'Insider' Launches Forensic Investigation Into Salary Leak

How have the executives at Insider, the news and culture website formerly known as Business Insider, reacted to their pay becoming very transparent? Fun question. Apparently, they have hired an “outside forensic team” to investigate the leak.

News of the leak investigation broke internally on Tuesday, in an email obtained by Gawker. In a message to the editorial staff, Insider’s global managing editor Jessica Liebman announced that the outlet would be conducting two investigations — an independent inquiry with the outside team, and an internal one. Afterwards, Liebman chided her employees for sharing the information the company had inadvertently shared. Here’s what the email said:

Team,

As many of you have seen, a story was published last week about compensation on our editorial team.

The information in the story appears to have been based on a data file that was inadvertently posted to one of our internal drives at the end of last year. That file was briefly accessible on our shared Google drive and was viewed by a handful of employees before it was removed.

We apologize that personal information like this was temporarily accessible. We take your privacy seriously, and this was a significant and unfortunate mistake. We have figured out how it happened (a human error), and we’re going to take steps to prevent it from happening again. We’ve hired an outside forensic team to investigate and are also investigating internally.

We’re also disappointed that someone on our team chose to take a file containing such personal information about so many of you and send it outside the company. We know that pay is an important topic, and we often discuss and debate it internally. But taking and sharing private information about hundreds of your colleagues without their permission is wrong. We expect everyone here to treat each other with respect and integrity, and this is the opposite of that.

Thanks,

Jess

That does sound ominous, though I have some questions about which outside forensic team specializes in G-drive privacy settings. Insider declined to comment. However, if you work at Insider or anywhere else and would like to do the opposite of what this email suggests, you can email tips@gawker.com.