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Someone inside Cisco is leaking corporate documents, and however innocuous these documents may seem, Cisco vice president Mike Quinn has vowed to hunt down the perpetrator.
His threats are worth taking seriously. He's a 20-year Cisco veteran who used to be an operations officer with the Central Intelligence Agency, according to his Linkedin Profile.
Quinn got steamed last week when someone leaked an internal memo to blogging site Bradreese.com.
The memo contained some shockingly innocuous boilerplate for Cisco employees who may get questions about California State University's decision to dump Cisco switches for cheaper networking gear built by Alcatel-Lucent. But for Quinn, it was an egregious violation of company policy.
He dashed off an angry e-mail -- cc:ing "all" -- to the leaker-in-chief saying that he -- or she -- "disrespected everyone else at Cisco" and should resign immediately. "Cisco puts the groceries on your table every two weeks, not Brad Reese or other Slander Sheet Journalists," he added.
"Now I know you do not have it in you to stand up and admit what you did, so I will now make you my 'hobby,'" Quinn said. "Ask around you will find out that I like to work on my hobbies."
Nonetheless, the angry memo was quickly leaked to the same blog.
Reached Friday, Cisco confirmed that the leaks were legit. "We take the confidentiality of our internal communications seriously," a Cisco spokesman said via email. "Mike Quinn's statement reflected his passion, not an official corporate communication. Nonetheless, his comments reflect a legitimate concern about those who work at Cisco yet seek to damage the company. There are many appropriate channels to report concerns internally and externally if there are issues. Sending confidential communications to a blog site isn't one of them."
Brad Reese, the blogger who published the memos believes that that Cisco is mad because the story underscores how expensive Cisco's upgrades can be. He says he doesn't know the identity of the anonymous tipster who sent him the memos. "The people that do send me this believe that Cisco has gotten off track and that everything that made them great has gone by the wayside," he says. "They're trying to help me help Cisco get better by exposing the hubris and arrogance."
Update: This story has been updated so that some of the information about Quinn and the leaked memos is higher up in the story.
