The U.S. Government Is Still in Its Tumblr Era
Reading Time: 9 minutesThe ‘IC on the Record’ Tumblr was created after the biggest leak in intelligence history., 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 (FISC). I asked a colleague if FISC had a website where I could find these opinions. ‘Oh, that’s easy,’ my colleague said. ‘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? And why, 10 years later, after the internet moved beyond the cat gifs, Tumblr alienated its queer communities, and Gen Z went through a cycle of Tumblr-aesthetic nostalgia, is the government still in its Tumblr era?
That era began in 2013, when a 29-year-old National Security Agency contractor named Edward Snowden leaked thousands of highly classified documents revealing sprawling global surveillance programs carried out by the United States and several allies. It was the biggest leak in intelligence history. The fallout was swift and the public outcry loud. James Clapper, the director of national intelligence at the time, publicly apologized and admitted that his testimony to Congress earlier that year, in which he claimed that the NSA did not collect data on millions of Americans, had been ‘clearly erroneous.’
‘The Snowden disclosures created a huge crisis of legitimacy for intelligence agencies in the public mind, and it was very clear to us that we needed to be more proactive in getting information out to the public,’ remembered Alex Joel, who led the Office of Civil Liberties, Privacy and Transparency at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence at the time.
But the civil libertarians weren’t the only ones up in arms. Everyday Americans began to pressure the Obama administration for greater transparency on the surveillance programs—something the intelligence community wasn’t accustomed to doing. Before the Snowden leaks, agencies like the CIA and NSA prioritized the protection of classified information and national security secrets, not public access to that information. The question was less about where and how to disclose information, but whether to disclose anything at all.
‘I remember being enormously frustrated,’ Joel told me. ‘Because there might be a story circulating that was clearly overblown and false in terms of concerns about some intelligence activities that people speculated were going on, and I wanted to be able to respond to those publicly. And the answer typically was, ‘No, we’re better off just letting it die down.’ ‘
It soon became clear that the Snowden story wasn’t going to die down. The leaks raised serious questions about surveillance programs undertaken in the name of national security, and the government had to answer them—especially if these agencies wanted to retain the programs in whole or in part. ‘Transparency has become the new buzzword in intelligence circles as officials attempt to preserve as much of their post-9/11 surveillance powers as they can from congressional restrictions,’ read one Guardian story at the time.
For Joel and others at the ODNI, the Snowden revelations urgently exposed the need to get ahead of disclosures and respond in real time, and the refrain shifted from ‘let it lie’ to ‘we’ve got to get ahead of the story.’ But they couldn’t seem to get ahead of the Snowden story, no matter how many carefully crafted statements by Clapper they released on their website. Their public engagement options were limited: They could issue a ‘no comment,’ write a long statement, or write a short statement—and that was about it.
It became clear that people needed to read more than statements—they needed to read the actual underlying documents. ‘How could we get these documents efficiently cleared and released?’ Joel remembered asking. ‘And where would we post them?’ Publishing documents on their own website was a laborious process that moved at the speed of bureaucracy—that is, painfully slowly.
The idea to post everything on Tumblr came from Michael Thomas, who joined the ODNI from the private sector in 2012 to head up social media and digital strategy. By using Tumblr, which allowed virtually anyone to spin up a ready-to-go website quickly, ODNI could circumvent the clunky process of posting documents on their own site by getting them up quickly and reactively on an accessible, easy-to-navigate website.
As Thomas got to work on creating the first-ever public-facing blog for the intelligence community, the president gave him an unexpected push. On Aug. 9, 2013, Obama addressed the growing controversy at a press conference in which he promised a few steps ‘to move the debate forward’ on transparency and public confidence in the surveillance programs. In addition to the appointment of a civil liberties and privacy officer at the NSA, Obama announced, ‘The intelligence community is creating a website that will serve as a hub for further transparency. And this will give Americans and the world the ability to learn more about what our intelligence community does and what it doesn’t do, how it carries out its mission, and why it does so.’ At that point, no one could have guessed that the website would have a Tumblr.com URL.
Well, no one outside of the ODNI. As Clapper wrote in his 2018 memoir, as soon as Obama announced the website, ‘our social media manager, Michael Thomas, realized the president had just announced live on national television the Tumblr site he was in the process of building. He gaped at the TV screen, as Public Affairs Director Shawn Turner patted him on the back, asking, ‘So, how’s that website coming?’ ‘
The ODNI launched Obama’s promised ‘hub’ on Aug. 21, less than two weeks after Obama’s speech. Tumblr had enabled the office to quickly build a ‘minimal viable product,’ in Silicon Valley–speak, because the road map to a better tool would have been ‘impossibly long.’ But the buzzy social media platform had other advantages, too. Tumblr allowed users to ‘hack’ the site by creating banners and design elements, and a built-in community satisfied one of the guiding tenets of digital communication: You can’t wait for people to come to your website—you have to go where the people are.
By the end of September, the ODNI had declassified and published 1,800 pages of FISC opinions on IC on the Record. ‘This wasn’t simply a pile of unclassified documents we’d been sitting on, or a collection of improperly overclassified papers, but actual classified court opinions, including requests for surveillance warrants,’ wrote Clapper. ‘We knew our adversaries would see them, and that making them public, to some degree, posed a risk to national security. But we judged that if we didn’t take drastic steps like this, national security could be undermined more by the erosion of trust of the American public and its elected representatives.’
