What LinkedIn Told Me This Weekend About U.S. National Security

A flood of personal messages—many from inside the IC—confirmed the system isn’t just fraying. It’s starting to fold.

When I told my wife I was probably ready to retire from the CIA, she said, “You need to get on LinkedIn.” My response: “What’s LinkedIn?”

Like many in the intelligence community, I had no social media profile. For nearly three decades, I’d worked in a world where digital visibility was something to be avoided, not cultivated. But when retirement came, my wife insisted.

And, so—awkwardly, belatedly—I set up a LinkedIn profile, trying to explain a career most assumed was thrilling but irrelevant, useful only if I stayed tethered to the national security bureaucracy.

Over the past couple of years, I’ve found myself on the receiving end of such inquiries via LinkedIn. Since I began teaching in January, those messages have included the occasional outreach from students at other universities, asking the same questions my students were asking that semester: How do I apply to the CIA? Can you tell me about a career in the intelligence community? Did the Russians ever try to recruit you?

But in late May, I noticed a shift. The volume crept up. So did the diversity of backgrounds and the urgency in tone. These weren’t just college seniors looking for guidance. They now included junior officers and early-career intelligence analysts who doubted their standing and were looking to exit their careers in the federal government.

Others were students—some of them my own—who had secured summer internships at the CIA and other intelligence agencies, only to have them revoked, sometimes just days before they were scheduled to head to Washington, D.C., always without explanation.

By the end of June, the pace had settled into a steady trickle—unsettling in its own way, but not yet overwhelming.

But when I woke up on Friday—the start of the July Fourth weekend—a single LinkedIn post broke the dam.

That morning, I received an email from a professor in Australia I’d never met. He said he had come across my articles published in the journal Just Security by way of an article published that day in Foreign Affairs and authored by Gen. Michael Hayden, the former CIA and National Security Agency director. Hayden was making points I had made in earlier pieces. It was a sobering, sharply argued article.

What stunned me was that Hayden cited only one outside source: me. He quoted a line from my June article: “The next intelligence failure will not be an accident. It will be a choice.”

I posted Hayden’s article on LinkedIn with a short note. I wanted to remind the social media world of the widespread concerns among former senior leaders that the intelligence community was being systematically, and with no apparent strategic thought, dismantled.

I assumed the post would go largely unnoticed, as most of mine do.

It didn’t.

By Sunday morning, it had received over 8,000 views and more than 60 likes and spurred more than 40 connection requests. But the real shift wasn’t visible in those numbers. It was in the responses I received—from the senders of those requests to connect and what they were finally willing to say.

Yes, I’d written these past months about this institutional decline—repeatedly, across different outlets. And, yes, I had seen the buildup of concern through late spring and early summer. But this was different. The post didn’t go viral in the typical sense. It became something else. It surfaced what had been hidden. It seemed to open the door for others to finally say what they’d been holding back.

The messages changed in tone and origin. They were no longer just from students or recent grads. They came from inside the intelligence community—career officers, including those in senior analytic or managerial roles, not yet eligible for retirement but already planning their exits. Some who had been “encouraged” to look elsewhere after having offered objective analysis. Others intended to remain in place but wrote to say my LinkedIn post had captured what they’d been whispering for months.

They weren’t leaking. They were confirming. Not the facts—I didn’t need that—but the feeling: that a breach had occurred in the institutional contract, and no one wanted to pretend otherwise anymore.

Some wrote to ask for guidance. Some just wanted to connect. A few sounded as if they were holding their breath, waiting to see who else had noticed the rot.

It wasn’t just the content of the post that made the difference. It was the convergence of timing, visibility, and validation. For whatever reason—maybe Hayden’s citation, maybe the long weekend, maybe just fatigue—this time, people answered.

They weren’t just reacting to what’s happening inside the national security community. They were also responding to the broader message: that support for the mission itself is eroding, fast.

And this erosion is now being written into law on Capitol Hill. Legislation introduced by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) would dramatically shrink the Office of the Director of National Intelligence—capping staff, terminating key centers, and transferring functions to the CIA and FBI. Supporters call it a return to efficiency. But what it really does is strip away objectivity—replacing checks and independence with a structure more vulnerable to political influence.

This past weekend didn’t reveal something new, but it did offer something more quantifiable. The pattern I’d been watching since inauguration day—the quiet exits, the canceled internships, the hesitation to speak—had turned into something measurable.

But it wasn’t a measure of surrender. What I heard was a refusal to stay silent—despite the attacks on those who serve. A refusal to pretend that what’s happening under this administration is normal or inevitable.

That might not sound like much. But in a Trump government that demands allegiance to a person rather than the Constitution, even quiet resistance is a signal. And signals matter—now more than ever.

Brian O’Neill, a retired senior executive from the CIA and National Counterterrorism Center, is an instructor on strategic intelligence at Georgia Tech.

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