She pretty much outed herself though by using her own computer to mail the document to the intercept. That the intercept then went and tried to verify the veracity of the documents does not give them much credit either, they didn't have to forward the actual scans, there would have been other ways of verifying that the documents were real.
Finally, this was clearly careless on the part of the Intercept, no proof has ever been given that this was malicious, and I'm not seeing any here.
It has been some years since I read about the original document leak, but as I recall, she shared documents from her workplace that either had printer steganography ID codes embedded into them (images in a raster scan of a paper document), or some form of digital stego IDs in electronic documents.
Basically not very different from how major motion picture studios embed some sort of unique ID code into the compressed video files given out pre-release, to reviewers (and workprints sent to 3rd party CGI studios) so that they can track down a leak.
None of which Winner was aware of the existence at the time. Some of those codes made it through to the reporting, and were published to the Internet, making it fairly easy for federal law enforcement to track her down.
I have also not seen any information saying that the journalists who received the documents, definitively were, or were not aware of the presence of the ID numbers stegoed into the documents.
On a more meta level, it's a hard problem to solve with handling and publishing leaked documents, because on one side you have the vast resources of the NSA and the US intelligence community coming up with new steganographic and other methods to embed tracking ID numbers into documents. The full size, scale, budget and weight of various federal agencies' "counterintelligence" efforts.
And on the other side you have investigative journalists who do not have PhD level degrees in math/cryptography, and do not have the technical resources to definitely search through a huge pile of documents and say with 100% confidence that any possible tracking IDs have been stripped out.
I don't think I could reasonably expect a person from a journalism/liberal arts degree educational and work experience background to identify steganography.
> She pretty much outed herself though by using her own computer to mail the document to the intercept.
I don't understand this point at all. Identifying oneself as a source to a journalist is a critical and important part of being a whistleblower. The Intercept could never have published anything without some authentication of where it came from. You think you can just mail some documents anonymously and papers will run with it?
I mean, maybe you could argue that in the case of specific kinds of documents that are self-authenticating, I guess. But in general, no, journalists need to know where stuff comes from. Ellsberg didn't hand over the Pentagon Papers anonymously, Deep Throat was known to Woodward & Bernstein, etc...
More than careless, basically incompetent regarding OpSec. And even worse is that they tried to cover it up and attemoting minimizing the impact of the damage.
Don't feed conspiracists by shutting down legitimate reporting, don't protect the powerful from inquiry, just because they are on 'your side,' don't feel the need to de-platform those with a record of truth-telling, when they go after those you admire. Let the muckrakers muck as much as they can and we'll all get closer to the truth, however uncomfortable it may be.
It took this? Greenwald has been a crackpot and possibly a closet fascist for years.
The only reason anyone ever took him or the Intercept seriously is that Snowden dropped a huge story right in his lap. All he had to do was to be mildly competent at handling that and he was assured a reputation.
> Greenwald rebuts Ben Smith’s recent New York Times piece on The Intercept publishing the Reality Winner leak. “It wasn’t like The Intercept was free from mistakes, there were mistakes made, and they acknowledged those mistakes. The parent company paid for the source’s, Reality Winner’s, legal defense,” says Greenwald. “I just don’t know what this New York Times article added other than to try and just take shots at people incoherently.”
I don't think Greenwald and Poitras see eye to eye on this one.
> "horrifyingly, took the lead in falsely branding the Hunter Biden archive as “Russian disinformation”"
Calling it an "archive" is laughable at best, the provenance of the supposed Hunter Biden laptop which was left in the custody of a randomly chosen computer repair shop guy who has ties to Giuliani and the Trump apparatus is clear. The entire thing was an intelligence plant that Greenwald swallowed hook, line and sinker.
There's a reason why dozens of highly respected, experienced investigative journalists took a good look at the information supposedly retrieved from this "laptop" and decided not to proceed with publishing any of it. Because they didn't want to embarrass themselves by publishing obvious fabrications.
From USA Today:
"John Paul Mac Isaac — owner of The Mac Shop — told reporters that a man who identified himself as Hunter Biden brought three liquid-damaged laptops to his repair shop in April 2019, per the Delaware News Journal.
The man left one laptop for repair and never returned to retrieve it.
