We made a tool that helps to determine leakers of documents | Hacker News Reader

We made a tool that helps to determine leakers of documents

leaksid.com

3 pointsjuliet_dem17 comments

It's about time. Governments and corporations are getting a bit too transparent, and this is exactly the tool we need to keep what they do out of the public eye.

Our solution has no emotional connotation, we are in favor of helping those who need it to find the culprit of the leak using our invisible marking technology.

You can't avoid moral responsibility that way. It sounds an awful lot like "I was just following orders."

Historically, what kind of leakers tend to be prosecuted? And by whom? Do you have any reason to believe your tool will buck these trends?

according to the last statistics about 3/4 of all leaks are made by insiders, by people who have already had legal access to confidential information. So we are planning to promote our solution to solve this problem. And each year the number of insiders threats increases, this the most important trend for us

Insiders such as Edward Snowden? Or Chelsea Manning, sentenced to 35 years in prison for revealing US military's human rights abuses? The leaker of the Panama Papers, revealing how the wealthy dodge taxes?

Maybe the world would be better of if the person who leaked the Minton Report, showing that the Trafigura corporation was knowingly dumping toxic waste [1], was deanonymized and "took responsibility" for their actions?

Forgive me if I'm being harsh, but you knew perfectly well that "insiders" is an irrelevant non-answer.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2006_Ivory_Coast_toxic_waste_d...

If you're having to dodge the question...

Shame on you, you best hope the tools of oppression are not turned on you one day.

No emotional connotation.

How about making a tool that lets insiders leak documents about illegal actions that corporations and governments are suppressing the release of?

I mean, there's statistically very few real secrets, but there's many, many coverups, unethical or illegal decisions, and scads of corruption. Seems like the need is to help leakers rather than help those who would keep blunders, coverups and illegal actions secret.

This tool appears to bounce everything off the company's servers so in that respect it seems to be a great way to harvest information deemed confidential by its originators.

So essentially automated barium meal preparation. Won't this be defeated by OCR/retyping? Professional journalists already destroy original materials prior to publication so they can't be compelled to hand over information that would expose their sources.

Our solution is a patented marking technology. We add invisible anti-leak marks on the documents to protect them. If somebody decided to take a screenshot of this document, make a photo on the smartphone, or print it, our marks will still be on the document, because you can't remove them. They are detectable only by our system LeaksID. You can try our solution via app.leaksid.com!

“Won't this be defeated by OCR/retyping?” - you didn’t answer the question

obviously, using OCR or retyping you will create a new document, but it will be a forgery of documents, which is a court case. Our technology is created to secure documents with sensitive information that has value only when you have real evidence in the format of this document (its photo, screenshot, scan, hard copy). Our cases are when people take a photo of the confidential contracts, instructions, data from CRM or when they share sensitive documents with contractors

What? It's not a forgery if you're not trying to pass it off as the authentic original. Journalists have other ways of authenticating things than just publishing the original.

Of course there are good reasons to want to track documents to prevent things like fraud, industrial espionage, and so forth. But your marketing specifically targets leakers, and leakers are often motivated to expose to the public secrets that corporate actors would prefer to keep hidden, perhaps illegally, eg the Panama papers or records of pollution violations. It seems that you're inadvertently or unintentionally offering 'retaliation as a service.'

> Our technology is created to secure documents with sensitive information that has value only when you have real evidence in the format of this document (its photo, screenshot, scan, hard copy).

A business competitor wouldn't care about "real evidence", only that the information is useful. The only institution that I can think of that wants "evidence" is the court system.

Are you saying your tool is specifically intended to discourage people from submitting evidence to courts and the police?

Cool solution!

Thank you very much!

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