Information security

CIA’s anti-leaking tool leaked as ‘whistleblowers watch the watchers’

Annie Machon: I’d be certainly alarmed if the CIA was only reliant on Microsoft in this day and age, but anyway. No, it is not a surprise. In fact, ironically, there was a document drawn up by the American intelligence agencies written in 2008 about how to tackle what was perceived to be an insider threat, as they called it, potential future whistleblowers. This was ironically leaked to WikiLeaks in 2010, so it came into a wider world. The knowledge has been there for many, many years to those both from the inside and those who watch from the outside that, actually, they do take whistleblowing and leaking very seriously. They are trying to take steps to try and stop it. The interesting thing about these CIA documents at the moment is that they date from between 2013 and 2016. So, whoever leaked this cache of documents that is appearing in WikiLeaks ‘Vault 7’ was probably well aware that these documents were indeed watermarked digitally, and they managed to evade that system anyway, because they successfully leaked these documents to WikiLeaks. So, who is watching watchers? Well, the whistleblowers are.