Whistleblowers and Former FBI Agents Criticized FBI/Big Tech Collusion During Hearing
Jose Nino
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At a House Judiciary Committee that took place on February 9, 2023, whistleblowers and former Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents criticized the agency’s censorship collusion efforts with Big Tech companies. These critics also took the FBI to task for its secret surveillance practices.
This hearing was titled “Weaponization of the Federal Government.”
Ohio Congressman Jim Jordan, who is the Chairman of the Select Subcommittee on the Weaponization of the Federal Government, called attention to an FBI whistleblower’s claims made in November 2022 asserting that the agency accepts private user information from Facebook without the user’s consent. In addition, he highlighted that this information is only coming from the conservative side of the political aisle. In Jordan’s opening statement, he said the following:
“In my time in Congress, I have never seen anything like this.”
Former FBI agent Thomas Baker published a written testimony where he criticized the agency’s “promiscuous spying on Americans” through Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants. Tom Parker of Reclaim the Net noted that FISA warrants are “a controversial type of surveillance warrant that has been used by the FBI to secretly collect the personal information of more than three million Americans.”
In addition, Baker described the FBI-Twitter censorship collusion as “a perversion of the First Amendment.”
When he was questioned by Kentucky Congressman Thomas Massie, Baker mentioned “reverse targeting” — a surveillance technique several federal government agencies use to circumvent legal restrictions that ban these agencies from spying on Americans.
“They would target a foreign person who was close to an American they were really interested in and then when they picked up that information on the Americans, ‘Aha, we got it in incidental…collection,’” Baker stated. “That was all phony and false. It wasn’t incidental collection at all.”
Baker continued by hinting that Congress “address and correct” this practice by sanctioning this type of behavior.
Massie also criticized the FBI’s use of FISA to snoop on Americans, stating that it had been used to gather “millions of exabytes of data.”
“When what you’re collecting incidentally becomes the entire universe, I think you might need a warrant to go and look at that information,” Massie continued.
Baker criticized former FBI Director Robert Mueller for changing the FBI’s culture from an “intelligence-driven” agency and turning into an institution that currently operates “through deceit and deception.”
It goes without saying: The FBI has to go. This unconstitutional agency is an affront to the republican values of limited government this country was founded on. Plus, it presents an existential threat on the Right. It’s not enough to reform the FBI, it must be abolished altogether.
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