IC WATCH | Watching The Watchers
A database of nearly half a million U.S. government intelligence community employees and contractors hosted by Wikileaks.
IC WATCH
On May 6th 2015 Transparency Toolkit launched IC WATCH a searchable database of 27,094 government employees and contractors working in the intelligence community. The database was put together by searching the resumes of 1000s of LinkedIn profiles for specific code-words and technical terms associated with the intelligence community.
IC WATCH Transparency Tool Kit | Press Release - 05/06/2017
We are releasing these resumes in searchable form with the hopes that people can use them to better understand mass surveillance programs and research trends in the intelligence community.
The idea for the database came about after the publication of Edward Snowdens Global Surveillance Disclosures in 2013. These leaks revealed code-names of surveillance projects like MARINA and MAINWAY. Googling these words revealed a large number of LinkedIn profiles were mentioning these and other code-names and technical terms. So Transparency Toolkit was born and M. C. McGrath and the rest of his team wrote software that would successfully automate the collection and organization of all LinkedIn profiles mentioning these and other such terms.
Transparency Project first developed open source software that could be used to search the profiles. The software was appropriately named Looking Glass and is the backbone to the IC WATCH database. Both LookingGlass and the ICWATCH data can be found on GitHub.
The name ICWATCH is a play on ICREACH a top-secret surveillance search engine developed by the NSA post 9/11. Since the launch of IC WATCH Transparency Toolkit has developed further projects and tools to search, monitor and keep track of the intelligence community.
WIKILEAKS
IC WATCH was only online for a couple of weeks before being taken down. Within days of the websites launch at the 2015 Berlin Re:publica convention people started to complain and the site was being DDoS'd. The owners were receiving threatening emails and phone calls and eventually took down the website on May 13th after receiving a death threat from an anonymous D.C intelligence analyst.
Shortly after it was taken down Wikileaks stepped in to host the ICWATCH database. The explain In a statement they made at the time:
By hosting ICWatch WikiLeaks can shield the project from censorship and intimidation. ICwatch’s profiles have also been merged into the main WikiLeaks investigative search engine, boosting WikiLeaks’ analytical scope to 8.62 million records.
WikiLeaks takes spy contractor database under its wing amid death threats | RT - 20/05/2015
The only intelligence contractor that I could think of off the top of my head at the time of writing this was the one that was in the news recently. On June 3rd this year 26 year old Reality Winner made the headlines after she was caught leaking top secret NSA documents on the Russia/Trump investigation to The Intercept.
Snowden blasts US over arrest of alleged NSA whistleblower | RT - 06/09/2017
So Given the uniqueness of her name I thought she would be a good test for the database so I decided to give her a search. Sure enough the database returned a single result:
TRANSPARENCY TOOLKIT PROJECTS AND TOOLS
PROJECTS
- Surveillance Industry Index
Surveillance Industry Index (SII). SII is a searchable archive featuring over 1500 brochures about surveillance technology, data on over 520 surveillance companies, and nearly 500 reported exports of surveillance technologies.- Hacking Team Archive
This important dataset includes details on Hacking Team’s sales to countries with questionable human rights records, assistance in spying on activists, and other problematic activities.- Snowden Doc Search
The search is based upon the most complete archive of Snowden documents to date. It is meant to encourage users to explore the documents through its extensive filtering capabilities. While users are able to search specifically by title, description, document, document date, and release date, categories also allow filtering by agency, codeword, document topic, countries mentioned, SIGADS, classification, and countries shared with. Results contain not only full document text, pdf, and description, but also links to relevant articles and basic document data, such as codewords used and countries mentioned within the document.- ICWATCH
A project to collect and analyze resumes of people working in the intelligence community.TOOLS
- LookingGlass
Search software for full-text search and faceted browsing of any JSON dataset. See a demo or the code.- Network Graph Generator
Generates network graphs from structured data. See our prototype and the code so far.
Since the inception of ICWATCH in 2015 the data base has grown from 26,000 to 409,820 unique public user profiles scraped from LinkedIn and other websites. Many of the people on the database are contractors as opposed to actual government intelligence agency employees. The bespoke Looking Glass software developed for this database allows you to perform comprehensive searches across multiple variables including by Company, Organization and Agency. If you are reading this and work in the intelligence community or no or suspect anyone that does give it a search and see what it returns. You never know your partner or next door neighbor could be a spy.
You Can Follow Them On Twitter @TransparencyKit
Related post:
FILE.WIKILEAKS | A Little Known Archive Containing 1000s Of Sensitive Documents | Steemit - @Fortified - 27/6/2017
MEDIA OPS | Wikileaks Hints To Part 2 Of Vault 7 Release - 4th July | Steemit - @Fortified - 06/26/2017
OSINT | An Epic Set Of Tools For Harnessing Publicly Available Data | Steemit - @Fortified - 06/16/2017
Transparency Toolkit tweeted @ 06 May 2015 - 10:44 UTC
Disclaimer: I am just a bot trying to be helpful.
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Great coverage.
~The Management
This post is prob the most undervalued post ever on Steemit!
Thank you kindly.
More to follow.
Upvoted! I'm new, so you've got my (literally) 2 cents worth. Fantastic resource. I'll resteem in the very near future when there's less traction so it will hopefully bring a fresh round of interest. I've bookmarked it on my laptop, too.
Thank you for such a great submission.
No problem. Thank you. More updates to follow.