Transparency Toolkit’s database, called ICWatch, includes the public resumes of people working for intelligence contractors, the military, and intelligence agencies.
According to WikiLeaks, a US intelligence analyst in Washington threatened the project on May 13, saying: "I promise that I will kill everyone involved in your website. There is nowhere on this earth that you will be able to hide from me."
That threat "perhaps perfectly encapsulates why the US intelligence community (IC) needs to be kept under close observation," WikiLeaks said in a release announcing the data merge.
"By hosting ICWatch WikiLeaks can shield the project from censorship and intimidation," the secrets-spilling group said.
ICWatch's creator, 21-year-old M. C. McGrath, was able to build the list by mining online resumes from LinkedIn.
"I'm not too worried about the death threat or complaints at this point as I haven't heard more on them," McGrath was quoted as saying by the ZDNet website on Tuesday.
The database included the profiles of 27,000 NSA contractors when McGrath revealed his project at a conference in Berlin in early May. By Wednesday, when it was relaunched on WikiLeaks, ICWatch had expanded to 139,361 profiles.
"These records reveal key details for hundreds of US spying, assassination, drone and detainee programs — providing important leads for journalists and prosecutors," WikiLeaks said.
ICWatch's profiles also were merged into the main WikiLeaks investigative search engine, boosting WikiLeaks’ analytical scope to 8.62 million records.
To create the database, Transparency Toolkit built search software called LookingGlass to make it easy to browse the data it collected from LinkedIn.
"Transparency Toolkit uses open data to watch the watchers and hold the powerful to account." the group's website says.
"We build free software to collect and analyze open data from a variety of sources. Then we work with investigative journalists and human rights organizations to turn that into useful, actionable knowledge. Currently, our primary focuses are investigating surveillance and human rights abuses."
