The intelligence services have done a great deal of research into the persona of the press leaker/Wikileaks leaker (as distinct from the more traditional espionage leaker). A common trait is for the press leaker to be either highly over-qualified for their job or believe themselves to be over-qualified for their job. The belief coming out of that research is a sense of being under appreciated and a deep need to be recognized by someone (even themselves) for something they’ve done is the primary motivation for this class of leaker. The “leaking good and important things” blanket that the leaks are wrapped in then becomes a secondary factor that is used by the leaker to justify their actions to themselves in their quest for the recognition they need. I doubt if corporate press leakers have been studied as heavily as intelligence sector leakers, but the chances are good there are some similar motivations at play.

The leakers that come to mind immediately are Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning whom both suffered greatly for their leaks (Snowden had to leave his life behind and Manning was kept in isolation and had her medical needs neglected amongst other things). While they both may have wanted to be recognized as having done something good, they also clearly wanted to let the public know what the government was doing in their name.

As an example there's a short discussion in the recent movie The Post where Post reporters are trying to figure out who leaked the Pentagon Papers. Ben Bagdikian says something like these guys are always a bit of a showboat and it leads him to remember Ellsberg at Rand.

EDIT to add: the CIA is interested in why people leak because the #1 job of the CIA is to create leakers in other countries.

You mention locking people up, but that is not the CIA's job. The FBI is the counter-intelligence lead in the U.S.

The CIA only locks up brown people and tortures them in Thailand (star). It refers US leakers to the FBI which throws them into lonely prisons, terrifies, and abuses them.

EDIT: (star) Or rather it did. That's what Gina Haspel, our new CIA director nominee, is famous for.

EDIT2: https://www.huffingtonpost.com/norman-solomon/why-the-washin...

A conflict of interest would be relevant, in different ways, if it was current with the events that the movie is about, or if the movie was produced by the Post.

But neither of those is true, sonit seems to be a non-sequitur.

Hollywood has a long history of entanglement with the CIA and DoD in general. (How do you think so many war movies get access to equipment?) The Post was produced by Stephen Spielberg, an entertainer, not a typical careful documentarian. The social purpose of the movie is to soothe liberals at a time when their minds are being fractured by DJT and cries of "fake news". I wouldn't put it past Hollywood and the military to take this prime opportunity to insert propaganda via framing and selection of quotes.

Of course, I can't prove it that this is how this quote came to be, but what I can with certainty is to be skeptical of taking away core moral and factual positions from mass political entertainment and be doubly skeptical of claims (referring to the original claim sans movie) that come from the intelligence services (whose job it is to lie cheat and steal, duh).

EDIT: Here's an example of the CIA getting involved in the movie business https://www.salon.com/2015/09/11/the_cias_insidious_hollywoo...

They are a great example of an organization hiring the best and brightest, only to be dimmed by org and political structures.

This is not a recent thing. I believe they blew up a Russian refinery with a sweet exploit in he 80s. But other than that, I’m not sure why anyone would see them other than a bumbling comedy of politics.

To be fair, that is also a reason why they would have a motive to spread misinformation about what they believe motivates leakers, since information about their beliefs on that matter give target nations clues to both actual vulnerabilities and CIAs likely means of attempting to exploit them.

Joking aside. I think the difference lies in how easily an adversary can refute the information. You can just call up a library or an embassy to verify most claims in the world factbook. How would you get access to a wide selection of leakers?

also, just because an adversary is denying information does not mean that they themselves are being truthful.

After throwing out the all but three of the original 100 people saying one of the other 9 were the best skin cream.

People have been trying much harder and more successfully to discredit Snowden using other arguments.

The characterisation actually makes me more hopeful for the future of whistle blowing.

I never understood why Snowden and Manning are put on equal footing in that regard.

