Open Letter from Laura Poitras | Hacker News Reader

Open Letter from Laura Poitras

praxisfilms.org

277 pointsjashkenas91 comments

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.

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.

> 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.

All modern printers have this steganography feature.

"In October 2004, consumers first heard of the hidden feature, when it was used by Dutch authorities to track down counterfeiters who had used a Canon color laser printer." [1]

This is written in "PC World" in 2004 by journalist Wilbert de Vries. He now works for Tweakers, back then he worked for Webwereld. 2004 was mid-end heydays of Webwereld. I'm quite sure I read about this technology on Webwereld back then.

Later on, this got covered on CCC as well, not sure which years.

My point / opinion? The Intercept could have known (see above), and, given he nature of their content ([2]), should/ought to have known.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Machine_Identification_Code

[2] The fact they had Greenwald/Poitras on board says enough (they were key figures in the Snowden leaks). You can look at their content from the era 2017 if in doubt.

The whole point was that the Intercept had specialist security experts on staff who know this, but the reporter rushed the story, told his own sources in the intelligence community critical info without realizing, and never actually spoke to the Intercept security team.

The fact that the Editor-in-chief did not ensure their own processes were followed for an NSA leak is a failure.

Journalists and office staff in First Look's line of business should definitely be aware of these risks.

But it's certainly possible that they simply failed here. That possibility warrants an internal investigation, to determine the nature of the failure, and to signal internally and publically that they take their responsibility to sources seriously.

No organization likes to be criticized from within. But some organizations are strengthened by their reaction to criticism (whatever the source), and others are diminished.

Laura Poitras is a credible party. I'm inclined to believe her side of the story here.

Related (though not directly): Bellingcat is doing impressive work. https://www.bellingcat.com/

> I don't think I could reasonably expect a person from a journalism/liberal arts degree educational and work experience background to identify steganography.

Typing the whole leaked document into a brand new Word file does not require experienced background and would protect your sources against most steganography tricks

most steganography tricks

There are still variations in word ordering, word choice, included/omitted subtle details, etc. to watch out for.

> I don't think I could reasonably expect a person from a journalism/liberal arts degree educational and work experience background to identify steganography.

I agree with nearly everything you said, except this.

As others have noted, this sort of document tracing has been deployed and well-known for a long time. I would expect investigative journalists working the NatSec beat to have read a bit of other NetSec investigative journalism, and mention of things like this come up fairly regularly. Not to mention, contact with people like security researchers, EFF staff, etc. will all tend to expose you to information like this - it is part of the paranoid air people who discuss this stuff breathe.

Also, a bit of tradecraft is just part of an investigative journalist's job.

If I recall correctly, the Intercept people weren't accused (by anyone serious) of intentionally outing her, just of being dangerously incompetent to collaborate with.

Correct.

> 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.

Maybe not malicious, but definitely haphazard; they're dealing with incredibly sensitive information, from people in intelligence agenecies who do not hesitate to neutralize a potential threat. In all honesty, Reality got off easy, after the Snowden and Manning/Assange sagas it beceome clear the US has will not hesitation to chase people to the ends of the World, and in apply what the UN has stated to be torture in Assange's case, and outright inhumane pressure in Manning's case that has forced her to attempt suicide. I wouldn't be surprised if many of these leaks don't eventually end up with trips to a rendition camp under the guise of 'national security' the way some of the most jingoistic in Washington speak and vote and this goes for both R/D parties.

I honestly want to see Laura on a massive platform like Joe Roan so she can go in depth on OPSEC and INFOSEC for the common non tech user told from her very relevant position and elaborate on the many misgivings from the Intercept--it's very telling that Glenn, Laura and Edward have all departed from it and there seems to be a common theme here.

I'd also like to hear what Laura has to say about Jacob Applebaum's departure from the TOR Community for so long now, she touched on her relationship with him in her last documentary about Assange. I really miss Jacob's State of the Onion speeches at the CCC and him being a general thorn in in the side of most Nation states security apparatuses. Something never really felt right about his rape accusations, as they tried to get Julian on similar charges in Sweden with nearly no evidence and just a massive media campaign, but succeed in making Jacob a pariah as he is no where to be seen--even when his close friend and possible mentor Assange was wasting away in jail.

