FBI Agent Says He Hassles People ‘Every Day, All Day Long’ Over Facebook Posts
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.Â
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
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