Facebook a ‘national security’ problem
Facebook is ‘‘radically understaffed’’ and frequently fails to thwart national security threats from countries such as Russia and Iran, a whistleblower has claimed.
Frances Haugen, who stopped working for the social network earlier this year, was part of a global counterespionage team which monitored the activities of state actors using the social network to spy on citizens and militaries of other nations. She claimed her unit was so stretched that it could only handle a third of the cases identified.
‘‘We knew we were looking at the outer edge of an onion but we didn’t know whether that onion was the size of a baseball or a beach ball. And that’s a national security problem, because some of those groups I was working with are looking at terrorists,’’ she said.
Haugen, 37, said she saw ‘‘active participation of the Iranian government doing espionage on other state actors’’. Her team also worked on cases where Chinese officials were using the platform to spy on Uighur Muslims around the world.
Her team of six or seven people ‘‘handled the entire world’’, she said. ‘‘It was just completely inappropriately staffed.’’
The unit responsible for disrupting malicious campaigns, such as alleged efforts by Russian trolls to influence foreign elections and sway the Brexit vote, was also under-resourced.
Asked about the size of the teams protecting the site, Facebook, which has 2.9 billion monthly active users, said yesterday that there were more than 200 people ‘‘focused on finding and disrupting sophisticated adversarial threats related to covert influence operations and espionage’’.
That figure includes people on a variety of foreign and domestic threats, as well as disinformation campaigns by fringe political groups, according to a report by the company. Facebook would not say how many of those employees deal with campaigns by countries such as Iran and Russia.
Haugen also accused the site of being woefully slow at removing dangerous groups, such as those used by terrorists. Facebook took 14 days to establish whether new and ‘‘respawned’’ groups were harmful, during which time they could ‘‘bloom like mushrooms’’, she said. She called on the UK and others to regulate the site.