Now granted, the mission plans would have been pretty interesting to the other team (I almost wrote the word enemy, but I don't believe that to be accurate, but that's irrelevant to this post), but those were printed out and ended up laying around on desks, all the platoon leaders / platoon sergeants had them, and despite best efforts to keep track of that stuff it is never 100%.

Granted, Chelsea may have had WAY more access than I did, I'm not trying to speak about things I have no facts regarding. I am trying to say that I find it VERY hard to believe that an E-4 intel soldier (or even most O-6's, to be honest) would have access to anything that could compromise field intelligence activities or actionable information about the goings on with special forces teams. The overwhelming majority of the information we had on SIPR (basically the 'secret' internet for USG, the computers with red cables coming out of them) relevant to the local theater of operations was an insanely disorganized mess of reports following missions, almost none of which had anything juicy in them.

Having become a software engineer and math guy after getting out of the service, looking back on the "information" available to US and allied commanders in Afghanistan I'm 100% certain that my current boss would fire me for delivering such a mess.

EDIT Looked up Manning's unit level: Full Disclosure: Chelsea Manning worked in a Brigade level S-2 (intel section), and I was only at Battalion, so she definitely had better systems / access than I did. I still doubt she could find out what Jason Bourne was up to.

No. Foreign agents or sources working with US intelligence (which are not the same as operatives) maybe.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/jun/20/chelsea-mann...

The strongest common trait in leakers is belief. They believe in something. They aren't willing to sit back and witness some people damage society as a whole.

Manning at least spent her day in court. Yeah they are different, Snowden was a coward. If he truly did it for the good of the world, he'd turn himself in because of the reward he has already gotten by sharing information he felt like the world needed.

" If he truly did it for the good of the world, he'd turn himself in because of the reward he has already gotten by sharing information he felt like the world needed."

This is offensively manipulative nonsense. Wanting to avoid being thrown in a hole and tortured is a normal human response and utterly orthogonal to whether his motives were pure or not.

Here is some stateside coverage analyzing why he did something so stupid: http://theweek.com/articles/463249/why-edward-snowden-spilli...

"In the bigger scale of things, Sino-US relations outweigh any information Snowden may have. It is also impractical for China to hope Snowden will co-operate with us. If he wanted to do that, he'd have flown to Beijing," said an expert in Shanghai who requested anonymity."

Looks more like he revealed that we were spying on everyone and ran to Hong Kong because they were a neutral party and you want to spin this into he sold us out to the Chinese to me.

Why did he reveal Chinese telecom targets then? The "expert in Shanghai" is clearly wrong from Snowden's perspective. Hong Kong is outside the Great Firewall and so Snowden felt less hypocritical living in Hong Kong, but it is still under Chinese rule, so he hoped to get Chinese protection by leaking state secrets to them.

You must be heavily influenced by things you’ve read/heard others say.

As a human being - just imagine what you might do... Perhaps you’ll begin to realise how palpably absurd your suggestion that someone must be a coward for not taking their beating is.

Shocker, people have different opinions on the internet. Most intelligent people do in fact think for themselves.

> You must be heavily influenced by things you’ve read/heard others say.

I'm heavily influenced by taking the same oath as he once did and Manning did. You are given a choice to have a TS/SCI clearance, you can say "no thanks" at many many points in the process. Once given that choice it is up to you do decide whether or not you follow the rules you signed up for. He chose to be treasonous, much like Manning. I'm not arguing about whether that choice was the right one or not, that does not matter. Unlike Manning, he gave intelligence away to foreign countries in hopes they would protect him and he didn't have his day in court. He life is ruined because his plan backfired, that is on him, no one else.

So yes, I'm heavily influenced, but by experiences I know about, unlike most. He committed treason, that fact is inarguable, and I believe he should've stayed home and argued his case in court. Manning did, she is now a free woman.

I know I'm not going to change your mind, that isn't my intention, but I'm also going to defend my own intelligence. Lifetip: not everyone who disagrees with you is a moron. Have a nice day.

