How the NSA successfully manage to prevent the Washington Post and friends from discovering and reporting on this malicious backdoor? They've been sitting on these documents for a decade. Are the journalists just that *uncurious* about the deep contents of the documents they hold exclusive access to? Was this some kind of organizational failing?
I suspect when a trove of documents is big enough, newspaper readers lose interest before you run out of documents. I mean, even on this tech forum hardly anyone knows who Cavium are, let alone your average Washington Post reader.
Maybe the moral of the story is that future snowdens should leak to selected law firms instead of selected journalists? If there's one organization designed to comb through large documents for details and understand the impacts to potential parties, it is law organizations. Put 2-3 in time competition to make cases out of the documents and it will be a scramble race for justice.
Law firms aren't terribly entrepreneurial. Absent somebody paying them their hourly rate, I suspect not a single document would be read. Newspapers regularly take risks deploying humans to investigate issues without any assurance there will be a story at the bottom, but even the newspaper business has less appetite for that these days (as an aside, I suspect it's that margin that the financial investors have exploited -- at the expense of high quality reporting).
And they make money by going after low-hanging fruit. Ever wonder why they advertise 90%+ success rates and work on contingency? Because if your case isn't easy, you aren't their customer.
More importantly, there's money out the other end for them. The payoff is more questionable for information from Snowden leaks. Yes, I guess a journalistic outlet can get a big scoop and that drives eyeballs which leads to advertisers... But that's pretty different from the ambulance-chaser payout.
We're such a weird society when it comes to enforcing laws on business. It's all "scummy" behavior.
For examples: Accessibility laws, consumer protection laws, and privacy laws.
It's a trivial matter to determine which websites don't comply with the easy targets of accessibility. Yet the concept of running such a scanner, automatically, and charging for corrections, is seen as predatory behavior.
There was an article about grocery pricing with obvious collusion, dark practices, and misinformation yet nothing is done. Business as usual, people need to understand it and work around it. Problem is, it's clearly outside the realm of the average intellectual ability.
Predatory behavior is everywhere. I don't feel compelled to list even a single example.
If the lawyer chasing the ambulance results in a law being followed instead of ignored, that is a positive thing.
You'd be surprised. Top journalism organizations do this kind of thing with tremendous efficiency. The Pandora Papers were impressive for exactly that reason.
Then your risk identifying yourself in the Ashley Madison leak. You run the risk of not getting your message out in the Snowden case. The biggest threat is future publishing which is why so many countries broke laws made up charges going after Wikileaks.
> newspaper readers lose interest before you run out of documents
So.. what's your case here? It would be so expensive to host and publish the documents that they would be unable to recoup their investment based upon lack of interest?
> hardly anyone knows who Cavium are, let alone your average Washington Post reader.
Oh.. I don't know.. maybe that's because no one has reported on it and explained why it would be important?
There's a lot of circular reasoning present to create excuses for an entity that really doesn't need or deserve it.
If only. The biggest problems right now are limited context size and basic security, including having to share such documents with God-knows-how-many third parties.
Tangent, but we use Azure instead of OpenAI due to data-retention concerns. To ensure nobody's inputting anything classified or proprietary, Legal demanded implementation of an "AI safety" tool...so we demoed one that ships all prompts to a third party's regex-retraction API.
So you never know who ends up the recipient of your LLM prompt, where it's getting logged to, who's reviewing those logs, etc. Even some local models require execution of arbitrary code, and Gradio ships telemetry data. Uploading Snowden's docs into a black box is a good way to catch a ride in a black van.
The snowden leak was huge and reverberated for weeks. There were lots of followups.
However at the time it was the more sexy things like tapping google's fibre and backdoors in cisco's kits that were more interesting. This is because the public could understand those things and therefore it sold papers.
The difference between "cisco, dell and many other leading manufacturers shipped backdoors in their kit" and "cavium the small provider you've not really heard of" is large.
Most people reading the snowden stuff will have assumed that the NSA had put in backdoors to most things.
Snowden leaked a shit ton of documents, the vast majority of which had absolutely nothing to do with any kind of NSA wrongdoing. Journalists then had to go through and try to figure out what these documents actually meant (which they frequently misunderstood). Obviously they're still doing it to today.
