Why former CIA director John Brennan is nervous about Facebook and Google

Days after revelations of sweeping security vulnerabilities at Facebook and Google, former CIA director John Brennan offered no confidence that we’ve discovered all of yesterday’s bad news about social-network security and can move on to preventing tomorrow’s. “I don’t think we’ve turned a corner yet, from the standpoint of remediation or prevention,” he said. Brennan, who led the Central Intelligence Agency from 2013 to 2017 after spending four years as President Barack Obama’s homeland-security adviser, lent only this faint endorsement: “I think we may have turned a corner from the standpoint of cognizance and awareness and humility.” As Brennan sees it, first these tech giants overlooked widespread exploitation of their networks by foreign actors before trying to brush off early reports of this interference. And their recent revelations of a series of privacy vulnerabilities have left him uneasy over what we haven’t heard about next.