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Barium meal test Īccording to the book Spycatcher by Peter Wright (published in 1987), the technique is standard practice that has been used by MI5 (and other intelligence agencies) for many years, under the name " barium meal test". In December 2020, Andrew Lewer, a Member of Parliament and Parliamentary Private Secretary in the UK government, was fired after a canary trap in the form of a letter reminding staff not to leak was published on the website Guido Fawkes.
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The subsequent libel trial became known as the Wagatha Christie case. When these details appeared in the press, she publicly identified the leaks as coming from the account of Rebekah Vardy, wife of footballer Jamie Vardy. In October 2019, British celebrity Coleen Rooney used the technique to identify who was leaking information from her private Instagram stories to tabloid newspaper The Sun by posting fake stories which were blocked to all but one account.
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As a result, Musk's scheme was realized by employees who now had a safe copy to leak. The plan was undermined when the company's general counsel forwarded his own unique version of the e-mail with the attached agreement. The e-mail was disguised as a request to employees to sign a new non-disclosure agreement.
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Īfter a series of leaks at Tesla Motors in 2008, CEO Elon Musk reportedly sent slightly different versions of an e-mail to each employee in an attempt to reveal potential leakers. He found that a leaked copy of the script was the one given to Roddenberry, but was unable to do anything about it. Shortly after Roddenberry opposed the destruction of the Enterprise at the climax of that film, fans began to complain to Paramount and Bennett. So, before any drafts of the screenplay for Star Trek III: The Search for Spock were circulated, Bennett arranged for each individual copy to have subtle clues distinguishing it from the others. The fans often complained about particular plot developments proposed for the films, such as the death of Spock in Star Trek II, that Roddenberry had opposed. Roddenberry was retained as an "executive consultant", due to the high regard the series' fans held him in while he had little real authority he was still kept involved in the creative process. įollowing the troubled production of Star Trek: The Motion Picture in the late 1970s, Paramount Pictures effectively replaced Gene Roddenberry as producer of further movies in the franchise with Harve Bennett. If he quotes something from two or three of those paragraphs, we know which copy he saw and, therefore, who leaked it.Ī refinement of this technique uses a thesaurus program to shuffle through synonyms, thus making every copy of the document unique. The reason the summary paragraphs are so lurid is to entice a reporter to quote them verbatim in the public media. There are over a thousand possible permutations, but only ninety-six numbered copies of the actual document. The fictional character Jack Ryan describes the technique he devised for identifying the sources of leaked classified documents:Įach summary paragraph has six different versions, and the mixture of those paragraphs is unique to each numbered copy of the paper. The actual method (usually referred to as a barium meal test in espionage circles) has been used by intelligence agencies for many years. The term was coined by Tom Clancy in his novel Patriot Games, although Clancy did not invent the technique. Special attention is paid to the quality of the prose of the unique language, in the hopes that the suspect will repeat it verbatim in the leak, thereby identifying the version of the document. It could be one false statement, to see whether sensitive information gets out to other people as well. JSTOR ( September 2014) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message)Ī canary trap is a method for exposing an information leak by giving different versions of a sensitive document to each of several suspects and seeing which version gets leaked.Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. This article needs additional citations for verification.
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