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Big tech companies swarming with ex-FBI, CIA agents as social media becomes part of 'national security state'
By jdheyes // 2023-02-28
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According to a journalist who has extensively studied Big Tech giants such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google, these companies are not just private entities but essentially “agents of the national security state," going on to argue that these companies have become far too powerful and are actively exploiting the public. The journalist, Alan MacLeod noted on a podcast hosted by fellow journalist and researcher Whitney Webb, that Big Tech companies are leveraging their vast resources to influence public opinion and shape the political landscape. They have become an integral part of the national security state apparatus, MacLeod continued, and are now interfering with political discourse, censoring content, and manipulating data to promote their own interests, according to Lifesite News. MacLeod also believes that the situation is dangerous and should be regulated by the government in order to protect the public from exploitation. Furthermore, he is calling on the public to hold these companies more accountable and to demand greater transparency and accountability in how they use their power. Lifesite News noted further: His claim is backed by research by an open-source investigator with the Twitter handle @NameRedacted247, who has found that Google, for example, currently employs “at least 165 people, in high-ranking positions, from the intelligence community,” including 52 people from the FBI, 30 people from the NSA, and 27 people from the CIA, as The Trumpet shared in January. MacLeod himself has documented employee shifts from the CIA to Google, showing with LinkedIn account screenshots how one CIA employee after another has gone on to work for the world’s most popular search engine, there often clustering in “trust and safety” roles, which are hugely influential in their management of so-called “misinformation” and “hate speech.” For instance, Jacqueline Lopour, who spent over ten years at the CIA as an expert on “security challenges in South Asia and the Middle East” and as a “go-to writer of quickly needed papers for the U.S. President,” is presently a “trust and safety” senior manager at Google. Ryan Fugit and Nick Rossman have both spent time working for the CIA before joining Google as senior managers of trust and safety. Michelle Toborowski, who had worked for the CIA for 12 years before joining YouTube – a major Google subsidiary – worked as an intelligence analyst lead in trust and safety. In this role, she was tasked with proactively assessing platform risks, particularly in areas such as violent extremism and hate. LinkedIn profiles indicate that former U.S. intelligence employees are often "shared" among Big Tech giants. Bryan Weisbard, a former CIA intelligence officer, is a prime example. His roles have included Director of Online Safety Operations for Twitter, Director of Trust and Safety for YouTube, and currently Director of Privacy Planning and Operations for Meta (Facebook). MacLeod has also discovered that Facebook “has recruited dozens of individuals from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), as well as many more from other agencies like the FBI and Department of Defense (DoD),” who, as in the other big tech platforms, are concentrated in “highly politically sensitive sectors such as trust, security and content moderation."
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