Eventually, Mac Isaac gave a copy of the laptop's hard drive to Brian Costello, an attorney for Rudy Giuliani, who is the personal lawyer for President Donald Trump. Mac Isaac said he turned the hard drive over to Costello because of fears for his safety."
She should never have been put in jail and each day she remains increases the injustice.
US society is absolutely unhinged with its extremely assertive willingness to punish the most vulnerable while simultaneously bending over backwards to avoid accountability for anyone with money or belonging to the correct political clubs ...
From the NYTimes article that Poitras links to, this really sounds to me like a perfect conjunction of mutual screwups on both sides. Winner didn't know that the documents had a stegonographic ID embedded into them, and the people at the Intercept who hastily published high-resolution raster scans of them didn't know or care either. Really seems like there's equal blame to go around on both sides.
Just my opinion: Winner was either very naive or very ignorant to assume that any classified level document didn't have tracking IDs embedded into it. It's been a known thing for mole hunts for 70+ years... There's tons of declassified information that can be found in cold war era books on intelligence related matters about how false information is fed to known agents, and such.
nytimes:
"Ms. Winner, then 25, had been listening to the site’s podcast. She printed out a secret report on Russian cyberattacks on American voting software that seemed to address some of Mr. Greenwald’s doubts about Russian interference in the 2016 campaign and mailed it to The Intercept’s Washington, D.C., post office box in early May.
The Intercept scrambled to publish a story on the report, ignoring the most basic security precautions. The lead reporter on the story sent a copy of the document, which contained a crease showing it had been printed out, to the N.S.A. media affairs office, all but identifying Ms. Winner as the leaker."
IMO the journalists should be expert in protecting their sources, and they failed here (arguably, Winner picked the wrong ones). Winner is an expert in her own field (e.g. Farsi); not in journalism, steganography, or OPSEC. The steganography was well known in journalist circles I was into in, back in '00s.
Ah, this is one of those that can only make me think of how news outlets, especially since in Brazil they're even more tightly controlled and aligned and oligarchic, report on governments from other countries, of political prisoners and messed up stuff going elsewhere(specially if it's in 'countries we dont like' of course), and how it is when it's an 'us' story(and of course put Assange in here too).. And that then it drips down to partially informed ppl that are basically tamed into whatever position interests oligarchs and that it becomes useless to try to discuss anything because information is just not reaching the overwhelming majority of people. That's how you end up with a Bolsonaro.
Yeah, sure, democratic/western ideals and blah blah, how about when it's time to put them into practice? I think sadly we all know what happens, and we mostly just look away. To be clear, I'm not talking about any single case in particular, it's more of an essence thing.
Please don't take HN threads on flamewar tangents. Jumping into the nearest lava pit immediately upon some provocation is, to quote my son when he was two, "what we not do".
The letter only mentions Greenwald to appropriately credit his reporting along with hers for the founding basis of The Intercept. Otherwise the mention of his departure from The Intercept is notably absent.
I mean, he left because as a founder of the intercept, he had a contract item that editors couldn't deny him the ability to publish in the intercept on the grounds of content. When they told him that he couldn't publish anything that could be construed as against Biden, he left as they had broken their contract with him.
Seriously, these concerns shouldn’t be a partisan issue, but today everything is just so tribalistic. We are laying the floor for potential bad actors to remain unchallenged.
> what you saw in China to be a precusor to what will come to America
America is very culturally distinct from China. Of the negative outcomes institutional collapse or maybe secession are far more likely than one-party totalitarianism. Personally I think a counter-cultural backlash is most likely.
> The Intercept’s claim that an independent investigation was conducted is false. The so-called “independent” review was done by the same lawyer who worked on the NSA/Winner story. The Intercept should correct the record and apologize to its readers.
At this point, plus Greenwald's resignation, should we have any respect of the Intercept, or should it always be regarded with some suspicion like Bloomberg and the supermicro fiasco?
I'm sorry, but I'm a real conspiracy theorist on this. Winner was a woman tricked into leaking a story that supported the Russiagate yarn, and part of the team on the Intercept side is clearly a federal agent/independent contractor: https://thegrayzone.com/2020/05/20/the-intercept-reality-win...
IMO they would have found her no matter what; the reasons they gave for finding her could well be a parallel construction, and they had Esposito as an insider who could "accidentally" out her if all else failed. This was a media operation to leak the standard Russiagate stuff through a Bernie-supporting (biased against Russiagate) peripheral insider and to make a great show of prosecuting her to give the leak more credibility than it would normally be given, from an audience (lefties) that was normally very critical.