I'd assume most intelligence services love leakers. They just want to be the recipient, not the source.

> The intelligence services have done a great deal of research into the persona of the press leaker/Wikileaks leaker

Taught in a counterintelligence 101 type class, there's generally four types of intel leak. Not always mutually exclusive, sometimes there's a combination of factors influencing the behavior of any single person.

MICE

Money - for financial gain. Robert Hanssen would be one example.

Ideology - Typical cold war stuff, a person that deeply believes in the political ideology of power group A becomes a mole inside opposing political group B.

Conscience - Something happening is deeply wrong and unjust in the view of the leaker. Snowden.

Ego - Sometimes combined with the Money part. The persons receiving the intel find a way to flatter the ego of the leaker, about how important their role is on a grand strategic level.

The leaks an Apple employee makes is about inconsequential stuff like what features the next iPhone will have. It's not even in the same ballpark as someone who is leaking something illegal going on at the company or someone at Facebook leaking the Boz memo, for example.

option A: “I’m working on really cool / inconsequential shit. But I can’t tell you about it. Maybe we can catch up next year and I can tell you what I did”

option B: “I work at Apple”

option C: just stay home.

Personally, I wouldn't think that the leakers were getting paid. Even if they were, I imagine the amount that these particular online web sites are able to pay is very much -- especially when compared to the average Apple employee's salary.

This makes me think that money isn't the primary motivating factor, if it is a factor at all.

you can’t really buy that

Also somehow I doubt that newsrooms are making enough money to pay $100,000 (or any money for that matter) for random tidbits about products that don't really matter in the grand scheme of things.

Source?

https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intellig...

The cyberpunk dna in me thanks you for this.

Sounds like how a sociopath would interpret the motivations of a good person.

Edward Snowden and someone who leaks an upcoming iPhone's rounded edges are not in the same category.

An example from this week. Someone was asking about the usual questions. Stuff on our website that I can comfortably answer. Then they casually led the conversation to the tech side in appreciation that I'm an engineer doing a great job. He eventually asked, "what feature in your latest release are you the most proud of?" I badly want to tell you because it's fucking cool stuff. But I won't because you're an investor for our competition.

Another great source is the airplane ride to the show. I've heard of at least one tech columnist that would watch people working on laptop presentations on the flights and pick up all kinds of scoops.

Pay attention to someone if they keep stuttering or "forgetting key" parts of the statement they're making, getting others to fill in the blanks is one of the easiest ways since our minds just want to do that. So you intentionally pretend to have difficulty remembering what you're saying and let the other person tell you.

1. Immediate Financial - They either have a direct quid-pro-quo with the leak recipient, or stand to benefit directly from the leak.

2. Disagreement with the direction/decision-making - They want Apple to do something different, and internal (legitimate) attempts to influence this decision have failed; usually because the leaker doesn't have the political capital.

3. Vanity/Ego - More of a contributing factor to #2, but they want a feeling of power that comes from leaking.

4. Trolling - A subset of #3 really. Some people just want to watch the world burn.

5. Revenge - Feeling screwed out of a promotion, or otherwise neglected? Leak!

6. Low self-esteem - If you're approached by a reporter or blogger, having something of value is a way to boost yourself.

Reporting a CEO embezzling is whistleblowing. Announcing apple is working on a new gizmo is not. Don't conflate them.

I think your definition is of a whistleblower is too narrow, and I prefer the fuller definition from wikipedia:

"A whistleblower (also written as whistle-blower or whistle blower)[1] is a person who exposes any kind of information or activity that is deemed illegal, unethical, or not correct within an organization that is either private or public."

"not correct within an organization" clearly applies to the #2 in my list.

so some of them are good?

