by Cindy Harper,Reclaim The Net:

A federal judge has handed the FBI a win in its attempts to keep secrets. On February 4th, Chief Judge James Boasberg ruled that the bureau can keep secret the precise amounts it paid Twitter between 2016 and 2023 for complying with legal process requests.

Judicial Watch, which hadsuedunder theFreedom of Information Act, walked away empty-handed.

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You may remember our earlierreporting on how the FBI was paying Twitter. The payments totaled at least $3.4 million between October 2019 and February 2021 alone. That figure emerged from the Twitter Files released in December 2022. The FBI has never confirmed it. Neither has Twitter. And now, thanks to Boasberg’s ruling, the quarterly breakdown that would show exactly when the money flowed, and how much, stays buried.

What were the payments for? Officially, reimbursements. Federal law requires agencies to compensate companies for the cost of responding to subpoenas, search warrants, and national security legal demands. The FBI was sending those requests to Twitter in volume.

During the period leading up to the 2020 election, theFBI’s Elvis Chan and colleagueswere holding weekly meetings with Twitter staff about “misinformation.” They wereflagging accounts. They wereflagging content. And they were being reimbursed for the legal paperwork that accompanied all of it.

The Trump DOJ, through US Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s office, filed for summary judgment in December 2025, arguing the payment amounts are shielded by FOIA’s Exemption 7(E). That exemption covers law enforcement techniques and procedures whose disclosure could help criminals evade detection. Boasberg agreed, accepting the government’s argument that quarterly payment figures, combined with Twitter’s own transparency reports, could let bad actors reverse-engineer where the FBI is looking and where it isn’t.

The logic is that if you know the FBI paid Twitter significantly more in Q4 2021 than Q3, you might infer the bureau ramped up surveillance following a specific event. A foreign intelligence service could check whether its operation triggered a spike.

Source: SGT Report