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ICWATCH is a public database of mainly LinkedIn profiles of people in the United States Intelligence Community. The database was created by Transparency Toolkit and was hosted by WikiLeaks.[3]
| Available in | English |
|---|---|
| Created by | Transparency Toolkit |
| URL | icwatch |
| Commercial | No |
| Launched | May 6, 2015 |
| Current status | Offline[1] |
| Written in |
The publication of global surveillance disclosures in 2013 revealed code names for surveillance projects including MARINA and MAINWAY.[4][5] It was then discovered that the LinkedIn profiles of individuals in the intelligence community mentioned these code names as well as additional ones.[6][7] Transparency Toolkit took advantage of this and automated the collection of LinkedIn profiles mentioning such code names, collating them into a searchable database.[3][8][9]
The name "ICWATCH" is a play on ICREACH, an alleged top-secret, surveillance-related search engine created by the United States National Security Agency (NSA) after the September 11 attacks.[3][10]
The initial commit to the Git repository of LookingGlass was made on August 23, 2014.[11] LookingGlass is a search tool that was built for use in ICWATCH.[8]
ICWATCH launched on May 6, 2015;[12] on the same day, Transparency Toolkit, the group that created ICWATCH, presented it at the re:publica conference.[3] At launch, the database contained information from over 27,000 LinkedIn profiles.[3][13]
By mid-May 2015, Transparency Toolkit began receiving requests from individuals to be removed from ICWATCH, including death threats.[14] Following the threats as well as distributed denial-of-service attacks made against the site, WikiLeaks began hosting the website and database by the end of May 2015.[14][15]
In August 2016 TechCrunch reported that LinkedIn was suing 100 unnamed individuals who had scraped LinkedIn's website, and named ICWATCH as a possible target.[16]
As of February 2017[update], the database tracked over 100,000 profiles from LinkedIn, Indeed, and other public sources.[17]
In November 2022, ICWATCH and other datasets became unavailable on the WikiLeaks website.[18][19]
The database can be searched using the company, location, industry, and other parameters of the intelligence workers.[3]
Most of the discovered profiles are not of those in the National Security Agency but of those working for contractors.[3]
The project also revealed possible trends in employment in the intelligence community. For instance, the "number of people claiming to work with SIGINT databases [...] has increased dramatically over the years since 2008, with just a small decline starting in 2013."[3]
M. C. McGrath of Transparency Toolkit believes that the workers are "for the most part, pretty normal people".[3]
Ian Paul of PC World voiced concern for the safety of the individuals listed in the database.[13]
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