Big Brother Becomes Little Brother
Corporations are the new nation state, U.S. intelligence admits
Envious of the power and wealth of corporate America, the head of U.S. intelligence has issued a new directive calling on the spy agencies to “routinize” and “expand” their partnerships with private companies. Agencies are even authorized to incur “risk” in these relationships, the directive says. The move underscores the awesome power of corporations — the appistocracy, as I call them, or “non-state entities,” the directive’s euphemistic term.
Called Intelligence Community Directive 406, the order was signed on January 16 by then-President Biden’s Director of National Intelligence in the final days of the administration. It lays out new ways for spy agencies to capitalize on the information and expertise of these corporate superpowers, which could be anything from social media platforms to AI firms. It is not yet clear how the Trump administration plans to exercise these authorities.
There is an unspoken and unsettling context to this effort: these corporations have become more powerful than many nation states. Top companies are now worth more than the GDPs of most countries. Where the CIA once might have coveted the secrets of Albania, now it is Apple, whose wealth exceeds all but the four richest countries.
So eager is the intelligence community to access corporate knowledge that the directive even orders agencies to embrace “risk acceptance” in its interactions with these firms. Specifically, the directive says agencies should:
“Prioritize NSE [Non-State Entities] engagements through risk acceptance that encourages and promotes information sharing with NSEs.”
In other words, take more risks in forging new partnerships, favoring cooperation over security and loosening the restrictions for sharing classified information.
To facilitate state-corporate partnerships, the directive authorizes the intelligence community to bypass its notorious secrecy in several ways. First, by “expanding the use of one-time read-ins” — that is, allowing private individuals to be briefed on U.S. intelligence without a traditional security clearance. Second, by employing “declassification processes” to authorize the release of intelligence, specifically to cooperating companies and entities. And third, allowing intelligence agencies to create “new, collaborative processes” for sharing intelligence, including by “relationship development” and “relationship management.”
Though the directive provides no examples and few specifics on what type of cooperation and “engagement” it is unleashing, their target clearly includes the appistocracy who attended President Trump’s inauguration last week. Many believed the billionaire tech executives in attendance (e.g. Bezos, Zuck and Musk) were broadcasting their support in exchange for Trump’s support later. The reality, however, is even more alarming. The appistocracy doesn’t need the government. The government needs them. And they know it.
Given the vast power of individual companies, and introducing the prospect that one corporate executive might seek special favor, the directive warns that “IC [intelligence community] elements shall not show preferential treatment or provide an unfair competitive advantage to any NSE or individuals associated with an NSE.” Perhaps someone should tell that to Musk, the Twitter (X), SpaceX, and Tesla owner who has become so close to President Trump that he’s been dubbed the “First Buddy.”
The directive is vague on the why this is all happening now, saying only that “NSEs are pivotal” to national security and “essential to maintaining U.S. advantage.” But past documents provide some clues.
“Increasingly, informed judgments reside with not just state actors but also non-state entities (NSEs), from companies to academia to cities to civil society organizations,” the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said in its own 2024 strategy document. In other words, the secrets (“informed judgments”) of the world increasingly exist behind corporate firewalls. The main job of a spy is to know things and if the knowers are private companies, that’s who they’re going to target.
NSEs do include non-corporate groups like academia and non-profits, but their resources are small potatoes compared to those of private industry. So when the National Director of Intelligence participates in a ribbon cutting at the University of Virginia to celebrate their partnership, as Avril Haines did last year, that is only a small fraction of the NSE partnerships — most of which aren’t announced and exist in highly classified exchanges.
I once had a conversation with an FBI intelligence official, who I asked about the Bureau’s surveillance capabilities. He scoffed, explaining that what they had was a joke compared to what Google had. Then-CIA Director William Burns, unusually candid for an intelligence official, basically said as much in remarks delivered at a recent Billington Cybersecurity Summit:
“I think 60 or 70 years ago, the truth was, the US government was investing very heavily at the height of the Cold War and led in research and development…It’s the private sector today that drives innovation.”
“We face a real challenge [in] building greater flexibility and how we connect better with the private sector. We’re never going to be able to match the private sector salaries or, you know, economic benefits that you can find.”
Several years ago an FBI recruiter lamented to me how difficult hiring cyber talent had become, given how much better tech companies pay than the Bureau. “All we can offer is patriotism,” I recall her sighing.
The intelligence community already has a huge contracting relationship with these “non-state agencies,” buying goods and services (Amazon, for example, is the largest provider of cloud services for the intelligence world.) And it has highly secret “sensitive” industrial relations arrangements, where, for instance, it obtains code-breaking materials. But the new directive goes one step further than all that, encouraging America’s spies to make the corporations partners in their quest for secrets. Put simply, corporations now know more about the world than America’s spies.
— Edited by William M. Arkin
"Techno-Feudalism." Yannis Varoufakis nailed it!
Only a short time ago, I could "Share to Notes." Tonight, that option stopped working, here, and on more than one site I subscribe to. I can see the words are still there, but they, and the little box, are grayed out. What's up with that, eh, Substack, Broligarchs?
Why do I get the feeling that we are heading in one direction with vigor and there is no element capable of reversing our course?