The Next Freakout: Foreign Spies in Surveillance Valley!

Yasha Levine

“The nativist panic is already here — it’s just not evenly distributed.”

This week, the FBI unveiled charges against two former Twitter employees — one of whom is a Saudi citizen — accusing them of spying for Saudi Arabia. According to the feds, the two of them were being run by another Saudi national on behalf of Crown “Bone Saw” Prince Mohammed bin Salman. In 2015, on orders from their handler, these two are accused of accessing the private Twitter data of more than 6,000 accounts — including those who were critical of the Saudi royal family. In return, they were rewarded with luxury watches and five-figure bank transfers. One of them got over $300,000 in total.

Reading the complaint, these “spies” come off as very inept. They did everything out in the open, had their activity logged, and even got caught by Twitter management. One of them iMessaged with his wife about his “important” project.

These guys were not pros. They left a freeway sized digital trail behind them. But the fact that they got nabbed brings up something I thought quite a lot about while writing Surveillance Valley: Silicon Valley companies like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, and Apple collectively store more surveillance data about the world than all the world’s intelligence agencies combined. Given their strategic importance as a chokepoint through which so much global data flows, it makes sense that just about every country with a bit of spunk and resources would try to penetrate them in some way. The place must be shot through with all sorts of spies working for every intelligence agency imaginable.

It’s a FBI counterintelligence agent’s worst nightmare — made even more frightening by the fact that Silicon Valley is crammed full of foreigners and immigrants. They occupy every rung of the corporate ladder: founders, executives, middle managers, rank-and-file coders and engineers, contract laborers who clean and cook. I know many immigrants and foreigners who work in Silicon Valley — including members of my own family. Possible spies and traitors everywhere! They’re probably working together and covering for each other the way that those sneaky communalist foreigners do! Can’t trust anyone. What if Sergey Brin is in on it, too?

Given the nonstop national security paranoia and xenophobia being pumped out by both rightwing and liberal establishments (something I’ve written about here, here, here, and here), when is the presence of so many foreigners in Silicon Valley — such a strategically important industry — going to blow up into a bout of mass hysteria? It’s already happening with China and Chinese people in tech and academia. When is it going to start affecting other immigrant groups — including the huge number of Soviet and Russian immigrants that populate the tech industry?

It’s already happening around the edges. My sense it that it’s just a matter of time before it goes mainstream. To paraphrase a wise-man-turned-Resistance-Hero, “The nativist panic is already here — it’s just not evenly distributed.”

—Yasha Levine

Immigrants as a Weapon is a new investigative newsletter that looks at how America weaponizes nationalism and immigrant communities. Sign up to get subscriber-only stuff in your inbox!