As a general rule when criminal conspiracies are taken to task, they don't retain a right to privacy for their communications that aren't about the criminal conspiracy. Rather it all comes out in court. I understand why Snowden released the way he did, and given how it kept attention on the subject for longer than Binney/Klein it was probably the right call. But there should have also been an escrow/intent to dump the whole trove raw after some time period.
>As a general rule when criminal conspiracies are taken to task, they don't retain a right to privacy for their communications that aren't about the criminal conspiracy. Rather it all comes out in court.
That doesn't seem to be true. There are many court cases involving criminal conspiracies where you cannot find unrelated information about the involved people.
"in court" may have been a bit too strong, but police do generally have carte blanche to the entirety of someone's private life. For most people the police show up, confiscate anything that might possibly be evidence, damaging it or at least denying its use for several years. Never mind what happens to people, who often get arrested first and then sorted out later.
Due to the severe corruption of our institutions, the investigators in this case are the public. A time period of a decade is more than enough time to recall all the HUMINT assets that might be harmed by such disclosure.
Do you really think the entire American IC is a "criminal conspiracy", or are you just trying to justify the fact that Snowden is an angry and vindictive sharepoint admin who simply dumped everything he had access to without regard for what was actually in those documents?
Yes. By the straightforward standards that non-governmental criminal conspiracies are prosecuted, a large chunk of the NSA is engaged in a criminal conspiracy. We don't hold back on prosecuting other criminal conspiracies just because their associations produce other results like financially supporting their communities and coaching their kids' soccer teams.
I don't think the journos were lazy, and I don't think there was an organisational failing. The Guardian, in particular, evidently fell out with Snowden and his collaborators; they turned on him. I assume that was coordinated with Washpo and Spiegel. That is: I think there was a decision made, to stop publishing information from the Snowden trove.
I don't know what the reason for the betrayal was. I'm pretty sure Alan Rusbridger knows though. He resigned as Editor-in-chief shortly after these events.
I don't get why whistleblowers rely on newspaper publishers to unpack their leaks for the public; it's not as if the press are known for either their honesty or their scruples.
Are you kidding? WaPo serves the intelligence community.
>After creation of the CIA in 1947, it enjoyed direct collaboration with many U.S. news organizations. But the agency faced a major challenge in October 1977, when—soon after leaving the Washington Post—famed Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein provided an extensive exposé in Rolling Stone.
Citing CIA documents, Bernstein wrote that during the previous 25 years “more than 400 American journalists…have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency.” He added: “The history of the CIA’s involvement with the American press continues to be shrouded by an official policy of obfuscation and deception.”
Bernstein’s story tarnished the reputations of many journalists and media institutions, including the Washington Post and New York Times. While the CIA’s mission was widely assumed to involve “obfuscation and deception,” the mission of the nation’s finest newspapers was ostensibly the opposite.
The WaPo is relentlessly pro-US and pro-'intelligence community' in its writings today, too. It's transparent. Idk how it could be missed, even without knowing the history. Just read a couple articles about contemporary whistleblowers or US involvement in the Syrian civil war or the war in Ukraine or whatever.
Support or criticism for the intelligence community became very partisan during Trump's campaign and presidency. Once something like this becomes partisan, the average political creature loses some degree of rationality for it. The IC becomes patriotic good guys, stalwart defenders of American democracy standing up to fascism; their past and present malfeasance goes unnoticed, forgotten, or simply ignored. This is how the WaPo's relentless pro-IC stance could be missed; they've been telling a lot of people what they want to hear and all people are less critical and suspicious of things that support their biases and prejudices.
There was also a German ex-journalist (dr. Udo Ulfkotte) who wrote a book about how journalists (in Germany and EU I suppose) are “bought” by intelligence agencies like the CIA:
I personally had my eyes opened during the run up to the Iraq war in 2022. Pretty much every single news org with national recognition seemed completely incapable of the smallest amount of critical thought. They would basically parrot the whitehouse/etc press releases, and never question a single thing in them.