> .. as I recall, she shared documents from her workplace that either had printer steganography ID codes embedded into them .. None of which Winner was aware of the existence at the time ..

An 'intelligence specialist' doesn't know about protecting the source, I don't think so ;]

> 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...

Where does malice come into it?

I see the link talking about self interest and negligence.

Yeah - and as the old saying goes, it's not the crime, it's the coverup. Malice is not required.

Poitras and others have painted a grim picture of the processes and the lack of introspection / transparency that followed Winner's capture. That lack of accountability for those in charge now hangs over the entire organization.

As Poitras says, journalists make mistakes, and it's understandable. But in the response to them, the Intercept leadership seemed more interested in protecting their own skins than in addressing the concerns brought to light.

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.

> ...when they go after those you admire

I don't understand what this has to do with Poitras being let go.

Cross "The Intercept" off the list of organizations I donate to.

100% completely. This is disgraceful.

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.

Early Greenwald was interesting.

Recent Greenwald seems off the deep end, such as his flat assertion that nobody organized anything about 6 Jan on Parler, only on Facebook.

He used to uncover inconvenient facts, facts that challenged both sides’ tight narratives. Now he seems to cherry pick or manufacture fact-ish soundbites to push a contrarian or click-bait position. There’s not a lot of daylight between these, but I suspect the difference has to do with the tedious work needed for being a great reporter.

Early Greenwald method seemed to be “do the homework”, recent Greenwald method seems more akin to Fox’s opinion hosts the Fox legal team disclaims as nobody reasonably believing are real news.

>his flat assertion that nobody organized anything about 6 Jan on Parler, only on Facebook.

His accusation was that none of the thirteen people arrested actively used Parler, something he "did the homework" on by checking with Parler executives. Virtually all the criticism I see of Greenwald seems based on false strawman versions of his arguments ignoring what he is actually writing about.

Greenwald's behavior in recent years is, for all the world, like someone whose access to information is being ever-so-carefully managed so as to subconsciously lead him down a path to discredit himself and drive away his support group.

If that is what is happening, it is terrifying that it has been achieved. Such a capability might have been a goal of the original MK-ULTRA project. Its original purpose was, by the evidence, to test, on the US public, methods of thought control. An early project, to get people to believe the CIA were trying to use ESP for spying, was a rousing success: to this day, a strong majority of Americans still believe it.

For another application of their methods, consider the ground-swell of support for invading Iraq, despite every scrap of actual evidence showing that its casus belli was completely fallacious. QAnon might be one of their projects; it's weird enough, but just as likely someone else's. The whole recent Navy/UFOs business has all of their fingerprints.

Jon Ronson's book, "Men Who Stare at Goats" is a terrifying exploration of the development of the US pychological warfare apparatus and its experimentation on the American public. Equally as terrifying is the prospect of veterans of the program going into business for themselves.

In the spirit of not doing homeworking, you raise an unintended point on the value of our words.

Whether or not anyone agrees with you, you don't have a reputation, you haven't done meaningful research, and the accusations you've asserted under the flimsy guise of opinion are the kind of unsubstantiated and valueless commentary you'd expect from one of the less brazen corporate media outlets.

You've provided no defense of the basis of your intuition other than sprinkling a few "seems" around. Seems to whom, on what evidence?

That's the difference between someone who has cultivated a history of performing reputable journalism, defended under the scrutiny of editors, fact finders, and the public and low effort armchair experts, spin doctors, popular conspiracy theorists, and other soundbite spewing talking heads.

I'm not exempt, but my point is that when subjected to the same standards and scrutiny we might hold another to, especially on the internet, we don't often fare as well as we'd think.

I agree completely ... it's more like this was the final straw as my support was in part a "thank you" to Laura Poitras. I have to admit that I've gotten tired of ALL news sites as there are way too many pop-ups, ads, auto-playing audio/video, etc. Lately I've been getting news almost exclusively from https://lite.cnn.com - it has both the nostagia of the early web and the text-only nature of the CLI so it may be the perfect news outlet for me as a nerd.

