The FBI spends “every day, all day” questioning people through their Facebook posts. At least that’s what officers told the Stillwater, Oklahoma, resident Rolla Abdeljawad when they showed up at her house to ask about her social media activity.
Three FBI agents came to Abdeljawad’s home and said they had received “screenshots” of his posts from Facebook. His lawyer Hassan Shibly posted a video of the incident online Wednesday.
Abdeljawad told the officers he did not want to talk and asked them to show their badges on camera, which the officers refused to do. She he wrote on Facebook who later confirmed to local police that the FBI agents were indeed FBI agents.
“Facebook provided us with a couple of screenshots of your account,” an officer in a gray T-shirt said in the video.
“So we no longer live in a free country and can’t say what we want?” Abdeljawad replied.
“No, we absolutely do. That’s why we’re not here to arrest you or anything,” added a second officer in a red T-shirt. “We do this every day, all day. It’s just an effort to keep everyone safe and make sure no one has ill will.”
Shibly says he didn’t know which Facebook post caught the officers’ 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 spokesperson for Meta, and Kayla McCleery, a spokeswoman for the FBI’s Oklahoma City office, declined to comment.*
Meta’s official policy is to turn over Facebook data to U.S. law enforcement in response to a court order, subpoena, search warrant, or emergency situation involving “imminent harm to a child or risk of death or serious physical injury to any person.” According to the report, in the first half of 2023 the company received 73,956 requests from US law enforcement agencies and transmitted data 87.84% of the time. Meta website.
Abdeljawad’s Facebook history is public, so FBI agents may have found it on their own. For the past week you have posted numerous angry posts every day about the war in Gaza, referring to Israel as “Israhell.” But none of her posts on her feed call for violence.
Ironically, Abdeljawad had also posted a warning about exactly the kind of government monitoring she would subsequently be subjected to.
“Don’t fall for their games. Our community is being watched and they are just waiting for any reason to gather us,” Abdeljawad he wrote. “If you are Muslim and/or pro-Friend, consider having all your media accounts, Google searches, mail, messenger, local mosques, and political events monitored. #NYC #usa #PoliceState #FreePalestine”
Shibly says Abdeljawad has been able to assert his rights since he volunteered at the Council on American-Islamic Relations, where Shibly was a state-level director. “Unfortunately, it is normal behavior for the FBI to target the community in this way,” Shibly says.
In his caption of the video, Shibly added some advice to others: Abdeljawad was right to refuse to talk and he was right to record the interaction, but he shouldn’t have left the house to talk to FBI agents.
He says Reason that his main goal with the Abdeljawad case is to raise awareness of people’s rights when dealing with the FBI.
“What they did was wrong. Realistically, given the situation the community is in, I don’t know if we have the bandwidth to persecute them,” Shibly says. “Also, that’s fine, continue to exercise your rights. If they contact you again, they’ll hear from us directly. We’ll take care of it. We’ll put them under control.”
*UPDATE: After publication, McCleery provided the following statement; “Every day, the FBI speaks with members of the public to advance our mission, which is to protect the American people and uphold the Constitution of the United States. We will never open an investigation based solely on activity protected by the First Amendment. The FBI is committed to ensuring that our activities are conducted with good law enforcement or national security purposes, while upholding the constitutional rights of all Americans.”