So, the behavior you point out is enabled by politicians who show such bad judgment in such a critical area, and yet few if any lost their positions over their votes. I personalty have been wondering for the past few years how many of our leaders are actually there of their own accord, rather than put there by various backroom cabals of business leaders and intelligence (foreign and domestic) agencies that want to put their thumbs on the scale with a representative or dozen. How would you ever know, except by their behavior.
This happens a lot. I've read stories too about British journalists being cultivated by their intelligence services to make sure that the leaks they want to be published get published and the leaks they don't want published don't.
There's a lot of pontificating about the virtuous, important, selfless job journalists do, but when they're manipulated to such an extent not just by the Government and intelligence agencies but also by their corporate sponsors... It's hard to not be a bit cynical...
It's quite a bit more subtle than that. News organization have their sources that are in the intelligence community. They use each other. Sometimes the journalist wants to use their sources for information. Other times their sources feed them disinformation disguised as information. Other times they want a back channel to leak some real information but can't be seem as coming from a government source. Being a good journalist is hard and often doesn't pay very well.
The twitter files showed government agencies were coercing Twitter into suppressing information. I would find it hard to believe they don't also coerce at newspapers, particularly with the cozy relationship they already have with "anonymous sources" from said agencies.
> The twitter files showed government agencies were coercing Twitter into suppressing information.
They very much did not. Twitter's own lawyers when pressed in court (the place where there are consequences for lying) admitted that nothing in the "Twitter Files" cited by Donald Trump actually show that the social media platform was a tool of government censorship.
The 5th circuit court of appeals found that there was coercion. Read the first 5 or so pages and the last 5 or so pages, specifically that it upheld the unconstitutionality of provision 6 and at the end it lists the offending agencies.
> So, the district court reasoned, the Plaintiffs were “likely to succeed” on their claim because when the platforms moderated content, they were acting under the coercion (or significant encouragement) of government officials, in violation of the First Amendment, at the expense of both private and governmental actors.
You are moving the goalposts. First it was "gov policing speech" which there was no proof of. Now it's "gov coercion/encouragement" which is entirely up to how you subjectively interrupt what interactions occured.
Which fine, lets go over the facts. Any exchanges of information were voluntary, at times set up under the initiative of social media companies themselves, and the vast majority of instances of mis/disinfo flagged by the gov were not acted upon by platforms. Social media companies could have stopped talking to the gov at any time (a few did), and they didn't have to act on anything.
Not exactly the picture of an authoritarian government policing speech. The Twitter Files were set up as an exercise in confirmation bias for people that believe gov was censoring speech (and targeting them), which is why they disappeared so quickly when a lack of proof was highlighted in court. It served its purpose.
Reading this document, it's in extremely bad faith:
> We start with coercion. On multiple occasions, the officials coerced
the platforms into direct action via urgent, uncompromising demands to
moderate content. Privately, the officials were not shy in their requests—
they asked the platforms to remove posts “ASAP”
The ASAP was in reference to a case of revenge porn, something not only against the Twitter TOS, but illegal.
> When the platforms did not comply, officials followed up by asking why posts
were “still up,” stating (1) “how does something like [this] happen,” (2)
“what good is” flagging if it did not result in content moderation, (3) “I don’t
know why you guys can’t figure this out,” and (4) “you are hiding the ball,”
Again, this was in reference to illegal content (iirc an OFAC sanctioned entity not only posting content but making money off it). Using such language when a private company isn't following the law isn't "coercion for censorship".
This reads like a political document by partisan lawyers. This document makes no attempt to distinguish between actually illegal content and suggested violations of TOS (such as when spreading COVID disinfo was against Twitter's rules, which it no longer is). It provides no context for how this "coercion" was mostly civil servants either pointing out violations of Twitter's own rules, or federal crimes. Either way, inaction was baffling, as communicated.
But, again, the mere fact that Twitter ignored so much of this, so often, proves they clearly didn't feel the need to respond to gov requests as if they had to.
We live in a world where people believe things with no proof (therefore with no reason), but a little humility and less certainty might benefit the conversation.
Wait until you realize their footprints on Wallstreet, many of which openly admit their former employment.. Once a company man always a company man.. or something.