So you're into conspiracy theories, but the collusion of the Trump campaign with Russian intelligence agents, which was voluminously documented in the Mueller report, is a "yarn".
Conspiracies just aren't any fun when they're blindingly obvious to anyone who can read .
What? I'm legit not understanding. I def think there is something fishy here. I think Poitras and Greenwald are both very dedicated and courageous journalists but they also have a screw loose and are prone to grandstanding. I also can't help but think First Look bought their credibility to gain an audience and are going to pivot to something more profit-driven now.
Meanwhile, Barton Gellman, who also worked with Snowden, has kept churning out great reporting [0], while Greenwald and Poitras kept trying to ride on the coattails of Snowden long past the point of relevance.
At least wrt Greenwald, the upshot of your comment is that you don't pay attention to news out of Brazil. He's done some pretty important investigative stories there, one of which they tried to indict him for. None of those stories had to do with the Snowden leaks.
He also continues to rewrite/update the same plodding OpEd about how no one should forget that Democratic apparatchiks and pundits are also hypocritical, self-serving and untrustworthy asshats. Not the most incisive journalism by any metric, but again unrelated to Snowden leaks.
How is this relevant? Poitras is highlighting that an informant was not protected accordingly, and that the Intercept is no longer a trustworthy resource.
[+] [-] jacquesm|5 years ago|reply
Finally, this was clearly careless on the part of the Intercept, no proof has ever been given that this was malicious, and I'm not seeing any here.
[+] [-] walrus01|5 years ago|reply
Basically not very different from how major motion picture studios embed some sort of unique ID code into the compressed video files given out pre-release, to reviewers (and workprints sent to 3rd party CGI studios) so that they can track down a leak.
None of which Winner was aware of the existence at the time. Some of those codes made it through to the reporting, and were published to the Internet, making it fairly easy for federal law enforcement to track her down.
I have also not seen any information saying that the journalists who received the documents, definitively were, or were not aware of the presence of the ID numbers stegoed into the documents.
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/06/the-m...
https://blog.erratasec.com/2017/06/how-intercept-outed-reali...
On a more meta level, it's a hard problem to solve with handling and publishing leaked documents, because on one side you have the vast resources of the NSA and the US intelligence community coming up with new steganographic and other methods to embed tracking ID numbers into documents. The full size, scale, budget and weight of various federal agencies' "counterintelligence" efforts.
And on the other side you have investigative journalists who do not have PhD level degrees in math/cryptography, and do not have the technical resources to definitely search through a huge pile of documents and say with 100% confidence that any possible tracking IDs have been stripped out.
I don't think I could reasonably expect a person from a journalism/liberal arts degree educational and work experience background to identify steganography.
[+] [-] newacct583|5 years ago|reply
I don't understand this point at all. Identifying oneself as a source to a journalist is a critical and important part of being a whistleblower. The Intercept could never have published anything without some authentication of where it came from. You think you can just mail some documents anonymously and papers will run with it?
I mean, maybe you could argue that in the case of specific kinds of documents that are self-authenticating, I guess. But in general, no, journalists need to know where stuff comes from. Ellsberg didn't hand over the Pentagon Papers anonymously, Deep Throat was known to Woodward & Bernstein, etc...
[+] [-] m-p-3|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] maxerickson|5 years ago|reply
I see the link talking about self interest and negligence.
[+] [-] mrkstu|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] aaron_m04|5 years ago|reply
I don't understand what this has to do with Poitras being let go.
[+] [-] smoyer|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] api|5 years ago|reply
The only reason anyone ever took him or the Intercept seriously is that Snowden dropped a huge story right in his lap. All he had to do was to be mildly competent at handling that and he was assured a reputation.
[+] [-] ProAm|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kome|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cwyers|5 years ago|reply
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/useful-i...
> Greenwald rebuts Ben Smith’s recent New York Times piece on The Intercept publishing the Reality Winner leak. “It wasn’t like The Intercept was free from mistakes, there were mistakes made, and they acknowledged those mistakes. The parent company paid for the source’s, Reality Winner’s, legal defense,” says Greenwald. “I just don’t know what this New York Times article added other than to try and just take shots at people incoherently.”
I don't think Greenwald and Poitras see eye to eye on this one.
