Dead Drop: January 5

IS CIA AN EX X USER AND Y?  The social media platform formerly known as Twitter has had a rough year. The mutual fund Fidelity says  X has lost 71.5% of its value since having been purchased by Elon Musk. The number of users has dropped by 15% and advertisers have been bailing– some apparently motivated by intemperate and possibly antisemitic comments by the platform’s owner. We stumbled across an interesting angle more in The Cipher Brief’s wheelhouse, however.  We noticed that CIA, once a powerful user of the Twitter platform, seems to be giving Musk the silent treatment. The Agency has posted more than 5,000 times on X (nee Twitter) since it joined in 2014 and has racked up 3.4 million followers. But CIA hasn’t posted anything on X since late September. We thought perhaps the CIA social media team had gone on hiatus – but they’re still posting with some regularity on other sites like Instagram and LinkedIn. Then we wondered if the Intelligence Community writ large had put X on ice – but no, the ODNI, NSA, FBI et al seem to be posting at the same pace as they had before. A little birdie told us there is no official Agency guidance not to post on X, so (we’re just flying by the seat of our pants here, but …) maybe the Agency is focusing its energy on platforms that offer more ‘constructive’ engagement opportunities, which – by our assessment – would be any platform other than X.

SO SOON? According to the British tabloid, The Mirror, a woman identified only as “Barbara” has decided to call it a career at MI5 – after having served at the domestic agency for more than half a century.  We figure that Barbara, who is now 90 years old, was probably making up for lost time – since she didn’t join MI5 until 1968, when she was in her mid-30s. All we know about her is that she worked in personnel management, recruiting and the agency’s history section serving under 12 directors-general.  It’s safe to say that after 50 years, she probably knows a lot more about us than we know about her.