The U.S. Government Is Still in Its Tumblr Era

A few months ago, as a debate was heating up over whether to renew an FBI surveillance authority known as Section 702, I was looking for an unsealed court document from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. “Just check their Tumblr.” Sure enough, I found the document on the Tumblr in question: “IC on the Record,” a website “created at the direction of the President of the United States and maintained by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence,” which promised “direct access to factual information related to the lawful foreign surveillance activities of the U.S. Intelligence Community.” How did the Office of the Director of National Intelligence—a senior-level agency representing the entire intelligence community including the CIA and the National Security Agency—come to host some of the most important docs on a platform better known for cat gifs, LGBTQ+ discourse, and indie sleaze? One TechCrunch journalist remained skeptical, writing, “The site is a good idea on the surface, but such great portions of the declassified documents are redacted that it won’t end up being a big help.” After mentioning the site’s accompanying Twitter handle, the journalist quipped, “Hopefully the office will be able to string together 140 characters without redacting anything.” While some had hailed the choice of Tumblr as a brilliant marketing maneuver, others attacked it as just that: a rebranding exercise to distract from the sprawling and at times illegal surveillance program that had just been revealed to the public. The Atlantic published a piece titled “The Revolution Will Be Twittered,” and in the New York Times, Nicholas Kristof wrote that “in the quintessential 21st-century conflict … on the one side are government thugs firing bullets … on the other side are young protesters firing ‘tweets.’ ” One former deputy national security adviser in the Bush administration wanted to award Twitter the Nobel Peace Prize. Related From Slate The Evolution of a 5G Zombie Apocalypse Conspiracy Theory As Government Technology’s Lindsay Crudele wrote last November, “It took years for Twitter to evolve from a platform for casual lunch updates to a vital tool for public information exchange … it took just days for chaotic, profit-driven strategy to dismantle the personnel and security functions that supported a once-reliable public resource.” The Twitter chaos has thrown government agencies into crisis.