HUNT IS ON! It’s A Manhunt For The CIA Leaker…

by Cassy Fiano | March 9, 2017 11:39 am

It took less than 24 hours after WikiLeaks released their data dump on the CIA for the FBI to begin a manhunt for the CIA leaker. Fox News has confirmed that FBI officials have formed a special unit that is working on a federal criminal probe. But it might prove to be more difficult than cases in the past[1].

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(SAUL LOEB/AFP/Getty Images)

When then-Private Bradley Manning leaked classified documents to WikiLeaks, Barack Obama formed a task force specifically dedicated to tracking down and prosecuting government leakers. Manning was eventually caught after bragging about what he did to another hacker, who later testified against him. And Obama later created the National Insider Threat Task Force.

The NITTF was formed “to prevent, deter and detect compromises of classified information by malicious insiders” and yet, a tweet sent out this week does not bode well for the CIA. It read that “all of the firewalls in the world won’t stop an insider who is already on the inside of these firewalls.” That was proved when Edward Snowden leaked documents from the NSA. Snowden outed himself as the leaker and has been in hiding ever since to avoid prosecution.

Today, FBI Director James Comey addressed a crowd at Boston College and while he didn’t specifically address the CIA leaks, he did allude to the greater problem. “There’s always been a corner of the room where the FBI operates where sophisticated actors were who had access to encryption,” he said. “What’s happened to us since Snowden… is that more and more of that room has gotten dark as encryption has become the default.”

Gregory Keeley is an expert in the security of digital devices and co-founder of the consulting company Phosphorus, and according to him, what’s surprising is that something like this has never happened before. And it will also make it harder to find the person responsible due to the size of the unit, saying, “what we have to understand is… the CIA’s never been hacked like this before. With 5,000-plus users in that particular unit, how will they track that leak?”