Technology

It Took 2 Hours for @CIA to Get Dragged Into Its First Twitter Fight

The New York Review of Books is directing a series of scathing tweets at the CIA's handle, apparently listing their not-so-social-media-friendly interrogation techniques

By Danielle Wiener-Bronner
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You may have heard that the CIA is now on Twitter (at @CIA, where else). It's a little jarring to see the spy agency in our friendly social media feed, and this inaugural (and so far only) tweet isn't helping.

Still, the event gave us all a chance to crack some jokes at @CIA's expense, because that's what we do. But The New York Review of Books  (@nybooks) took it to the next level, unleashing a series of scathing tweets directed at the CIA's handle, apparently listing their not-so-social-media-friendly interrogation techniques:

The short url in each Tweet links to a 2009 article titled "U.S. Torture: Voices From the Black Sites," which "reveals for the first time the contents of a confidential Red Cross report about the CIA's secret offshore prisons," according to a NYRB podcast. It was actually a review of the International Red Cross's 43-page Report on the Treatment of Fourteen “High Value Detainees” in CIA Custody. (The link was broken for some time, possibly because the CIA acts fast or, perhaps more likely, because the site was overcome by Twitter-driven traffic. But it's working now.) The actual tweets were taken directly from the report's table of contents.

The CIA's account hasn't responded to the attack, but people on Twitter seem pretty excited about what's going down.

Welcome to Twitter, @CIA. Perhaps some of the intelligence you've gathered over the years will tell you how to deal with trolls.

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.