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FBI Agent Says He Hassles People 'Every Day, All Day Long' Over Facebook Posts
Key Excerpts from Article on Website of Reason

Agents from the FBI Cyber Task Force and the Department of Homeland Security Investigations conduct a search in 2021. Photo Credit: FBI

Reason, March 29, 2024
Posted: April 8th, 2024
https://reason.com/2024/03/29/fbi-agent-says-he-hassles-peop...

The FBI spends "every day, all day long" interrogating people over their Facebook posts. At least, that's what agents told Stillwater, Oklahoma, resident Rolla Abdeljawad when they showed up at her house to ask her about her social media activity. Three FBI agents came to Abdeljawad's house and said that they had been given "screenshots" of her posts by Facebook. Her lawyer Hassan Shibly posted a video of the incident. "Facebook gave us a couple of screenshots of your account," one agent in a gray shirt said in the video. "So we no longer live in a free country and we can't say what we want?" replied Abdeljawad. "No, we totally do. That's why we're not here to arrest you or anything," a second agent in a red shirt added. "We do this every day, all day long. It's just an effort to keep everybody safe and make sure nobody has any ill will." Shibly says that he doesn't know which Facebook post caught the agents' attention, and that it was the first time he had heard of Facebook's parent company, Meta, preemptively reporting posts to law enforcement. [Abdeljawad] made multiple angry posts per day about the war in Gaza, referring to Israel as "Israhell." But none of the posts on her feed call for violence. Ironically, Abdeljawad had also posted a warning about exactly the kind of government monitoring she was later subjected to. "Don't fall for their games. Our community is being watched & they are just waiting for any reason to round us up," Abdeljawad wrote.

Note: For more along these lines, see concise summaries of deeply revealing news articles on government corruption and the erosion of civil liberties from reliable major media sources.


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