WP is a very close ally to the government agencies in general. That's where it gets those juicy "anonymous government sources claim ..." news. If WP all of sudden wanted to prevent democracy from dying "in darkness" as their motto says, it would mean to start digging a lot harder going against the government as a whole. Don't think they are prepared for it.
Well yes, why do you think the noise died after the initial hype of Snowden leaking the docs? Do you honestly believe the mechanisms of for-profit journalism lets journalists be journalists? They got to eat and in this world you don't eat by covering yesterdays news.
NSA didn't have to lift a finger. Wait a few weeks and people move on to the next story, this should not be a shocking revelation to anyone.
The British intelligence agencies forced the Guardian to literally shred the laptop with the contents while they were in the swing of running headlines about the things it was revealing.
While the USA and the UK are different, I suspect there was a bit more difficult for the NSA than "didn't have to lift a finger".
According to Appelbaum, the person publishing these new leaks,
>Primarily these documents remain unpublished because the journalists who hold them fear they will be considered disloyal or even that they will be legally punished
Whether that's true I can't say. But as a reminder, despite constant claims that Assange is being extradited over hacking charges, something like 17 of his 18 charges are over publishing documents.
WaPo, NYT, et. al. are tied to DOD and the intel community. They are the anonymous sources that provide many of their story ideas as well as quotes and sourcing. That doesn't come for free.
>How the NSA successfully manage to prevent the Washington Post and friends from discovering and reporting on this malicious backdoor? They've been sitting on these documents for a decade.
I personally suspect that security services visited the newspapers a few days after the leak [1], and ever since then, every article has been about stuff that wouldn't be a surprise to rival security services.
Sure - it was a surprise to the public. But rival security services I'm sure would expect US controlled backdoors in US made technology.
Some of them are deputies for the state. State-run-media, or Media-run-state, whichever you prefer.
The FBI and CIA had agents inside Twitter and Facebook. Of course they have them inside news agencies as well. Part of it over time is access-media, the ones that play ball get the stories and info, the others get weeded out.
It's illegal to lie under oath to Congress, did James Clapper go to jail? It's illegal to sleep with underage girls, how many people on Epstein's client list went to jail?
mainstream journalists are incredibly unreliable. it's absolutely clear to everyone that you cannot trust nyt and similar publications. i never read them anyway, and when I do come across articles on topics I'm knowledgeable about, i'm appalled by how wrong they are.
Modern journalists are just terminally online twitter heads.
"Why go out or talk to anyone when I can just stay home and be on twitter all day!?!"
It's the absolute worst outcome for journalism, and none of publications seem to care. If I had a publication the first thing I would do is ban twitter use (and probably go bankrupt because of it.)
publications probably encourage it so they can slash the operating budgets. if people are "staying at home on twitter all day", then they don't need office space. if they are willing to stay home to be on twitter all day, they are probably much younger less experienced/credentialed employee so they're cheaper too!
>i never read them anyway, and when I do come across articles on topics I'm knowledgeable about, i'm appalled by how wrong they are.
I never do that, except when I do. What kind of soapbox are you trying to stand on. It looks more like a cardboard box collapsing under the weight of your own hubris.
I get the suspicion of news outlets of any kind. It doesn't matter what stream the journalists are fished out of, but they cannot all be subject matter experts in all subjects. This is also an expectation full of hubris on your part.
exactly.
When I read things I KNOW about, it's incredibly obvious that the news entertainment business (which WP and NYT and CNN and Fox all are) exist to serve the prejudices of their audience.
A few times I made the mistake to let myself be interviewed by a newspaper who wanted an "expert" on something (flattering, but meh); something copletely benign and harmless, nothing political. They twisted my words to serve up stuff that fit what their "normal reader" already believed about the world.
It's crazy to me that people pay for access to these outlets. I wouldn't pay for any content except from individual journalists and a few very small outlets, and even then, would immediately stop if things ever turn for the worse.
Well, COINTELPRO certainly didn't : we've got recent examples about how the FBI monitored the Parler group discussions that were planning the January 6 2021 United States Capitol rally - including convincing some of the most risky elements to not participate, and (supposedly) warned Washington law enforcement about it well in advance.
Which is fine I guess, as long as it doesn't go into the more abusive examples listed.
