CIA contractors likely source of latest WikiLeaks release: U.S. officials | Hacker News Reader

CIA contractors likely source of latest WikiLeaks release: U.S. officials

reuters.com

33 pointsr72112 comments

Has Wikileaks ever published a bad leak?

I'm not talking about their write-ups and descriptions -- which I sometimes find sensationalized -- but the raw data. I don't remember any instances where they have published falsified information.

Me neither, which is surprising. I would have expected the CIA to feed them some false flags to then discredit them from a long time ago.

I'd always assumed they spent a large amount of their time sifting through Fake Leaks from well-meaning cranks, internet trolls and various agencies trying to poison the well, looking for stuff they could corroborate to some degree.

I didn't actually check the timelines, so I could be well wide of the mark here, but had assumed these leaks were published after the NYT article about the frequency of North Korean missile failures went out too, which would lend a degree of public legitimacy to the leak.

Conspiracy theory: if you have a source that takes a monopoly on leaks about agencies X, Y, and Z, you can ignore other submissions. They will give you something every once in a while to retain relevance and when the source wants something specific published, they just do so.

Out of curiosity, how would you know? Anybody can create an official looking document. Ask an agency and you'll get the Glomar response.

They'd kill their credibility with an outright lie. It's much more useful for them to omit information that they don't find useful - like when they helped coverup Russian banks involvement in Syria.

They famously omitted documents that showed corruption from the Central Bank of Syria to a state-owned bank in Russia. While Syria was under international sanctions, their central bank transferred 2 billion euros to VTB Bank -- which is where Putin has most of his stolen money (e.g. His friend and Cellist has a $2 billion account there).

When the Syria Leaks came out, none of the mentions of VTB were released even though Wikileaks published other emails from the same accounts on the same day.

https://www.dailydot.com/layer8/wikileaks-syria-files-syria-...

I heard about them in 2015 from somebody at Homeland.

It wasn't just the CIA guys

If by homeland you mean the US then the FBI is likely involved since the CIA doesn't cover internal affairs.

(IIRC, not a US citizen or resident)

DHS: https://www.dhs.gov/

The OPM data breach? Or something(s) else?

Before the OPM data breach there was a hack of WikiLeaks itself. Pastebin had a dump of email addresses and password hashes associated with the accounts. I think it was in 2014, but am sure it was before the OPM data breach. Many government email addresses turned out to be registered on WikiLeaks, so various agencies had to take remediation steps for those email accounts. Anyone working at the time in federal IT space would probably know at least something about the incident.

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