The CIA Propaganda On YouTube [Work in progress]

This is a final version of my scrip on CIA propaganda. Preliminary timestamps refer to audio clips used for citations in the upcoming YouTube video.

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Social media is flooded with CIA propaganda. Here’s one: “I am a woman of color, I am a mom, I am a cisgender millennial who’s been diagnosed with with generalized anxiety disorder.” [0]

This was a recruitment video made by the Central Intelligence Agency that quickly outraged pretty much everyone. [1]

This is old news by now. But did you know that thanks to the massive uproar the video caused, the CIA’s 2021 recruitment class was the third largest in a decade and the most diverse since 2010? [1]

It’s true.

The backlash got the CIA on Twitter’s trending page for multiple days and for an agency with such a troubled moral history, there really is no such thing as a bad publicity.  [1] [2]

CIA now has a large social media presence with multi-million-follower accounts on Twitter, Instagram and TikTok. The agency is using social media as a recruitment tool but another mission of their social media arm is to make the public view the CIA in a positive light.

Here’s a funny tweet from June 6, 2014: “We can neither confirm nor deny that this is our first tweet.” This is hilarious. Alexa, what’s the password into the CIA’s database? [3]

SplinterItIntoAThousandPiecesAndScatterItIntoTheWinds

And splintered it they did indeed.

CIA’s playful social media posts are designed to make you think like you too could be part of the agency. It is clearly a promotional material building up a brand for the agency. Becoming an influencer, if you will.  [4] [5] [1]

Most social media platforms do not really like government propaganda. YouTube for instance, has a policy of labeling or removing videos and channels that have received funding from government sources. [6] [7]

But these policies have a loophole as they only apply to channels identified as news publishers. Which means anytime an official makes an appearance on a privately owned and funded channel, anything goes.

This is exactly where the most overt propaganda happens. Anytime you are suggested content with a “CIA spy reacts” or an “interview with a former/current CIA operative” you are being enrolled into a re-education class. And to buy a book they just happen to be selling.

CIA trains its staff really well so that when they leave the job and take a public persona, they become a brand ambassador for the agency. It is clever.

Anyone still at the agency would be contractually obligated to portray the CIA in a positive light, or talk neutrally by the very least. But you would listen to ex-officers because you would think they are no longer bound by those rules and can criticize their former employer without spilling any classified secrets of course. But that’s not what happens.

2:30:40 NSA was looking for threats that would lead to American deaths; we are now less secure because of Snowden

I’d like to introduce you to Andrew Bustamante, a former human intelligence officer at the Central Intelligence Agency.

I found multiple of his appearances on YouTube videos and podcasts and noticed something particularly troubling about all of them – they are filled with such flaunting falsehoods about US intelligence I am really confused as to whether this person is a former operative or is still on the job.

As someone who spent years studying and researching security and strategy, social media appearances of real intelligence operatives naturally pique my interest. If I had a chance to talk to a former or current CIA spy, the interview wouldn’t have been very cordial. It would have been a lot darker. [bond tortured]

Not that dark. What am I on the CIA’s payroll or something?

No, what I would do is I would confront and question their claims. Fact-check. Point to hard evidence that debunks their propaganda. With the mountains of news reports on the CIA’s true record, this isn’t really that difficult a job. If I could interview a CIA spy, this is what it would it look like.

2:30:40 NSA was looking for threats that would lead to American deaths; we are now less secure because of Snowden

Let’s rewind back to June 2013, when the first reports on NSA mass surveillance began coming out.  [8]

What was the immediate comment we heard from government officials excusing warrantless surveillance programs? It was that bulk collection of data is a necessary trade-off for national security and to save lives. To this day, it still the most repeated propaganda regurgitated even by former CIA spies. [9]

2:27:54 Mass surveillance is beneficial and people don’t understand “Bulk collection of data that allows for an expedient identification of threats to national security benefits all of us.”