One thing that jumped at me when (re-?)reading the letter to MLK from the FBI : first you have some very informal speech :
"look into your heart", "you are done", "you are [] an evil, abnormal beast", "there is only one thing for you left to do"
Then SUDDENLY : "You have just 34 days in which to do it (this exact number has been selected for a specific reason, it has definite practical significance)."
Lol, talk about a change in tone, I wonder if MLK noticed it ? (The specific reason being Christmas, but still...)
>NSA also pays the owner of the Washington Post upwards of $10 billion for cloud services
That's not the only publication that had access to the documents. From wikipedia
>the first of Snowden's documents were published simultaneously by The Washington Post and The Guardian. [...] The disclosure continued throughout 2013, and a small portion of the estimated full cache of documents was later published by other media outlets worldwide, most notably The New York Times (United States), the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Der Spiegel (Germany), O Globo (Brazil), Le Monde (France), L'espresso (Italy), NRC Handelsblad (the Netherlands), Dagbladet (Norway), El País (Spain), and Sveriges Television (Sweden).
>More likely an IC plant in the editorial office that said "NSA Backdoors Don't Share."
Wouldn't be more likely that a plant would actually not say that, but rather come up with something else? Seems much more likely that a plant would promote some other aspect of a leak that would be less damaging as the story. Or even possibly making part of the document dump disappear.
Supposed news organizations openly employ spooks as commentators on things like foreign policy.
Journalists knowingly report lies, acting as the mouthpiece of the government.
We know at least one news organization had the whole Epstein story locked down and they buried it because they were afraid they’d lose access to the royal family for future news/puff pieces.
You think you hate journalists enough, but you don’t.
In the US, we have this passionate fantasy about Woodward and Bernstein and the Post and the Pulitzer and the movie and Redford and Hoffman and the Academy Award, about how the Press played the part of the "fourth estate" as the Founders intended, and rooted out a corrupt politician, and forced him to resign. It's all bullshit. The people who broke into the Watergate Hotel were CIA, Woodward was formerly CIA, and "Deepthroat" was a Deputy Director of the FBI. It was all a deep state plot to get rid of Nixon. Any time the deep state wants to get rid of a politician, the "press" does its "job" by exposing things. When the deep state likes a politician, the "press" ALSO does its "job" by covering things up. Look absolutely no further than Hunter Biden. The hypocrisy is utterly astounding, even to someone who is deeply cynical at this point. The rest of the US needs to wake up to the fact that the press is just another branch of the deep state, and stop pretending that there's ANYTHING useful being fed to us through ANY of the large media corporations.
> about how the Press played the part of the "fourth estate" as the Founders intended
The rest of your post is quite the bullshit (easily probable with publicly accessible archives bullshit at that), but this is also wrong. The mythological god-like creatures that crafted America as their divine powers ordained it didn't "intend" for the press to be "the fourth power". That term was first used after the US revolution, and in the UK. You're just retconing stuff into your mythology, and everyone knows that doesn't work and leaves a poor taste.
I have no idea what you're on about. The Founders of the US absolutely intended the press to be the last counterbalance on government overreach. It's literally why it's the First Amendment. Getting bogged down by terminology is perfect HN pedantry. Well done, sir!
* it's an amendment, so not part of the original text
* "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press" . I don't know, it doesn't sound to me like the freedom of the press was the most pressing matter when that amendment was written considering the ordering, and again, the fact that it's an amendment and not part of the original text where the rest of the "checks and balances" are written.
They got the Constitution ratified based on the promise of the first ten Amendments to be passed later. The fact that they weren't part of the original document was just the political process they used. I don't know; maybe read a book.
Wow, the deep state is so powerful that they got Nixon to say on tape that he was going to try to get the CIA to falsely use national security as an excuse to stonewall an FBI investigation. Poor innocent Nixon was no match for their telepathic powers.
What's so hard to understand? Nixon was literally caught on tape[0] conspiring to cover up CREEP payments; it's a bit funny to claim Watergate was all a deep stage conspiracy to screw Nixon when he was recorded committing crimes.
I never claimed anything about his character or his innocence. I don't understand that you don't seem to understand that this was part of the process. They used his narcissism and paranoia to effect the plan.
