In Popular Culture
- The canary trap was also used in Clancy's (chronologically) earlier novel, Without Remorse, when a CIA official alters a report given to a senator, revealing an internal leak who was giving information to the KGB.
- Barium meals are also administered in Robert Littel's book The Company, and later in the TV short-series with same name.
- The technique (not named) was used in the 1970s BBC television serial 1990. The same unnamed technique also appeared in Irving Wallace's book The Word (1972).
- A variation of the canary trap was used in Miami Vice, with various rendezvous dates leaked to different groups.
- In the third-season finale of The Mentalist, the characters use a canary trap (giving different hotel room numbers to different suspects) to uncover a mole within their agency. A similar ruse is used in the TV series Ashes to Ashes.
- In A Clash of Kings, the second book in the A Song of Ice and Fire series, Tyrion Lannister uses the trap to find out which member of the King's Privy Council is reporting to his sister, the Queen Regent Cersei Lannister. To the Grand Maester Pycelle, he tells of a plot to marry his niece, Princess Myrcella, to Prince Trystane of the powerful House Martell, from Dorne. To Littlefinger, he claims he will instead send Myrcella to be raised by Lysa Arryn and married to her son Robert. To Varys, he says his plan is to send his nephew Tommen to the Martells. When Cersei confronts him, and knows only of the plan to send Myrcella to Dorne, Tyrion knows Pycelle to be the leak.
- When distributing Broken to friends, Trent Reznor claims that he watermarked the tapes with dropouts at certain points so that he could identify if a leak would surface.
Read more about this topic: Canary Trap
Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:
“Like other secret lovers, many speak mockingly about popular culture to conceal their passion for it.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“Vodka is our enemy, so let’s finish it off.”
—Russian saying popular in the Soviet period, trans. by Vladimir Ivanovich Shlyakov (1993)
“Any historian of the literature of the modern age will take virtually for granted the adversary intention, the actually subversive intention, that characterizes modern writing—he will perceive its clear purpose of detaching the reader from the habits of thought and feeling that the larger culture imposes, of giving him a ground and a vantage point from which to judge and condemn, and perhaps revise, the culture that produces him.”
—Lionel Trilling (1905–1975)