Posted on 04/01/2024 10:04:39 AM PDT by nickcarraway
"It's just an effort to keep everybody safe and make sure nobody has any ill will," he claimed.
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 online on Wednesday.
Abdeljawad told agents that she didn't want to talk and asked them to show their badges on camera, which the agents refused to do. She wrote on Facebook that she later confirmed with local police that the FBI agents really were FBI agents.
"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. Andy Stone, a spokesman for Meta, and Kayla McCleery, a spokeswoman for the FBI's Oklahoma City office, declined to comment.*
Meta's official policy is to hand over Facebook data to U.S. law enforcement in response to a court order, a subpoena, a search warrant, or an emergency situation involving "imminent harm to a child or risk of death or serious physical injury to any person." The company received 73,956 requests from U.S. law enforcement and handed over data 87.84 percent of the time in the first half of 2023, according to the Meta website.
Abdeljawad's Facebook timeline is public, so the FBI agents could have found it themselves. For the past week, she has 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. "If you're Muslim and/or pro-pal consider all your media accounts, Google searches, mail, messenger, local mosques & political events monitored. #NYC #usa #PoliceState #FreePalestine"
Shibly claims that Abdeljawad knew how to assert her rights from her time volunteering at the Council on American-Islamic Relations, where Shibly used to be a state-level director. "It's unfortunately normal behavior for the FBI to target the community like this," Shibly says.
In his caption of the video, Shibly added some advice to others: Abdeljawad was right to refuse to speak and right to record the interaction, but should not have stepped outside the house to talk to the FBI agents.
He tells Reason that his main goal with Abdeljawad's case is to raise awareness of people's rights when dealing with the FBI.
"It's wrong what they did. Realistically, with where the community's at, I don't know if we have the bandwidth to go after them for it," Shibly says. "Moreso, it's, ok, continue to exercise your rights. If they do contact you again, they're going to be hearing directly from us. We're going to deal with it. We're going to put them in check."
*UPDATE: After publication, McCleery provided the following statement; "Every day, the FBI engages with members of the public in furtherance of our mission, which is to protect the American people and uphold the Constitution of the United States. We can never open an investigation based solely on First Amendment protected activity. The FBI is committed to ensuring our activities are conducted with a valid law enforcement or national security purpose, while upholding the constitutional rights of all Americans."
“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin’s thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn’t love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward.”
― Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn , The Gulag Archipelago 1918–1956
Doing the work that Joseph Goebbels can no longer do.
And people wonder why I won’t do social media.
Indeed.
FBI: hello. can we talk about your social media posts?
ME: do you have a warrant?
FBI: no
ME: bye
You can’t yell fire in accorded theater so if it’s on par with threatening what’s the prob.em? Think stop and frisk with Rudy. The end justified the means.
*UPDATE: After publication, McCleery provided the following statement; "Every day, the FBI engages with members of the public in furtherance of our mission, which is to protect the American people and uphold the Constitution of the United States. We can never open an investigation based solely on First Amendment protected activity. The FBI is committed to ensuring our activities are conducted with a valid law enforcement or national security purpose, while upholding the constitutional rights of all Americans."
Preparing for the election....
I don’t go on FB for lots of reasons - mostly because I don’t like enriching Zuckerberg with my personal info that then gets used against me. How insane are people who go there???
Saw a video that said when questioned by an authority all you have to say over and over is “I don’t answer questions”.
Another exhibit that shows the “rank and file are good” myth is bullcrap. Every damned one of them is a crook.
FBI: hello. can we talk about your social media posts?
ME: do you have a warrant?
FBI: no
Me: Then you are trespassing, and you have 1 minute to get down my mile long driveway and off my property!
ME: bye, clock is ticking....
The question about the "rank and file" is really a moot point. It simply doesn't matter.
No doubt there were kind and generous KGB, Stasi and Gestapo members. It doesn't matter. They still went to work every day inside their vast bureaucracy which moved forward on political orders from the top.
There are obviously WAY too many FBI agents if they have time to do this. Another thing, I’ve seen several videos of this on Twitter. The personal appearance of these FBI agents, grooming, physical fitness, and attire, is severely lacking and totally unprofessional. Most people would automatically lose any amount of respect for the FBI if these people came to their door looking like I’ve seen on the videos.
#1 Make them show you proof of FBI status AND take the time to write it down, photograph it or video it. Do not answer questions. I’d tell them I won’t answer questions without a lawyer. Any answer you give them can be interpreted by them as a lie and that’s a felony.
These people (FBI) are liars and political operatives and nothing they say or do can be trusted.
Please. People like her should be monitored quite possibly. Is she here legally? Does she have ties to islamic terrorists? There is a lot missing from this article.
Ministry of Love
She didn’t break any laws and the FBI had ZERO reason to come out and question her. This amounts to harassment. The First Amendment applies to Muslims too whether you like it or not.
‘… We can never open an investigation based solely on First Amendment protected activity.’
When they knocked on this person’s door to discuss online postings, was it not an investigation? Let’s stop the BS right there. They perceived a potential threat, they should be clear about that and let attorneys on both sides sort it out. In the meantime, maybe someone with balls like Rand Paul will ask some questions.
Lastly, for the record I’m not defending this person, her postings, nothing. She doesn’t sound like someone I’d align with ideologically.
“Shibly claims that Abdeljawad knew how to assert her rights from her time volunteering at the Council on American-Islamic Relations...”
Well, there you go, she worked for an unindicted co-conspirator to terrorist organizations. No wonder the FBI is checking in on her.
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