"Was that reported or was it kept, as so often seems to be the case, kept within the family?" he asked.

Allan said that the emails constitute an "unverified partial account from a source who has a particular angle."

"There is, as I understand it, a partial set of information obtained by a hostile litigant who’s seeking to overturn the very changes to restrict access to data that you, as a committee, and others would want to see happen," Allan continued.

When reached for comment, a Facebook spokesperson told WIRED, "The engineers who had flagged these initial concerns subsequently looked into this further and found no evidence of specific Russian activity." Facebook later supplied WIRED with redacted versions of the emails themselves. "Ok, things are not as bad as they seemed," reads one email. "There was a series of unfortunate coincidences that made me think of the worst." The email goes on to say that the activity was actually coming from Pinterest's servers and was successfully pinging Facebook's API just six million times daily, not three billion times. Facebook wouldn't elaborate on the cause of the confusion.1

The swirling drama in the UK is just the latest crisis to emerge for Facebook over the last few weeks. In case you were too busy gnawing on leftover turkey to keep up, here’s what you need to know.

What is Six4Three?

Years ago, Six4Three developed an app called Pikinis, which allowed Facebook users to find other users’ bathing suit photos. It hinged on a feature of Facebook’s API that gave app developers access to their users’ data, as well as the data of their users’ friends. This feature is also what enabled a Cambridge University researcher named Aleksandr Kogan to collect the of data of tens of millions of Facebook users without their knowledge and sell it to the political firm Cambridge Analytica, which went on to work for President Trump’s 2016 campaign. The story of Cambridge Analytica’s wanton data scraping, and Facebook’s failure to stop it, sparked international outrage when it hit the front pages of The New York Times and The Guardian/Observer in March. The news also cast Six4Three’s years-old case in a new light.

The Six4Three lawsuit stems from Facebook’s decision in 2014 to cut off developer access to friend data. According to a source familiar with the case, Six4Three alleges that in 2012, long before Facebook changed its API, the company was desperate to boost its mobile advertising business. So, the suit alleges, Facebook began requiring developers to buy mobile ads in order to gain access to certain types of user data, including friend data. But two years later, in 2014, when Facebook announced changes to its API, it began cutting off access to friend data altogether. (Apps that were already using this data got extended access until April of 2015.) Six4Three’s Pikinis app was among the apps that shut down in 2015 due to the API changes. The suit argues that Facebook essentially defrauded developers by luring them to the platform with the promise of data, and then cutting them off from that data in 2014.

Facebook, for its part, argues that these changes were well within their rights and were made to protect user privacy. But the documents Kramer gave to Collins are reportedly what Six4Three uses to argue its more nefarious claims and offer evidence that Facebook was trading data access for advertising.

So, how did Collins get these sealed documents?

A representative for Collins told WIRED he had no further comment on the matter, and Kramer did not respond to WIRED’s request for comment. But in a court filing in San Mateo Superior Court on Monday, Kramer’s lawyers wrote that while traveling on a business trip to London last week, Kramer received several notices to his hotel from the DCMS committee, demanding the documents. In one instance, the committee sent the serjeant-at-arms to the hotel to personally serve Kramer with an order to produce the documents. But because of the California court’s decision, Kramer’s lawyers repeatedly advised him not to comply. Kramer’s lawyers say it’s unclear how British lawmakers knew where Kramer was staying, though the filing notes that Kramer had previously shared his location with Observer journalist Carole Cadwalladr. It was also Cadwalladr, the filing says, who first suggested “rais[ing] Six4Three’s case with Damian Collins” earlier in the year. Cadwalladr didn’t respond to WIRED’s request for comment.