2:15:50 how many wolfs got caught because of surveillance

In the decades of this claim’s existence it has never been accompanied by evidence of any kind. It was the biggest talking point against Snowden’s NSA leaks. But multiple analyses found bulk collection of telephone metadata had [quote] “no discernible impact” on preventing terrorist threats and only quote “the most marginal of impacts” on terrorist-related activities.[10] [11]

In the aftermath of NSA revelations, the government claimed they have averted at least 50 threats thanks to the information from the bulk collection program. But in the administration’s own report, the mass surveillance program made [quote] “only a modest contribution to the nation’s security. There has been no instance in which NSA could say with confidence that the outcome of a terror investigation would have been any different without the program.” [12]

When warrantless data collection was found to be unconstitutional, the ruling judge said the government was unable to cite [quote] “a single instance in which the NSA’s bulk collection of metadata actually stopped an imminent attack or otherwise aided the government in achieving any objective that was time-sensitive in nature.” [12]

When compared with traditional investigative methods, bulk collection of metadata only resulted in initiations to 1.8% of investigations, whereas targeted investigative methods provided impetus to 59.6% of investigations. [11]

This is critical information. Anytime you hear someone say mass surveillance is making us more secure or averts threats to national security or human lives, ask them to show evidence, point to specific cases. Apply some of that Hitchen’s razor on that scalp.

But this false argument serves a purpose nonetheless. There is an agenda behind why officials are making this claim. They are banking on people’s trust in their authority and experience to prime them into thinking they just have to sacrifice their privacy for the security of the whole nation.

2:13:55 It’s about whether or not the right to privacy exceeds the right to security

So if you follow this argument to its logical conclusion, you should be happy to give up your privacy because you are saving lives and helping the government catch the “bad guys”. Which is the whole purpose of the lie. You are not supposed to question mass surveillance, you are supposed to submit to it.

2:29:00 I will give the NSA my passwords

2:14:10 “If there’s a threat in my neighborhood, if there’s a potential terrorist living next door, guess how much I care about privacy – zero. Check me out guys – whatever you wanna know. I want you to find the hide the bad guy.”

So the argument is, you have to nothing fear if you have nothing to hide.

Martin Luther King, one of the leaders of the American Civil Rights movement in the 1960s, had plenty to hide about his personal life from the public. His privacy was substantively irrelevant to his argument about segregation. Yet it was his stance against discrimination that put him on the watch by the NSA as well as the FBI. [13] [14]

A lot of anti-war and anti-segregation activists were illegally surveilled by the government, including Muhammad Ali, Whitney Young and prominent journalists from the New York Times and the Washington Post. [13]

If you think this was the wild sixties and this practice is no longer in place, activists today are more surveilled than ever before. From using sophisticated tracking technologies such IMSI catchers, drones and facial recognition, to pulling location and device information directly from big tech and phone companies, police and intelligence now have every single citizen under default surveillance without a warrant or any rigorous judicial oversight. [15] [16] [17]

It might be difficult to internalize this if you are not inclined to become a protester anytime soon. But the point is that activists always have something to hide in the eyes of the protested.

The promise that was slowly boiling us in the water was that mass surveillance was only used only for national security threats and nothing else.

2:15:10 “the enemy within us” is taking advantage of our right to privacy

The whole idea of this premise is to plant the seed in your mind that will make you think privacy is only for those wishing to do us harm. The terrorists, the drug dealers, the criminals. It’s to make ‘privacy’ a dirty word, something that shouldn’t even be desired in a modern society.

“The fact that people think they have personal privacy is laughable. You have no privacy. The cellphone in your pocket you’re giving permission to those apps constantly. You’re giving commercial organizations permission to collect enormous amounts of private data from you all the time.”

This is a fallacy known as false dichotomy. See, the NSA is violating your privacy without your consent or knowledge, that is the same as private businesses asking for your permission to collect your private data.

There are problems with corporate surveillance too. Many companies have practiced bad policies of collecting data without seeking proper consent. But the permission model on your smartphone is not an example of bad practice.

Modern mobile operating systems such as Android and iOS run on the principle of least privilege, multiparty consent, and default denial. Applications you install on your phone are not allowed to ignore or bypass your privacy settings. They are not allowed to access other app data. They are heavily restricted by the sandbox environment which enforces that only that which is explicitly allowed is permitted and everything else is blocked. [18 – 24]

There are still plenty of bad privacy practices implemented by these platforms, which is why projects like GrapheneOS exist that significantly build up on the security and privacy feature-set of the mobile environment. But to argue that the intelligence agencies do nothing more than what commercial entities are already doing is flagrant disinformation.

2:28:45 When the NSA was collecting intelligence on the metadata from around the United States, they were very specifically looking for terrorist threats that would harm American lives.

This is another common attempt to whitewash the record of the US intelligence community. It is often argued as a last resort when they can no longer deny they routinely violate people’s personal privacy.

