# The Bigger Picture

By [DYLIT Chronicles](https://dylit.info/user/dylitmediabuzz)

[Global Finance](https://dylit.info/pr/global-finance/6a6849fd61bb0e07120aa486) > [The Bigger Picture](https://dylit.info/ch/the-bigger-picture/6a6849fe61bb0e07120aa4ba)

From CIA to Big Tech: The Quiet Migration of Spies to Silicon Valley A Pattern Nobody's Talking About Walk through the trust and safety departments at Google or Meta and you'll bump into more former intelligence officers than you'd expect. Investigative journalist Alan MacLeod spent months in 2022 digging through LinkedIn profiles, corporate reports, and employment databases for MintPress News. What he found was a steady pipeline of ex-CIA analysts and operations officers landing senior roles at the world's biggest tech platforms, usually in the parts of the business that decide what billions of people see online. Project Censored later flagged the story as one of the most under-reported of the year, noting that almost no major outlet had touched it. Google's Bench of Former Analysts At Google, the trend shows up almost department by department. One example MacLeod highlighted is Jacqueline Lopour, who spent over a decade at the CIA working on South Asia and Middle East security issues and helping prepare briefing material for the president. She joined Google in 2017 and now works in intelligence collection and trust and safety. She's not an outlier. According to the investigation, it's hard to find a senior team at Google without someone who once carried an agency badge, often in roles tied to content policy, security, or what the company calls "trust and safety," the division that sets the rules for what stays online and what gets removed. Facebook's Content Police, Straight From Langley Meta's numbers are even more striking. Bryan Weisbard, a CIA officer from 2006 to 2010, became a director overseeing sensitive trust and safety work tied to counterterrorism and misinformation campaigns. Cameron Harris, a CIA analyst until 2019, is now a trust and safety project manager there. Emily Vacher came from a decade at the FBI before becoming a Meta director of trust and safety, and Mike Bradow moved over after leading policy work at USAID. Perhaps the most notable case is a senior product policy manager for misinformation who, MacLeod found, had spent years drafting the President's Daily Brief before joining Facebook, meaning the person shaping what counts as misinformation for three billion users once helped shape what the president of the United States was told each morning. Why the Revolving Door Keeps Spinning There's a practical reason companies like this hire so heavily from the intelligence world. These recruits already hold security clearances, something expensive and slow for a company to obtain on its own, and they've had years of government-funded training in exactly the skills tech firms need for content moderation and cybersecurity work. Not everyone is comfortable with the arrangement, though. Elizabeth Murray, a 27-year CIA veteran who retired in 2010, has been openly critical, describing the trend as part of a troubling migration of people trained to monitor threats abroad now shaping what ordinary users see at home. Reuters made a similar move back in 2015 when it hired a 33-year CIA veteran as a global director, so the pattern isn't limited to social media companies either. What It Means for the Rest of Us None of this means anything illegal is happening. But it does raise a real question about how much distance exists between the platforms that host global conversation and the agencies that have spent decades shaping narratives abroad. Different building, different badge, arguably the same instincts and the same skill set, just aimed at a much bigger audience. Whether that's a problem or simply the natural outcome of a limited talent pool depends a lot on who you ask.   Sources MintPress News, "Meet the Ex-CIA Agents Deciding Facebook's Content Policy" (July 14, 2022): https://www.mintpressnews.com/meet-ex-cia-agents-deciding-facebook-content-policy/281307/ Project Censored, "Influential Google Positions Filled by Former CIA Employees": https://www.projectcensored.org/influential-google-positions-filled-by-former-cia-employees/ Project Censored, "CIA Employees, Ex-Israeli Agents 'Blur the Line' Between Big Tech and Big Brother": https://www.projectcensored.org/cia-employees-ex-israeli-agents-big-tech/ Related YouTube Videos "LIVE: Why are former CIA Agents flocking to Facebook & Google? With Lowkey & Alan MacLeod": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xwf41MqNZFY "Africa Secret Files Expose Why Google, Facebook, Twitter is Hiring Ex-CIA/FBI Agents": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdmuBrO5RIA