For context: this follow the departure of the other co-founder of the The Intercept, Glenn Greenwald. https://greenwald.substack.com/p/my-resignation-from-the-int...

> "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."

What are you talking about? The story was worth reporting and it wasn’t until the election was over and verified that major news sources decided to push it to the public.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/09/politics/hunter-biden-tax-inv...

Greenwald was right in calling the bias.

So either the "laptop" was given to Giuliani, or to the custody of the FBI, which is it? If it was given to the FBI, how did Giuliani come into possession of a large number of files supposedly retrieved from it, and share them with any journalist who would listen?

The laptop was given to the FBI first and then someone from the FBI leaked it to Giuliani after the investigation was not moving. Once it became public a senate committee verified the validity of the evidence and the investigation made it to the public.

Edit: I stand corrected. The repair shop owner shared an image of the disk with Giuliani, after first sharing it with the FBI.

If I recall, it was the repair shop owner who shared an image of the hard drive with Giuliani's people. He thought the FBI wasn't doing enough with it.

Edit: Source https://www.delawareonline.com/story/news/2020/10/14/meet-wi...

Digital data is not hard to duplicate. Both can be true.

The repair shop made disk images (part of the repair process), then gave the laptop to the FBI, and then shared the disk images.

> What are you talking about? The story was worth reporting and it wasn’t until the election was over and verified that major news sources decided to push it to the public.

"Hunter Biden" is not one monolithic story. IIRC, Giuliani's story was all about that laptop (and trying to make it look like Joe Biden was involved), but that laptop may in fact have nothing to do with this tax probe. The existence of the latter doesn't necessarily validate the former.

According to the story you posted:

> Hints of the investigation emerged after President Donald Trump's personal attorney, Rudy Giuliani, helped orchestrate news stories centered on a laptop purported to belong to Hunter Biden and said to include his business documents and other personal material.

> The FBI took possession of the laptop in late 2019, according to a computer repairman in Delaware who showed reporters a copy of a subpoena. The subpoena is real, according to people briefed on the matter, but the FBI and prosecutors in Delaware have refused to confirm the existence of the investigation.

> It's unclear whether the laptop's contents are relevant to the ongoing federal probe and whether investigators can even use them, given potential chain of custody requirements for evidence.

Pay attention to that last paragraph.

It was actually Hunter’s business partner Bobulinsky that went on Fox News to claim that he was working for Biden, and first met him during a scheduled time that has been redacted from Biden’s public calendar.

No mainstream press with access to Joe Biden ever dared to ask Joe a question so that he could at least defend himself from the allegations.

From your link: > It's unclear whether the laptop's contents are relevant to the ongoing federal probe and whether investigators can even use them, given potential chain of custody requirements for evidence.

It really doesn't pass the smell test that it was actually Hunter's laptop. Unless he's majorly stupid (I suppose that's a possibility...), why would he just choose a random computer repair store and leave his laptop(s) there. According to snopes.com, the owner didn't even see Hunter drop off the laptop: https://www.snopes.com/news/2020/10/15/hunter-biden-laptop-g...

If I were Hunter Biden, I would certainly have connections who I can call and ask about fixing a laptop which has secret information, and I would check that they're not a Trump supporter first. OTOH, if it really was Hunter Biden and he wasn't an idiot, then him giving the laptop to some stranger would mean he was sure there were no secrets on that laptop. (Then again, people don't understand tech and he might've thought deleting a file removes all traces of it).

But Twitter and Facebook censoring the story isn't that neutral either, it's obvious who they wanted to win the election.

Hunter has suffered through documented periods of crack addiction and it was during one of these episodes that he lost the laptop.

Got a source for your assertion?

https://www.businessinsider.com/hunter-biden-opens-about-add...

That link doesn't suggest he was battling addiction in April 2019. Got a source that tells us he was in one of this episodes in April 2019? Or are you just another Twitterer who throws "facts" into the dumpster fire?

From Snopes: The Post reported that the saga started in April 2019, when a man identifying himself as Hunter Biden dropped the laptop off at a computer repair shop in the Biden family’s home state of Delaware. The laptop had been damaged by water.

