The concealed carry advertisements
==================================

The concealed carry advertisements is an anecdote John Kiriakou uses to make a point about commercial data collection.

The conversation

Kiriakou has said that every time he publishes a column of a certain kind he receives death threats, and that he mentioned this to a friend on the telephone. The friend told him what he needed was a concealed carry permit. Kiriakou answered that he used to have one, but that he is a felon now, and that being caught with a gun would carry an eight-year mandatory minimum. 

They hung up. Kiriakou then went on Facebook, where, by his account, literally every single advertisement was for a concealed carry class. 

The argument

Kiriakou uses the episode to support a claim he makes flatly elsewhere in the same conversation: that Facebook has done more to collect human data than the CIA could ever imagine, and that the agency has to salivate at what Facebook is able to do, the difference being that the data is volunteered. 

He adds that he has always found it funny that so many Americans think Facebook is free, when the cost, in his phrase, is crazy high. 

The wider claim

Kiriakou places this within his account of the relationship between the intelligence community and the technology industry, which he says goes back to the creation of the industry, naming, as one example, a director of security at Microsoft who is a thirty-year CIA veteran, and describing it as common for senior CIA officers to retire straight into senior positions at Facebook, Microsoft or Google. Asked why, his answer is money: five or six times agency pay. 

His conclusion about the trust that survives all of this is bleak. Asked whether he trusts anyone, he answers that he does not, and agrees when it is put to him that this is an awful way to live. 

See also

- CIA,Big Tech revolving door
- The Office of Security arrangement
- John Kiriakou
