twitter would be more than happy to turn everything they have on President Trump if merely asked for. We all know they would do that at a drop of the hat!
But refusing to verify O’Keefes Twitter account is a much bigger problem because it appears they are only refusing to do that because his politics is inconvenient to them!!
It’s more akin to what the IRS was doing!
I don’t get it. I would expect Twitter, Google, Facebook, Comcast, Motel 6, Expedia or any other company to cooperate with the DOJ regardless of the target of the inquiry.
Like Apple co-operating with the FBI to unlock a terrorists iPhone?
Yes, I expected Apple to comply and assist the FBI. Apple will be tarred forever in my eyes as a company that refused to assist in an investigation into a lethal terrorist attack on Americans.
With a warrant, I expect Apple to comply. This twitter bug caught on tape seems interested in volunteering information. It’s not illegal, but it looks really bad for their activist company and demonstrates devout, zealous partisanship.
With a warrant for an actual case, yes I’m ok with Apple providing data. What DOJ wanted was for Apple to take the time and effort to crack the iphone encryption or give the DOJ the means to do so. Eff NO! Apple has IP rights to their encryption and also has the right to refuse work. Paid or not. TO have their engineers spend time cracking a phone vs doing their real company work is not a valid request.
Maybe that’s how things are done in Sweden, but a few hundred years ago here we fought for something called freedom. We don’t want to become Sweden.
Paul,
As I suspect that you are not from this country 🙂 You may be unaware of the process by which information is obtained by the government here.
First there needs to be cause as to why a person or persons will be investigated. Law enforcement, through Prosecutors (lawyers on the government side) obtain warrants that clearly and narrowly delineate what is being looked for (sometimes not so much). These warrants are signed by a judge and have a minimal threshold of supporting information that what is being looked for is relevant to a possible case. After law enforcement obtains this warrant they are then free to work within the bounds of the warrant to obtain what they are looking for.
The protection to individual rights (hopefully) is that a judge signs it and it is narrowly defined. This keeps what is known as fishing trips to a minimum.
What Twitter is doing is akin to turning your neighbor into the KGB in hopes that they investigate and then destroy your neighbor. This is common in totalitarian countries.
Hope that helped. Anyone else chime in here I know there are a lot of lawyers on this board and we should clear this up for our foreign friend 🙂
Depends on what you mean by “cooperation”. I agree with pwaldoch that we expect a valid subpoena would be honored. And, if there was some question as to the validity that the entity served with the subpoena would go the Federal Courts route to make sure the subpoena is valid by being ordered to obey the terms.
But just being asked to turn over records of a customer is not a good enough reason to turn over such records. It has been done, at least in the past with phone records, and probably still is being done. That doesn’t make it right. And in the past, if something was found which might be used in court, a subpoena was made up and a new set of records supplied to make it all valid for the courts.
In the eyes of law enforcement everyone is a potential terrorist. I offer the TSA as an example. Law enforcement has been making the “National Security” excuse for looking into private lives for years. We are better off keeping potential terrorists out of the country in the fist place rather than go looking for them after they arrive. Why anyone believes government employees are more ethical than anyone else is beyond me.
Amen
Some ignoramus was telling me just the other day that O’Keefe had become a “liability” because of his one failure with the WaPo. LOL
So much for the fourth amendment even if one is the president.
I’m a bit confused by the reference to the Fourth Amendment.
Does anyone with a brain have the expectation that what they publish to the world on Twatter or (to a lesser extent) Facebook is “private”.
Does any thinking person NOT know that data is being stored?
de facto private? Oh, Hell No.
Under their contracts with their users under the law, it’s supposed to be.
Just another example of a so-called officer of the court discarding the law in the name of getting President Trump.
Welcome to the #Resistance, tovarisch.
No, you poor T-rump sucking dupe.
Your post is another example of the hypersensitive T-rump cultist, protecting his man-crush.
Mine was of the general. Yours of a delusional specific.
According to you, any Twatter user MIGHT have a breach of contract claim (though you allude to a contract without support).
There would be no Forth Amendment claim that I can imagine.
My point being that NOBODY should EVER trust social media. A point I’ve made before, along with my point about social media being a net corrosive in our culture.
My gawd Rags what does his response have to do with Trump? Please stick to the argument man. You clearly have issues with Trump, that is fine but stick to pointing out the problems instead of playground taunting people.
“de facto private? Oh, Hell No.
Under their contracts with their users under the law, it’s supposed to be.”
ANOTHER example of you attacking me without knowing WTF you’re talking about. Letting your stupid fly!
https://twitter.com/en/privacy
The Twitter engineer may have broken the privacy policy section regarding the need for a warrant to disclose communications held by Twitter to legal authorities but no more than that as far as I can tell. Here is what I found in the privacy policy Rags posted:
Contents of communications requires a search warrant
Requests for the contents of communications (e.g., Tweets, Direct Messages, photos) require a valid search warrant or equivalent from an agency with proper jurisdiction over Twitter.
Will Twitter notify users of requests for account information?
Yes. Twitter’s policy is to notify users of requests for their Twitter or Periscope account information, which includes a copy of the request, as soon as we are able (e.g., prior to or after disclosure of account information) unless we are prohibited from doing so (e.g., an order under 18 U.S.C. § 2705(b)). We ask that any non-disclosure provisions include a specified duration (e.g., 90 days) during which Twitter is prohibited from notifying the user. Exceptions to user notice may include exigent or counterproductive circumstances, such as emergencies regarding imminent threat to life, child sexual exploitation, or terrorism.
Right.
Now take the case of some aggregator who monitored some Twatter account or accounts. They collect everything published by the person or persons. AND they make it known to third parties they’ve been doing this.
ANYBODY could ask them for all their information, and they’d be free to provide it at their good pleasure.
There is NO expectation of privacy respecting Twatter.
Twitter, like Fakebook is nothing but a pile of canine fecal matter.
Seems to me that the real reason Twitter leaves DJT’s Twitter account alone is that he is what keeps them relevant.
Remember just last month a Twitter employee took President Trump’s Twitter account down – deliberately.
Time to declare Twitter, Facebook, Google, etc. as public utilities, nationalize them and stick all Trump supporters in from entry-level employees to CEO!
SNARK!
I understand that this video proves the folks running Twitter are unethical left-wing partisans, but so what? Everybody already knew that. What’s the big deal with giving Trump’s tweets to the DOJ? They are not secret, confidential, privileged, or anything else. Trump tweets them to everybody, (including the DOJ,) because he wants everybody to see his tweets.
As I have read, one can send “private messages” others on Twitter that are not seen on either ones public page.
I don’t Tweet, so maybe someone here can confirm that
The private ones are the ones at stake here.
The Twitter employee exposed also said he’d be happy to turn over everything, even the tweets that were deleted. If a user typed anything while logged onto that platform its captured, published or not. Your keystrokes and mouse movements are monitored. He’d be willing to turn over everything. Such a nice person.