“The FBI team that was in communication with Facebook before the social media company censored the original Hunter Biden laptop story has been identified, according to a new court filing.
Meta, Facebook’s parent company, identified the team as the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force (FITF), according to an updated complaint entered late on Oct. 6.
Meta named the team after receiving a subpoena in a case alleging the federal government pressured Big Tech firms to censor users.
Laura Dehmlow (Credit: public domain)
Elvis Chan (Credit: public domain)
“Pursuant to the third-party subpoena, Meta has identified the FBI’s FITF, as supervised by Laura Dehmlow, and Elvis Chan as involved in the communications between the FBI and Meta that led to Facebook’s suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story,” the updated complaint states.
Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s CEO, said in August that Facebook reduced the reach of posts about Hunter Biden’s laptop in response to advice from the FBI.
(…) Laura Dehmlow is a supervisor of FITF. She has been named as a defendant in the case along with Elvis Chan, a special agent who manages the cyber branch at the FBI’s San Francisco Field Office.
According to new documents produced by the government as part of discovery in the case, Dehmlow briefed the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s (CISA) Cybersecurity Advisory Committee on March 1, 2022. Minutes of the meeting show Dehmlow telling members that the FITF actually started in 2016 and has since grown to 80 workers.
CISA Director Jen Easterly (Credit: Wikipedia)
Asked about goals for approaching mal-, mis-, and disinformation, Dehmlow said that “we need a media infrastructure that is held accountable; we need to early educate the populace; and that today, critical thinking seems to be a problem currently,” according to the minutes.
Chan, meanwhile, bragged on a recent podcast that the San Francisco office “was very involved in helping to protect the US elections in 2020” by working with private companies and election officials. He also indicated he works closely with CISA Director Jen Easterly, who has been revealed to have taken part in pressuring Big Tech companies to crack down on alleged misinformation.
“We talked with all of these entities I mentioned regularly, at least on a monthly basis. And right before the election, probably on a weekly basis. If they were seeing anything unusual, if we were seeing anything unusual, sharing intelligence with technology companies, with social media companies, so that they could protect their own platforms. That’s where the FBI and the US government can actually help companies,” Chan said. (Read more: The Epoch Times, 10/07/2022) (Archive)