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.
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