Cisco VP Vows to Make Hunting Secret-Leaker His ‘Hobby’ | Hacker News Reader

Cisco VP Vows to Make Hunting Secret-Leaker His ‘Hobby’

wired.com

36 pointsRobAley26 comments

So an exec wants to stop potentially embarrassing leaks? What's surprising about this? Also the fact that he worked for the CIA 20 years ago seems disingenuously noted by the author; I don't think anybody expects him to kidnap employees and detain them in torture camps, although I suspect the author is trying to invoke that "secret agent" connotation.

Perhaps the gentleman has skills in more prosaic areas of security work, like cross referencing evidence, attention to detail and good old fashioned police work.

Seriously: if CISCO is going off the rails, just find somewhere else to work...

Actually, I think the interesting story behind the corp-speak is that this is now an internal vendetta with corporate sponsorship.

There is nothing wrong in general with stopping leaks.

However, his email in particular, bearing in mind it wasn't sent to the leaker alone but to all (mostly innocent) staff, comes of as almost threatening (granted not in a life threatening way, but a job and happiness way). I'm sure it won't help morale at Cisco. He may think that it will only worry anyone thinking of making a leak, but innocent staff will worry too feeling threatened in case they accidentally let something slip to a loved one or such. Such tactics are necessary in, e.g. the CIA, where "loose lips sink ships" (i.e. lives are in danger), but are not appropriate in a civil commercial enterprise like Cisco.

In my mind, he would have been better served sending a polite, professional reminder of the rules and the penalties for breaking them.

He may even have been better served trying to fix the problems that caused the "embarrassing" situation to occur in the first place (the price gouging of public institutions) and cause discontent among his staff.

At the end of the day, the leak of the email kinda shows it isn't deterring the leaker(s).

As someone pointed out when this story hit slashdot, I think if anything this letter means that the guilty party has relatively little to worry about. If they had any idea at all who did it, I don't think they would be sending letters like that.

Or, they varied the spelling, punctuation, spacing, or other attributes of every copy, so they could uniquely identify whoever leaked this version.

Could be, though if they need to do that it probably suggests the same thing. Also, there would be little guarantee of it being leaked by the same person, considering the rather ridiculous nature of it.

They might not know NOW who did it, but now there will be increased scrutiny, and it's attracted top-level scrutiny. They'll have Top Men on this. I imagine that the VP's past experience will help inform him of ways to trip up the leaker, and also influences the diligence of his pursuit.

I am curious if this is in violation of any whistleblower protection laws

I believe whistleblowing applies to situations where illegal behavior has been taking place. I don't think that was the case here.

from wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whistleblower_Protection_Act) it seems that whistleblower law is a federal law that protects federal whistleblowers.... IANAL.

States have them too http://www.bsa.ca.gov/hotline

> I don't think anybody expects him to kidnap employees

Nobodies does. But some would expect that he still has a couple of old pals in the business, who might:

* either give him illegal access to information which should have required a warrant which wouldn't be granted;

* or make it so that he gets a warrant that some more regular folks wouldn't have been able to secure.

Considering the exec mentioned his own CIA connection, likely to scare his target, it seems absolutely pertinent for the author to mention it. It's details like that which transform a threat from laughable to believable. As others have mentioned, there are many valid reasons to fear ex-CIA agents even if you don't expect to get shot.

Worse, Cisco has a history* of fraud and conspiracy to falsify evidence to get people jailed. At this point, with their history, an employee at Cisco would be absolutely in the right to expect their reputation to be tarnished by lies, to be fired even if their leaks were legally required, to be framed for leaking trade secrets, etc., even if they weren't even originally involved, just because of this hothead's paranoia and the vastly greater chance he'll find an innocent person, especially after announcing his crusade.

On the upside, from now on almost any dismissal can be claimed to have happened as part of this crazy traitor-hunt giving all departing employees a far better severance package than otherwise.

http://www.vancouversun.com/news/Cisco+deceived+Canadian+cou...

I'd forgotten about that bit of history. In light of it, this exec's action is all the worse.

I won't repeat it here, but a particularly pithy, one-sentence disparaging comment on Slashdot summed up my impression of the current situation quite succinctly.

Even if and as you have legitimate concerns around leaks, this isn't how you address them. Very unprofessional.

Interesting memo. The folks at Google were livid when early pictures of the Android G1 leaked, the contractor responsible got fired over it. I knew of a few other cases as well, Google kept pretty tight tabs on what was going on (aka surveillance) so leaks were identified pretty quickly.

That people don't take confidentiality seriously enough to not send it out to the world is a problem. The response though seems a bit over the top. I suspect it would have been more productive to acknowledge the angst which results in this sort of behavior than go all 'black helicopter.'

Ten years ago, the Cisco brand was equivalent to high-end, enterprise networking gears. Any company that used Cisco gears would get a 'wow' from people who were in the know. However the trend reversed and I have not heard any of my IT friends mentioning it for quite sometime, aside the aperiodic snide remarks on its price tags.

Honestly it was the same with Sun. Ten years ago ( a little more really ) you were still dealing with the growth, and perceptions, related to the dotcom era. Sun was "ooo wow" Cisco was "ooo wow".

However, routers and switches are everywhere now. So are UNIX servers. Cisco and Sun became normal. Everyone had them, everyone ran them and for a lot of people you simply never asked 'Do I get a Cisco router for this,' it just happens.

Cisco still makes high end enterprise devices. It's just normal now.

Sounds like a good use of a VP's time. Hunt down unhappy employees and lower morale instead of working on their products.

Maybe it'll keep him out of the way of those getting work done.

Where do you work that VPs work on products? Sounds like a great place!

Surely the first step would have been to send a bait-ridden fingerprinted email to everyone and wait for it to be leaked? (When the article says "all", it means the small portion of Cisco underneath him.)

I was thinking the same thing. I wonder how many slightly different versions of this email exist.

That's why the blogger should be summarizing leaked info, not posting verbatim.

Brad Reese has made the claim that Cisco should stop infringing on their employee's "free speech" right. Perhaps Brad Reese doesn't know what the right to free speech entails, but I can assure him that it does not give employees the right to leak internal corporate documents and not get fired or prosecuted for it.

http://www.bradreese.com/blog/11-6-2012-afternoon.htm

I think its hilarious he sent out the email thinking it would scare the responsible party. Instead, his email threatening OP got sent to the same blog shortly thereafter.

Whomever it is better take care, if more stuff gets leaked, they could be looking at corporate espionage charges. Not something I'm sure someone who used to work at the CIA would take lightly.

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