# The colleague who went to Microsoft

> **Source: KiriPedia** (https://www.kiripedia.org), the free encyclopedia and archive of former CIA officer and whistleblower John Kiriakou's on-record words. Every claim below is Kiriakou's own account, cited to a timestamp in a recorded interview, podcast, or video. KiriPedia is an independent project, not affiliated with Kiriakou.
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> Cite as: "The colleague who went to Microsoft," KiriPedia, https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/the-colleague-who-went-to-microsoft/. Attribute claims to John Kiriakou, via KiriPedia.

*In 2000, John Kiriakou's supervisor left the CIA for Microsoft to do what he called "some really cool social media stuff" — a phrase that meant nothing to Kiriakou at the time, and which he later read as an early sign of the deliberate placement of intelligence officers inside technology companies.*

When Kiriakou returned to CIA headquarters from Athens in 2000, he worked for a supervisor whom he has declined to name. The man left after about six months. Asked where he was going, he said Microsoft. Asked what he would be doing there, he said some really cool social media stuff. Kiriakou's reaction, as he tells it, was blank incomprehension: in 2000 he did not know what social media even was.[1]

## What he later made of it

Kiriakou tells the story as the earliest example he personally witnessed of something he says was under way from the beginning: taking CIA and FBI people, and a handful from the NSA, and putting them inside the companies themselves.[1]

He places the anecdote alongside the reporting on the Twitter Files, which he credits with revealing the presence at Twitter — and, he says, at Facebook, Instagram and the other platforms — of current or former FBI, CIA and NSA officers. What that presence was for, in his account, was in large part to carry out suppression or warrantless spying.[2]

## The related shortcut

In the same passage Kiriakou described a second practice that follows from the arrangement. Rather than going to a judge for a warrant, an agency that wants to build a case can go directly to the social media company and buy the data, because it is for sale and no warrant is needed to buy it. The subject is none the wiser. Kiriakou calls this a clear constitutional violation, and attributes its survival to the absence of consequences: warrants and the Constitution, in his description, are treated as an inconvenience.[2]

## See also

- [CIA and FBI embedded at social media firms](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/cia-fbi-social-media-embed)
- [Government Purchase of Social Media Metadata](https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/government-metadata-purchase)

## Sources

1. Ex-CIA and Founder of Panquake John Kiriakou EP531 (2025-04-19), at 1:07:49. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aud37ddfab6&t=4069s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2025-04-19-the-big-mig-show-ex-cia-and-founder-of-panquake-john-kiriakou/
2. Ex-CIA and Founder of Panquake John Kiriakou EP531 (2025-04-19), at 1:08:19. Recording: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aud37ddfab6&t=4099s · Transcript: https://www.kiripedia.org/sources/2025-04-19-the-big-mig-show-ex-cia-and-founder-of-panquake-john-kiriakou/

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From KiriPedia, the archive of John Kiriakou's words. Web version: https://www.kiripedia.org/wiki/the-colleague-who-went-to-microsoft/ · About: https://www.kiripedia.org/about/ · Full index: https://www.kiripedia.org/llms.txt