Regardless of your politics, it doesn't take much to believe that a person known to have months-long crack binges went on another binge. Recovery is hard.

Sure, it's not impossible to believe, but DevKoala up there saying "yeah, he did that" with no evidence/verifiable sources, I'll assume he's just talking out of his ass.. (a trait shared by a certain political side)

You are right, it was wrong of me to assert he handed the laptop while intoxicated. Perhaps what I should have said is that given his recent history of addiction, his competence when handling important materials is in question.

Also, the laptop repair shop owner has gone on court to fight for his version of the story.

https://www.businessinsider.com/hunter-biden-laptop-repairma...

Thanks for the acknowledgement, sorry that I threw assumptions at you.

Greenwald's sources for his claim that (initially none, then walked back to no active) parler users weren't involved in the Capitol attacks was an un-named Parler exec, a claim which he published with zero fact-checking, since if quickly emerged there were rather a lot of active Parler users involved.

At this point he's just a laundering service for far-right scumbags.

Some context to the context:

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.

Greenwald is permanently wearing some kind of Democrat-hatred goggles that render everything he creates spastic and aligned with fascists purely to take the piss because he’s bitter.

I don’t think he could even see eye to eye with himself in the mirror at this point, he such an incoherent mess of poorly constructed anti-Democrat gripes.

I would trust Poitras’s take on this way, way more than Greenwald’s.

Yeah, I think Greenwald has blinders about Winner because what she leaked doesn't fit his narratives about the Dems and Russia. I wouldn't link his quitting because they tried to edit his Hunter Biden takes with Poitras' very legitimate outrage over not protecting a source.

I can't get in greenwald's head but if I had to make a judgement, I agree with you. The intercept decided not to publish greenwald's piece because the sourcing was too thin (in their opinion and mine, I get it if others don't agree), and he took it personally. I've reacted badly to this kind of thing too, so I get it I guess, but it still makes him a bitter man who can't handle the hit to his ego.

The intercept can decline to publish, that's their right. Greenwald had a contract where if they did decline a piece he could publish elswhere, that was his contractual right. He insisted on it as a founder so that he could not be silenced by an editorial board. Great. They don't want it, he publishes elsewhere life goes on.

But that didn't happen. They wanted to supress it. They tried to stop Greenwald from publishing it everywhere. He thinks the editors of the interecept did this because they had preferences on who should win the then upcoming US presidential election. I'm inclined to agree with him when you look at the correspondance. It's all been published by Greenwald at substack. His approach and his responnse all look extremely reasonable to me.

> but it still makes him a bitter man who can't handle the hit to his ego.

Can't disagree with that take on it enough. Makes him look like he has principles that he stands up for, to me. Indeed precisely that reputation is what got him the scoops and all those Journalism awards like say, the Pulitzer Prize.

The Intercept definitely did not try to suppress anything. Greenwald’s accusation that it amounted to censorship was beyond ridiculous. He wanted to publish a hatchet job against a Democrat, based on shoddy, unverified claims and mediocre, unverified physical evidence. The Intercept instead wanted to uphold bare minimum journalistic integrity and even offered to publish the piece if Greenwald would edit out the extremist rhetoric, claims of widespread liberal bias in professional news rooms, and unsubstantiated speculation against Hunter Biden that was purely playing into the hands of a fascist Republican administration.

Instead of adhering to these basic Journalism 101 bare minimum requirements, Greenwald decided to throw a tantrum and call it censorship, when really it is plain as day to any fair-minded outsider that there was utterly zero censorship towards Greenwald, the Hunter Biden story was crap and major news rooms were right to ignore it, and The Intercept did nothing wrong in that particular scenario.

> The Intercept definitely did not try to suppress anything.

I'm a little surprised by that response. It's so easy to check.

https://greenwald.substack.com/p/emails-with-intercept-edito...

"It would be unfortunate and detrimental to The Intercept for this story to be published elsewhere." --Betsy Reed

So that is stating very clearly: No we won't publish it. No you can't publish it elsewhere.

Now the rest is kind of separate but relevant.