2:29:25 The intelligence community is there to find threats to national security

“Your intelligence community is there to find threats to national security. That’s what they’re to do.”

You are only ever going to become a target, if you are a legitimate threat to national security. Even though you have to trust the intelligence community with the definition of ‘national security’, you can remain settled that once you are cleared, they’ll move on.

2:30:40 NSA was looking for threats that would lead to American deaths; we are now less secure because of Snowden

2:21:00 explains how they are looking through metadata to find threats and deprioritize dead leads → who defines threats?

All it takes is to examine the most recent history of US intelligence to demonstrate how full of shit they are.

The US Drug Enforcement Administration has a unit called the Special Operations Division. The unit is siphoning data from intelligence intercepts, wiretaps and vast telephone records. The intercepts that include data from CIA and NSA surveillance programs. The division rarely investigates cases involving national security issues. It combines the forces of two dozen government agencies and it was created in 1994 to wage a drug war against cartels. Cooperating agencies include the CIA, NSA, FBI as well as the IRS and DHS. [25]

Much of the mass surveillance the NSA engages in is covered in the Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. It was supposed to put boundaries around intelligence agencies to prevent them from searching records of US persons. But it was revealed that the NSA as well as the FBI routinely searched through private data of US persons without a warrant. A federal judge found both agencies have repeatedly violated the law or court orders and chose to ignore procedures to safeguard wholly domestic communications. How many times did their investigations involve national security threats? [Quote] “rarely”. [26] [27]

This practice continued well beyond Snowden leaks. Rulings in 2018 and 2020 found the FBI regularly searched through the NSA database, and federal agents used the database to make thousands of queries on people who were not a national security concern or weren’t suspect of crimes at all. [28]

So the intelligence community gets to define what constitutes national security and threats to it and they are still not capable of fitting their own boundaries.

But you are too ignorant to understand the complexities of intelligence. You see, they are the good guys by definition and you shouldn’t have a say in what they tell you they need to do.

“What Snowden did, when he outed that whole program, the fact that the civilian justice system went back and essentially overruled the ruling of the intelligence court before then just goes to show the general mass community really shouldn’t have a say in what happens in the intelligence community. They really shouldn’t.”

Towards the end of an episode at Trendifier, the host gave an excellent pushback against the idea that mass surveillance is worth it if it can save just one innocent life. 2:17:00 excellent pushback from the interviewer – what if 5 million Americans lose their freedom because we didn’t want to allow 10 Americans to die?

The United States has the biggest prison population in the world. The nation’s incarceration rates are ten times that of other industrialized countries. US prisons disproportionately target minorities of color, especially black males who are six times more likely to be incarcerated than white men. [29] [30] [31]

Mass surveillance is aiding in enforcing this societal prejudice. It multiplies the unjust overreach of the imperfect criminal justice system. It is a lot easier to argue harm of the bulk collection programs rather than their benefit. And if preventing loss of lives is truly the goal, abolishing mass surveillance would be the most logical conclusion.

The intelligence community is essentially turning the United States into a country its people once fought a war for independence from. And what’s the response of a former CIA operative? 

2:23:00 US is secure because of surveillance so if you care about privacy leave for Canada or France.

That’s right – if you don’t like what your own government is doing, don’t try to change the government. Just move to France or Canada, or… Romania?

2:25:00 tells the host to go to Romania (wtf?)

Romania doesn’t have a land border with Georgia. Are you high on one of those secret CIA pills?

Useful idiot was a term often used in Cold War, to describe a person unwittingly propagandizing for the opposing side without comprehending their goals. Some attribute this term to Vladimir Lenin but there is no evidence for this in library records. The term was often used in US media against liberals and centrist social democrats or generally any opposition to US foreign policy. [32]

But what it could also describe is a situation we have here. Either Andrew Bustamante is not really a former CIA spy but is still recruiting, or he has a naive faith in the agency that has the most morally bankrupt record in modern history.

As I hinted in this video, Bustamante isn’t the only intelligence operative making social media appearances. He is not even the most notorious one. There are many more examples like this. If you want me to cover more CIA propaganda in future videos, let me know.

Almost every time I make a video on state surveillance, YouTube demonetizes it and stops suggesting it to more audiences. This is because the advertiser-friendly content guidelines make it impossible for an independent channel to talk about serious topics. If it wasn’t for my Patreon supporters, this channel would have been long dead. This isn’t a hyperbole. My monthly revenue is now at or below $500. This is unlivable.

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