Thread on Anglosphere intelligence's role in the 2015-2023 closure of the Internet. Not a ton of evidence on the topic (obviously), so this thread isn't super dense. There was a huge surge in tech hiring of ex-FBI employees in 2018.

It is not inherently suspicious that ex-spooks go to Silicon Valley companies; many have expertise in cybersecurity and related fields. What IS suspicious is that so many flock to the content control/moderation roles (Trust and Safety etc).

For example, you have Meta product policy managers for disinformation (ex-CIA) and senior managers of Trust & Safety at Google (also ex-CIA).

One Twitter executive with editorial responsibility for MENA was simultaneously a psyop specialist for the British army.

The Twitter Files revealed that both the CIA and FBI regularly met with Twitter, and there were so many ex-FBI agents at the firm that they had their own slack channel. FITF meetings, which were supposed to be about foreign influence, usually focused on "domestic intelligence."

Not too much to say. Certainly tech and intelligence are fairly closely bound and have been since before the closure of the Internet (NLT the late Obama era - note 2016 is cut off, chart should end in 2015 to compare full years to full years).

The question is not "to what extent is intelligence involved with tech" (the answer is obviously, "a lot"), but to what extent have they used this to influence domestic politics (the answer is "not zero," but hard to tell how much).