I have no love for Facebook but this is article is such poor and yellow journalism.<p>>"Aaron is CIA. Or at least he was until July 2019."<p>The first sentence is false. The second sentence contradicts and corrects the inaccuracy of the first but the order of operation is by design. The first sentence is designed to appeal the gut and produce a visceral response. The second sentence is of course the more important but cerebral thinking it at that point still dominated by the "gut" at the point.<p>The article then states:<p>>"These hires are primarily in highly politically sensitive sectors such as trust, security and content moderation, to the point where some might feel it becomes difficult to see where the U.S. national security state ends and Facebook begins."<p>These folks left public sector. They left their public sector jobs to join the private sector. The line literally ends and begins on their Linkedin profiles which appears to be the biggest source of research for this article.<p>Then we have this gem:<p>>"But the sheer scale of infiltration of Facebook blows these away. Facebook, in short, is utterly swarming with spooks."<p>CIA Analysts are not spooks. Despite the portrayal in TV dramas, CIA analysts spend their time at desks reading and writing reports. They are highly specialized subject matter experts, they don't make policy. They hand data to other people who make policy. A "spook" is an operative, a clandestine role for someone who would most certainly not have a LinkedIn profile.<p>The article seems to ignore the more obvious in favor of conspiracy, which is that Washington, D.C. is a small town famous for networking. People always use their networks for new and better employment opportunities. It's not hard to imagine that when the first person who arrived at Facebook from DC informed their former colleagues how great the pay and the perks at Facebook were and of course the floodgates opened. Think of how many Beltway Facebook groups there must be. This same scenario plays out at tech companies as well but nobody states "the company is being "infiltrated" by ex-Googlers or ex-Redhat, it's hard to tell where Google ends and company X begins" as that would be seen as absurd.<p>Lastly, nowhere are any numbers meaningfully qualified. The article intones about the "sheer scale of infiltration" but fails to mention that Facebook is a company of 44K employees or that the CIA employees 22K people. Now consider the total number of people the article identifies as ex-Government which is 37 people total, one of which is no longer there. I would imagine you could go to any large corporation on the scale of Facebook and find an equal number of people that used to work a federal agency. In fact I'm positive you could that using Linkedin as your source as well. I'm guessing that including the results of this kind of comparative analysis would have been detrimental to the thrust of this piece however.