Spooks in Silicon Valley: Flow of U.S. intelligence analysts into Big Tech jobs raises alarm
Those who once served to protect the nation are now using their intel smarts to regulate speech in America.
As Congress and the courts delve deeper into federally sanctioned censorship by Big Tech, a troubling revolving door has emerged between the U.S. intelligence community and the Big Tech giants on the front lines of one of the fiercest battles over free speech in modern American history.
A Just the News review of LinkedIn employment histories of senior Big Tech executives found that at least 200 former workers of the Central Intelligence Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, National Security Agency, National Security Council and Homeland Security Department have landed Silicon Valley jobs, many within content moderation units regulating supposed "disinformation" and disproportionately throttling news and opinion deviating from approved, left-tilting norms.
These individuals range from Aaron Berman, who spent a decade and a half as a CIA analyst before joining Facebook parent Meta as product policy manager for disinformation, to James Baker, the former FBI general counsel recently fired by Elon Musk as Twitter's chief lawyer over a spat about prior review of "Twitter Files" releases exposing past censorship by the platform. Baker was one of the key FBI figures involved in obtaining a FISA warrant based on the now-debunked Steele dossier to surveil onetime Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.
The spooks-to-Silicon-Valley pipeline has sent an army of federal agents, intel analysts and even psychological operations experts once trained with taxpayer money to fight foreign enemies or capture big criminals into higher-paying private sector jobs where those same skills now target Americans' opinions in the name of fighting "disinformation."
None of the former intel world employees contacted by Just the News returned phone or email requests for comment. But in videos posted online, some acknowledged they are part of a new vanguard of Big Tech censors operating in a world where there is little consensus about what should be done and what is legal.
"There is very little agreement whether we should be leaving more content up or taking more content down," Berman said in a video posted on Meta's site. "With any particular rule or issue that we're looking at where something has come up, where the rules are not 100 percent clear, we're not going to make everybody happy."
Berman, whose LinkedIn biography boasts he used to prepare the presidential daily brief at the CIA, acknowledged there is some discomfort in the power he now wields in his new role in Big Tech to decide the difference between "harmful content" and free speech.
"It's a balance," he said in the video. "I think it should make me uncomfortable, and all of us who do this work."
Some of the federal intel veterans are less inhibited about expressing biases. For example, Nick Rossmann, former CIA analyst and current senior manager of Trust & Safety at Google, overtly supported defeated 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, said Donald Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner should be strangled and declared, "Anti-vaxxers are like Nazis."
https://justthenews.com/government/federal-agencies/former-agents-cia-fbi-dhs-nsa-defecting-big-tech-and-big-censorship