Upper ranks of Big Tech swarming with ex-CIA and FBI "agents of the national security state"

Big Tech giants such as Twitter, Facebook, and Google are not merely private companies but essentially “agents of the national security state,” observed a journalist who has extensively studied the subject.

An “alarming” amount of Big Tech’s high-ranking staff have been formerly employed by the CIA, FBI, or NSA, Alan MacLeod pointed out on a podcast hosted by fellow journalist and researcher Whitney Webb.

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 example, Jacqueline Lopour, who spent over 10 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 currently a “trust and safety” senior manager at Google.

Ryan Fugit and Nick Rossman have also spent eight years and five years, respectively, working for the CIA before going on to work as senior managers of trust and safety for Google. Michelle Toborowski, who worked for the CIA for 12 years, went on to work as an intelligence analyst lead in trust and safety at YouTube, a major Google subsidiary, where she “proactively assess platform risks” in areas including “violent extremism” and “hate.”

LinkedIn profiles also show that former U.S. intelligence employees are sometimes “shared” among Big Tech giants. For example, former CIA intelligence officer Bryan Weisbard has worked for Twitter as “Director of Online Safety Operations,” for YouTube as Director of Trust and Safety, and now works for Meta (Facebook) as Director of Privacy Planning and Operations.

Indeed, similar patterns of ex-intelligence hires have been shown to prevail at Twitter and Facebook as well. For example, Michael Shellenberger showed in the December 2022 Twitter Files release that “there were so many former FBI employees” who worked at Twitter “that they had created their own private Slack channel and a crib sheet to onboard new FBI arrivals.”

Similarly, MacLeod has found 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 their sister tech platforms, are concentrated in “highly politically sensitive sectors such as trust, security and content moderation … ”

He added, it is “to the point where some might feel it becomes difficult to see where the U.S. national security state ends and Facebook begins.”

Such hiring preferences suggest, MacLeod noted, that either Big Tech is “is actively recruiting from the intelligence services or that there is some sort of backroom deal between Silicon Valley and the national security state.”

Deliberate state interference with informed electoral process

The bombshell “Twitter Files” released in December 2022 after Elon Musk acquired Twitter are strong evidence that such hires are part of a deliberate effort by U.S. agencies to skew publicly available information in service of its own agenda.

As Schellenberger noted on Twitter, these files “poin[t] to an organized effort by the intel community to influence Twitter & other platforms,” including Facebook, through the suppression of explosive revelations about the Biden family and the censorship of certain information and individuals, in order to influence U.S. elections.

Schellenberger tweeted on December 19, 2022, “In Twitter Files #7, we present evidence pointing to an organized effort by representatives of the intelligence community (IC), aimed at senior executives at news and social media companies, to discredit leaked information about Hunter Biden before and after it was published.”

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg admitted to podcast host Joe Rogan that the FBI similarly attempted to suppress the leaked info on Hunter on Facebook with an alert about impending, election-related supposed “disinformation.”

When Facebook flagged the relevant New York Post report, an unnamed Facebook insider told the Post in an interview, “Facebook is almost an arm of the Democratic Party — an arm of the far-left wing of the Democratic Party.”

Schellenberger has extensively documented evidence of the FBI’s collaboration with Twitter, confirming that they aimed at interfering with one of the key things that freedom of speech is meant to protect: the integrity of elections.

As MacLeod pointed out to Webb, such collaborations are in fact a First Amendment issue, since social media platforms like Twitter and the search engine Google “really are a global town square,” as they are nearly universal go-tos for info-gathering and info-sharing...

Journalist Matt Taibbi observed regarding the Twitter Files revelations that “Twitter’s contact with the FBI was constant and pervasive, as if it were a subsidiary.”

Indeed, the evidence is mounting that Big Tech platforms, for all intents and purposes, essentially subsidiaries of the national security state.

But even more disturbingly, the evidence shows that by suppressing facts, including those which are enormously important to an informed electoral process, such as the Hunter Biden laptop revelations, these platforms are intentionally trying to keep Americans in the dark about information which potentially has huge implications for their security, freedom, and well-being.

These Big Tech platforms have thereby rendered themselves enemies of the U.S. Constitution.