[+] [-] h_anna_h|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] walrus01|5 years ago|reply
Calling it an "archive" is laughable at best, the provenance of the supposed Hunter Biden laptop which was left in the custody of a randomly chosen computer repair shop guy who has ties to Giuliani and the Trump apparatus is clear. The entire thing was an intelligence plant that Greenwald swallowed hook, line and sinker.
There's a reason why dozens of highly respected, experienced investigative journalists took a good look at the information supposedly retrieved from this "laptop" and decided not to proceed with publishing any of it. Because they didn't want to embarrass themselves by publishing obvious fabrications.
From USA Today:
"John Paul Mac Isaac — owner of The Mac Shop — told reporters that a man who identified himself as Hunter Biden brought three liquid-damaged laptops to his repair shop in April 2019, per the Delaware News Journal.
The man left one laptop for repair and never returned to retrieve it.
Eventually, Mac Isaac gave a copy of the laptop's hard drive to Brian Costello, an attorney for Rudy Giuliani, who is the personal lawyer for President Donald Trump. Mac Isaac said he turned the hard drive over to Costello because of fears for his safety."
[+] [-] breatheoften|5 years ago|reply
US society is absolutely unhinged with its extremely assertive willingness to punish the most vulnerable while simultaneously bending over backwards to avoid accountability for anyone with money or belonging to the correct political clubs ...
[+] [-] walrus01|5 years ago|reply
Just my opinion: Winner was either very naive or very ignorant to assume that any classified level document didn't have tracking IDs embedded into it. It's been a known thing for mole hunts for 70+ years... There's tons of declassified information that can be found in cold war era books on intelligence related matters about how false information is fed to known agents, and such.
nytimes:
"Ms. Winner, then 25, had been listening to the site’s podcast. She printed out a secret report on Russian cyberattacks on American voting software that seemed to address some of Mr. Greenwald’s doubts about Russian interference in the 2016 campaign and mailed it to The Intercept’s Washington, D.C., post office box in early May.
The Intercept scrambled to publish a story on the report, ignoring the most basic security precautions. The lead reporter on the story sent a copy of the document, which contained a crease showing it had been printed out, to the N.S.A. media affairs office, all but identifying Ms. Winner as the leaker."
[+] [-] Fnoord|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brbrodude|5 years ago|reply
Yeah, sure, democratic/western ideals and blah blah, how about when it's time to put them into practice? I think sadly we all know what happens, and we mostly just look away. To be clear, I'm not talking about any single case in particular, it's more of an essence thing.
[+] [-] Stierlitz|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] walrus01|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] dang|5 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[+] [-] greenburger|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] monocasa|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seppin|5 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] f430|5 years ago|reply
I believe that it has reached a point of no return and that you should expect what you saw in China to be a precusor to what will come to America now.
Congratulations! You've played yourself America.
[+] [-] DevKoala|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nyokodo|5 years ago|reply
America is very culturally distinct from China. Of the negative outcomes institutional collapse or maybe secession are far more likely than one-party totalitarianism. Personally I think a counter-cultural backlash is most likely.
[+] [-] TeaDrunk|5 years ago|reply
At this point, plus Greenwald's resignation, should we have any respect of the Intercept, or should it always be regarded with some suspicion like Bloomberg and the supermicro fiasco?
[+] [-] pessimizer|5 years ago|reply
IMO they would have found her no matter what; the reasons they gave for finding her could well be a parallel construction, and they had Esposito as an insider who could "accidentally" out her if all else failed. This was a media operation to leak the standard Russiagate stuff through a Bernie-supporting (biased against Russiagate) peripheral insider and to make a great show of prosecuting her to give the leak more credibility than it would normally be given, from an audience (lefties) that was normally very critical.
It didn't work.
[+] [-] zzzeek|5 years ago|reply
Conspiracies just aren't any fun when they're blindingly obvious to anyone who can read .
[+] [-] tootie|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nr2x|5 years ago|reply
[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/11/what-if...
[+] [-] jancsika|5 years ago|reply
He also continues to rewrite/update the same plodding OpEd about how no one should forget that Democratic apparatchiks and pundits are also hypocritical, self-serving and untrustworthy asshats. Not the most incisive journalism by any metric, but again unrelated to Snowden leaks.
[+] [-] DevKoala|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kome|5 years ago|reply