Workplace surveillance is nothing new, but this slide from Harry McLaren’s talk on Machine Learning for Threat Detection illustrates particularly well the challenges facing journalists wishing to protect whistleblowers.

McLaren is talking about malicious threats, and the way that machine learning can be used to identify suspicious patterns of behaviour. But the example given above is equally useful in illustrating the way that similar behaviour might be used to identify an employee intending to whistleblow on illegal, unethical or dangerous behaviour by his or her organisation. Continue reading →