Not that most of it hadn’t already done so, but it’s useful to understand that much of what is publicly considered to be “success” in the United States has nothing to do with competition in the marketplace, but rather, secret government funding:
By midway through the Obama administration, the CIA and FBI were creating “extensive digital legends with increasing sophistication,” as one former senior official puts it, with cooperation from key government agencies like the Social Security Administration, Health and Human Services and the IRS.
U.S. intelligence agencies also work with “friendly digital companies,” like commercially available ancestry databases, to alter personally identifying information, say former officials, and also backdate work histories. Concerned about digital leakage, and cognizant of the need to strictly quarantine deep-cover intelligence officials from their organizations, U.S. officials have adopted a strategy of “eclipsing” these individuals slowly into their cover identities before they are allowed to undertake their missions.
The CIA and FBI both concluded that every person connected to these organizations’ “black side” undercover programs had to be completely sealed off from the rest of their colleagues, say former officials. This firewall is an immensely complex undertaking in a world where electronic emissions from a single cellphone traveling, say, from CIA headquarters in Virginia to an unmarked office building nearby could blow multiple undercover operations. The FBI has also struggled with this transition. As of a few years ago, “none of this was completed yet, and none of it was even remotely being done easily,” says a former senior official.
The CIA, at least, had its own past practices to draw from, especially in its training of NOCs, say former officials. Years ago, the school for NOCs was entirely quarantined from that for normal future CIA operations officers, who undertake rigorous instruction at “the Farm,” a Williamsburg, Va.-area base, say two former senior officials. NOCs “never came to the East Coast” and were trained at separate secret facilities, says one of these former officials. But because of their often “rebellious” attitudes in the field, and in order to “increase their behavioral consistency,” senior CIA officials decided to move their instruction to the Farm. This move produced better-trained NOCs but also increased the threat of exposure. As of recently, the programs were sealed off from each other again, says a former senior official.
The pressures of the digital age have led the CIA to favor flexibility and deniability. The agency has formed a new reserve officer program to allow spies to work in the private sector, especially the tech industry, says a former intelligence official. The program is designed to allow those operatives to maintain their clearances so they can return seamlessly to the agency after a few years, says this person.
Another measure the CIA has used involves paying companies to gather intelligence for the government without even knowing it. In the last several years, the CIA has ramped up its use of “cutouts” to pay third parties to gather intelligence for them unwittingly, posing as data brokers looking into trends in the oil and gas industries, for example, says the same former official.
That’s how Facebook, Google, and other companies became so dominant. They possessed an advantage similar to the one that state-owned corporations have in communist companies; they didn’t need to actually sell anything to anyone in order to generate income. As would-be competitors to YouTube have learned, it’s very difficult to compete with companies that can afford to operate hundreds of millions of dollars in the red every year without being forced to shut down.
