“I promise that I will kill everyone involved in your website. There is nowhere on this earth that you will be able to hide from me.”
Just two weeks after its launch, Transparency Toolkit’s ICWatch project, which documents more than 100,000 job profiles associated with the US “intelligence community” has been rehoused at WikiLeaks due to death threats and DDoS attacks on its infrastructure.
The death threat quoted above, sent from a US intelligence analyst in Washington DC to the project on May 13, perhaps perfectly encapsulates why the US intelligence community (IC) needs to be kept under close observation.
The ICWatch project has been expanded to 139,361 job profiles for today’s relaunch. These records reveal key details for hundreds of US spying, assassination, drone and detainee programs – providing important leads for journalists and prosecutors.
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.
ICWatch launched at Berlin’s Re:publica conference to rave reviews on 6 May 2015. The project collects and cross references resumes posted on LinkedIn by people working in or associated with the intelligence and security sector. The dataset is intended as a tool for journalists, researchers and members of the public to better understand the secretive surveillance industry. The developers have simply made information that is already in the public domain easy to research.
M.C McGrath, the founder of Transparency Toolkit, who developed the project and presented it in Berlin, remarked that “open source intelligence is one of our biggest assets in understanding secret surveillance programs”.
Search ICWatch at icwatch.wikileaks.org (example, JPEL)
Search ICWatch using WikiLeaks advanced search (example, JPEL)
Search all of WikiLeaks including ICWatch (example, JPEL)