Personally, I’d be interested if someone leaked the CIA’s research into online trolls. Something tells me you wouldn’t consider that person a saint ;)

There's four reasons people leak information:

1. Out of moral responsibility to report unsafe or illegal activity.

2. To cause direct harm to the root organization because they feel slighted by some action in the past.

3. The "leak" is officially sanctioned as part of a submarine.

4. Ego.

Numbers 3 and 4 are the biggies.

> Are media organizations like 9to5mac (mentioned in Apple's memo) paying Apple insiders for the information they provide?

> Personally, I wouldn't think that the leakers were getting paid. Even if they were, I imagine the amount that these particular online web sites are able to pay is very much -- especially when compared to the average Apple employee's salary.

Let's take the memo linked in TFA, for example. Just how much can we expect Bloomberg might pay for a copy of this memo? I can't imagine that it would be very much at all -- certainly not enough to make it worth the risk of being caught.

> This makes me think that money isn't the primary motivating factor, if it is a factor at all.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16834397

How much would a hardware manufacturer be willing to pay to get specs of the latest iPhone in advance so their accessories can be out in the market before anyone else?

What about a competitor who wants to know more about the company's future releases.

All of this happens, and companies have to work to prevent it.

Yeah, you're right.

I was focusing on leaks to media/news sites but that's because the Apple memo seemed to focus on that as well (e.g., "The employee who leaked the meeting to a reporter ...", "Instead, people who work for Apple are often targeted by press, analysts and bloggers ...", and so on), although they did specifically mention leaks "in the supply chain" too.

Leaking/selling company information to a competitor or rival is obviously a concern as well but I think this memo is pretty clearly aimed at those who might consider leaking to the press.

I'm guessing that it's very much against Bloomberg's ethics policies to pay anything at all.

In addition, paying sources for information could lead to "fake" or incorrect information being provided to the media by "leakers" who are simply in need of money.

  s/all/well/

Saying leaked out of “ego” is equivalent to saying it was leaked “because”. We know it was something internal to the leaker’s psyche, but research should help us understand what led up to that point and how it could have been avoided.

For example, would you say a gossiper gossips because of “ego”?

They can also be extremely manipulative. Like pretending they know something already, and so its ok to comment on it, OR they say they are going to print with something that is wrong and damaging for the company. For example the next iPhone only has 6 GB of storage. You can either not confirm that, or you correct them, and say "I think you mean 600 GB", at which point you just leaked a major new feature.

So if Apple or Facebook wants leaks to stop happening they need to reverse course and stop the unofficial mandate to connect the world or get a device into every person’s hands.

These things are becoming global phenomenon pervasive in nearly everyone’s lives and yet they demand a near total lack of transparency of how they operate. Seems hypocritical and unfair at best and maybe unethical or immoral at worst.

Massive organizations and businesses, people and families rely on these things so they at least should have some insight into their operation.

[0]: https://www.mercurynews.com/2015/08/18/ex-yahoo-employee-adm...

[0]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-05-08/yahoo-sue...

[1]: https://www.scribd.com/document/275069641/Yahoo-vs-Cecile-La...

For employees it was like they were doing favors for their friend, and the things they were asking were generally pretty small, but could increase over time.

We were warned about this happening since it happened before, so I'm sure similar techniques that worked 20 years ago still work today. It's just a form of social engineering.

I'm not sure how many reporters have done jail time to protect their sources, but I'm sure that more than a few have been threatened with it.

Reporters cultivate relationships with sources and sharing some inside information can come to be seen as just helping out a friend with some tidbit that doesn't really hurt anything.

Furthermore, there can be an ego thing around sharing things you know that other people don't.

They may get money?

Some of these companies have valuation in hundreds of billions, and a small bit of news can nudge that +/- 0.5-2% or more which could be a couple billions dollars. If you own just 0.1% of the stock, that would be several $m opportunity . So, paying your informer, say, $100K or something, sounds reasonable, if you can execute it properly, even accounting for fake informers.

Revenge against a real or imaginary slight, by senior managers, or even their own line manager.

Bucks?