Couldn’t you just build into your cover identity’s personality being a bit old-fashioned about such things? I mean, there are still plenty of real people without Facebook accounts.
Of course. But it’s still a limiting factor, and a potential aid in profiling (“I think that company is a front for the CIA. Have a look at the list of staff, and find out which employees don’t have Facebook accounts!”). In general it would probably be fine for analysts and such, but for young active intelligence-gatherers who work mainly through networking, it would seem incongruous, surely?
You could easily do that today, since the majority of people 35+ still don’t have facebook pages.
But in 10-15 years time that’s not going to be possible. In 2035 it’s going to be utterly implausible that James St. John Smith, who attended university in 2012, never had any social media accounts whatsoever until 18 months ago.
While it’s plausible right now that many business people are old fashioned, it’s not plausible that someone who is an upwardly mobile BMOC/graduate would be old fashioned right now. That’s total antithesis of the networking obsessed, ambitious businessman that the spooks love to use as a cover. But in 15 years time that graduate will be the successful ambitious businessman.
To make those sorts of cover stories plausible, the spooks will need to be planting multiple fake media accounts now that can be adopted when needed in coming decades. Anyone posing as an ambitious business woman in 20 years time who doesn’t have an electronic paper trail dating back to today just won’t be plausible.
Interesting observation. And since spooks may not yet know what cover they’ll want in a decade or two, it would be logical that they’re creating many thousands of these fake identities.
Let’s extend that reasoning! Next there’s the issue of making all of these fake identities realistic - posting status updates, pictures, “checking in”… it’s entertaining to think of a department in the CIA, FSB, or whatever working only to maintain believable online personas.
After all, it would really be a hassle… you’d have to be careful with using random strangers’ pictures to be the fake persona’s friends, due to the risk that someone will spot the abuse and raise questions - but you can’t very well use other agency staff for the photos, as the exposure of one agent would risk exposing many other secret workers. “Checking in” would require some creative use of the feature - can’t have everybody checking in at Langley or at Dzerzhinsky Square.
Finally, and worst of all, all these personas need friends! Once again, you can’t use strangers or agency staff - so you’d have to create potentially hundreds of fake friends for each of the fake personas! You’d have to avoid reusing the fake friends, again because of the risk of exposing other fake IDs through connections.
In other words, if we stipulate that tens of thousands of Facebook identities are fake IDs for spies, it would be logical to conclude that possibly *millions *of Facebook identities are the creations of espionage agencies! So the equivalent of a small country’s population could originate in some spook basement - which seems like paranoid hysteria, but is the most hilarious thing I’ve considered all day 
At least it implies upward career mobility for MMORPG gold farmers…
The next technique is “hiding in plain sight”. You don’t need to fake a person, so much as make them undistinguishable. “Jim MacDonald” or “John Martin” should be almost impossible to find on Google or Facebook; too much “noise”. I suppose the giveaway would be the lack of detail. “Jim comes to us after an illustrious career in banking…” no company names in resumee. Or, spoof a different person. In the recent Palestinian assasination in the Gulf, Mossad stupidly copied someone’s passports. ( I google my name and 95% of the hits are african-american US citizens… 
)
For example, when Cheney et al revealed that Valerie Plume was CIA, her online profile included a stint in a certain company. Googling that company revealed at least one other resumee listing that company - the person was contacted by reporters and asked “are you also a CIA agent using the same front company?” and very quickly that resumee disappeared from the web. (So Skippy was guilty of the outing two, not one, CIA agent).
but yes, there are a lot of people who likely do not have a facebook account; in fact rumour has it facebook is already becoming passe, and twitter is the next big thing. How historical is twitter? Does someone have a giant database of Compuserve or AOL activity to research? Change may be espionage’s biggest friend.
As for recruiting, IIRC from various discussions, CIA, NSA etc. hire just like anyone else; hiring officers touring campuses, looking for specialties they need. Worse case, you look over the resumes of people that interest you, maybe have an “in” with a recruiting/headhunter firm, and approach them from a front company.
The thing that always bothers me about this crap, from Goldfinger to Goldmember, is where do they find these evil henchmen who do what they are told and just wait to get shot? G.Gordon Liddy is a classic example that what you are looking for may not be what’s out there. Even if a person is ideologically committed to a cause (which makes the recruiting easier for national agencies than independents) you risk ending up with cowboys, yahoos like Blackwater guards who shoot up an intersection just because they can, drunks and others with hidden personal problems, etc. Tom Clancy’s collection of dedicated, competent, and persevering heros are a real fantasy.
the other question is, do you really expect to stay under the radar? It depends on resources. The NSA can collect every phone call bin Laden made, every call those recipeints made, etc. Like drug dealers, very few are likely surprises - they know who they are supposed to be watching from years of mapping heirachies. As soon as you join the “game”, you will be noted. The question then is, are you trying to hide the fact that you have data, or just the atual content of that data?
I’m sure the NSA, for example, has reams of encrypted data stored away for that day when some mathematician figures out a simple crack for RSA or other encryption…
Just to add to the cowboy henchmen examples - apparently the 9-11 hijackers, while going to pilot school and presumably “keeping a low profile” stalled a practice plane engines at a major airport and just left it there sitting on the taxiway, and locked it up, walked away. Moussaoui apparently told his instructor he didn’t need to learn how to land planes… It wasn’t because of their cleverness that we failed to catch them…
We’ve all encountered the “I’m a Navy Seal” idiot-in-a-bar wanabee type, I’m sure. So recruiting better be the smartest operation in your company.
This article may be of interest to people who enjoyed this thread: apparently Al-Qaeda operatives have been hiding plans and documents in porn.