Above all, simply choosing Tumblr was a benefit in and of itself. It was a ‘mic drop’ moment, to borrow a popular term from the era. ‘If you put this stuff on the ODNI or NSA website, no one cares,’ Thomas told me. ‘But if you put it on Tumblr the, buzzy, hot place full of ironic mustaches and cat gifs, it’s gonna be a record-scratch in the conversation. Tumblr gave us an opportunity to reenter a public conversation that had fully run away from us.’
The gamble seemed to pay off, as a chastened ODNI won media attention, much of it positive, for its unorthodox choice. ‘NSA and Intelligence Community Turn to Tumblr—Weird but True,’ read one CNET headline. Even mainstream media seemed bemused enough to cover the blog’s launch. ‘If surveillance from government intelligence agencies has you concerned, now you can at least follow them back—if only on Tumblr,’ read one New York Times story. Liba Rubenstein, who was Tumblr’s ‘director of causes and politics,’ doubted the viral potential of IC on the Record’s posts, but called the move ‘really smart.’
Of course, not all the attention was good. Some Tumblr users felt the intelligence community’s ‘How Do You Do, Fellow Kids?’–style entry onto the platform had ushered in its premature death. ‘The feds are using tumblr. So that’s over now,’ read one Tweet at the time. Other problems included heavy redactions, a lack of search function, and the inability to copy and paste. One TechCrunch journalist remained skeptical, writing, ‘The site is a good idea on the surface, but such great portions of the declassified documents are (and, I presume, will continue to be) 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. In March 2014, national security journalist Spencer Ackerman criticized IC on the Record for failing to add critical disclosures and other important context, including the many instances when the government published declassified documents to the Tumblr only after it lost a transparency case.
Marcy Wheeler, a journalist who writes about national security and civil liberties, quickly dubbed the effort ‘I Con the Record.’
As Wheeler told an interviewer at the time about the intelligence community, ‘They said, here’s where you can come for facts, suggesting that if you go to the Guardian or the Washington Post, you’re going to get something that isn’t the facts. Problem is, you know, every time they roll out these documents, we learn more and more about the deceit and misrepresentations of the government.’ But at least the public didn’t have to rely on a massive leak every now and then to take a look at these classified opinions. Though often reactive, by April 2015, IC on the Record had released more than 4,500 pages of documents, exceeding the 3,710 pages collected and leaked by Snowden.
Though Tumblr may have seemed out of left field to observers at the time, Taylor Lorenz, a Washington Post columnist covering technology and online culture, pointed out that Tumblr may not have been that odd of a choice in 2013. ‘There’s no other platform that it would have started on at that time, except Tumblr,’ Lorenz told me. ‘That was peak Tumblr, in terms of its utility to reach the public.’ When IC on the Record launched, Tumblr already hosted over 30 U.S. government blogs, including sites for the White House, Department of Defense, and the IRS. Lorenz described a heady techno-optimism at the time, especially in the Obama administration, which maintained a ‘cozy relationship with tech companies’ and a social team in the White House experimenting with different platforms and technologies.
To be fair, the Obama administration officials weren’t the only ones going all-in on tech and social media, nor were they the first. As journalist Vincent Bevins chronicles in his new book If We Burn, this thinking was pervasive. 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. Former U.K. Prime Minister Gordon Brown suggested that the 1994 genocide in central Africa would not have happened in an age of social media.
Today, that period of techno-optimism may seem like a quaint fever dream. But in that era, some people found it exciting to feel like they had direct access to government agencies and the bureaucrats who populated them. In February 2016, for example, Clapper hosted an ‘AnswerTime,’ a Tumblr equivalent of Reddit’s Ask Me Anything. Around 2014, while IC on the Record remained on Tumblr, most government agencies migrated to Twitter as the platform rose to prominence. At the time, Twitter provided the government agencies the ability to interact with the public in a controlled space that was difficult to find on other social media sites.
‘In the early 2010s, it was this novelty to interact with the White House or a politician online,’ said Lorenz. ‘Like, ‘Oh my god, this government official is Tweeting.’ But now, the novelty has worn off, and people want accountability.’ On social media, attempts at accountability can range from speaking truth to power through journalistic disclosures to dunking on power using well-known history and humor. Some dunks have grown into memes and, on occasion, hallowed annual traditions. For example, the FBI often chooses to honor Martin Luther King Jr. on MLK Day on Twitter, leaving out the Bureau’s extensive spying and harassment of the civil rights hero—historical context that Twitter users are all too eager to provide.
Lorenz suspects the novelty has worn off for the government as well.
‘A downside of picking a social platform is you may be subject to the reputation of that platform that may not be associated with what you’re doing,’ Joel told me. ‘You don’t want it to seem like you deliberately made a choice to use this platform because of its reputation.’ Though IC on the Record has remained on Tumblr and ODNI on Twitter, other government agencies are now seriously debating whether to stay on the website now known as X.
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 … [but] it took just days for [Elon Musk’s] 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. At the annual Government Social Media Conference this summer, several government communications professionals bemoaned the ‘hellscape’ Twitter had become, and openly wondered when it was time to ‘time to pull the plug.’
Today, ‘hellscape’ feels like an apt description not just of Twitter, but of wide swaths of the internet. In 2013, choosing Tumblr to launch a serious, high-profile response to the Snowden allegations felt incongruous because of the reputation of the platform itself; today, it feels incongruous because the whole internet seems to be falling apart. ‘Ultimately, this is a disservice to the public, which deserves information, accountability, and responsiveness from our public officials,’ said Lorenz. ‘But it’s probably more of a headache than anything else in 2023, in this weird, fragmented, fraught platform ecosystem.’
As the promise of social media and the open web fades, is there a limit to what we can expect to solve by posting documents online?
Ref: slate
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