Anderson’s comments about the power of these tools, however, could be overblown to deter employees from becoming another Manning or Snowden. His "claim is probably bravado," said Bruce Schneier, a cryptographer, privacy specialist and Fellow of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, in an email. But the bottom line is "we don't know," he wrote. "Certainly there is better auditing that they can do, but it won't be foolproof. I have no idea what measures they've put in place post-Snowden. And, of course, they don't want us knowing."

But there are clues the effort to gain these technical powers is real. A month after the Snowden story broke in 2013, In-Q-Tel – an investment fund with CIA and Homeland Security links, which selectively invests in technologies to “support the mission of the U.S. Intelligence Community” – poured money into Mountain View, California tech firm HyTrust.

The aim was for HyTrust to “deliver audit, enforcement, and policy controls to the administrative layer” within cloud servers and implement a ‘two man rule’ requiring a separate employee’s approval to access sensitive data, said HyTrust President and Co-Founder, Eric Chiu in a statement.

Inside Threat

Insiders, not hackers, are the threat intelligence agencies believe will loom larger and larger in the future, said Andrew Fitzmaurice, Chief Executive of UK security consultants Templar Executives, speaking in October at a Royal College of Defence Studies talk sponsored by Boeing.

“Bradley [Chelsea] Manning, then followed by Edward Snowden probably suggest to us that we can’t have open access to all the information we have” among employees, said Fitzmaurice, warning his audience of security contractors and government officials from various countries.

Fitzmaurice, who works extensively in the UK’s Cabinet Office and GCHQ, said security systems should be less like an armadillo armed against outside threats but rather layered like an onion with different rings of security between employees, and information sharing on a need-to-know basis.

Vigilance against the insider threat is now at an all-time high. In a December 2013 U.S. Homeland Security assessment, insiders were picked out as an underestimated threat to critical government infrastructure. And the report recommends not only should employee data be tracked in the workplace, but also on social media, along with behavioural monitoring by other employees.

This January, the UK’s Centre for Protection of National Infrastructure issued major new guidelines for employee vigilance and pre-employment screening, highlighting the threats posed by insiders. And other groups are working to build a profile of an insider to pick out employees and contractors for extra scrutiny.

The world as it really is?

Despite these efforts “there will always be too many people with access to too much information to stop bulk leaking,” Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt writes in the new afterword to his 2013 book The New Digital Age.

Leaks from whistleblowers, Assange maintains, are the only way to continue to hold public and private organizations to account. “The larger effect is that it creates disincentives for organizations that create unjust plans or engage in unjust acts,” he writes in When Google Met WikiLeaks.

Yet the vast majority of history still remains unexplored, Assange told me.

“You think to yourself ‘wow you’ve learned a lot by those WikiLeaks publication of the cables, and Afghan and the Snowden stuff’, it’s like ‘wow, the world seems different now,’” he explained, “but if you take your mind back before all that happened, it was all still happening - you just didn’t know. What we perceive to be human civilization, isn’t human civilization . The reality we live in is still to be uncovered.”

Edit: This post was edited from the original to include comments from Bruce Schneier.