For what it's worth now that the election is done, nobody actually disputes the content of those emails and that they are genuine. Do they? I've missed that if so. I don't think the Bidens ever suggested they were forged, which would have killed the story pretty quick. But that is an /entirely/ separate discussion. Hatchet job? Well that's an opinion and I don't think so at all. I think Hunter Biden's conduct was always going to be an issue for Joe and that it will be again. There's not a lot of doubt in /my/ mind that Hunter Biden has been paid large sums for something that isn't the honest, fair value work he has done. Maybe he took the money that was paid for the sake of that appearance and that's all he did? If his last name was Johnson and his father was a moderately successful professional he's not getting those jobs and that money. It STINKS. And you can hate trump and still have that stench penetrate your preference for "not Trump."

Make of the story Greenwald wrote what you will. There's been plenty of opportunity to falsify it and discredit it. Maybe that's still coming? I want to see it if so. It's certainly something we should know about if so. Something is not right there.

The idea that it should not be published is, well, not something I'd agree with any more than I'd agree that the NYT should not have published Trump's tax returns.

In my view Glenn has integrity. That means something. I don't doubt he would have written a similar story if the facts related to any powerful politician. Trump, McConnell, Pelosi, anyone. Do you?

> In my view Glenn has integrity. That means something. I don't doubt he would have written a similar story if the facts related to any powerful politician. Trump, McConnell, Pelosi, anyone. Do you?

I've read Greenwald since his pre-Snowden Salon days. Yes, I absolutely doubt that he would have written such an article against Trump.

As can be seen on his Twitter, he will occasionally post something mildly critical of Trump so that he can later point to it repeatedly as cover, with the rest of his US political energies devoted to ignoring and downplaying the administration's actions while attacking Democrats and liberals.

That's a massive call right there. What you're backing it with seems very thin to me.

I do doubt he'd bother writing a story everyone else is already reporting and writing. I have approaching zero doubt in the same circumstances concerning a story that suggests corruption that nobody else was writing that he would do it about Don jr, Eric, Ivanka, Jared Kushner or anyone in that orbit. I also believe he looks at Trump's Republicans and Biden's Democrats and finds them equally revolting. You and I can disagree with him on that if we choose to. The anti-Trump stories you mention that he points to? Yeah, not many others writing about Trump write those stories as a focus that I saw. Maybe you saw it differently? I don't want to use him as a repub-dem scoreboard or as my sole source of news so I'm absolutely fine with that. In fact even if he were an ardent Trump Republican supporter or ardent Democrat, (which I think is nonsense for what that's worth), I'd still want to read his stuff.

And for me that is what makes him interesting. He does not fit the "He's a dem/repub" so... But there do seem to be a lot of people who want to shoe-horn him into that line of thinking.

Separate to that the other thing I really like about Glenn is that it is easy to knowledgably disagree with him, (and I frequently, possibly even usually do). He makes that easy by, in my view, having the best mastery of that, (in terms of newspaper traditions) extremely modern writing technique, using the hyperlink. When he draws an inference from facts he links the source. I frequently follow that and look at it and think to myself that his inference is one possibility but I'm not especially sold on it. My own views are made more robust, altered somewhat or even changed by having been exposed to his writing even when I disagree with him. I really like that.

In my view his integrity, devotion to principle, willingness to support his argument with evidence and disdain for following the zeitgeist simply because it exists make him someone I want to read.

Just take each story on it's own. If it interests you follow the links he has and look at other reporting on it so you can make up your own mind and you might find like I do Glenn's stuff is worth your time.

> "It would be unfortunate and detrimental to The Intercept for this story to be published elsewhere." So that is stating very clearly: No we won't publish it. No you can't publish it elsewhere.

This is not logical implication at all.

> In my view Glenn has integrity. That means something. I don't doubt he would have written a similar story if the facts related to any powerful politician. Trump, McConnell, Pelosi, anyone. Do you?

I think that in fact he selects who he writes about a lot. He is not trying to be all sides equal objective. He also ignores evidence he dont like and uncritically believe people when it suits him.

In fact, it is part of his journalism philosophy. He calls journalistic objectivity myth, not something to strive for. (His arguments actually convicted me too. Altrought I dont trust him anymore, this one did stayed with me.).

> "It would be unfortunate and detrimental to The Intercept for this story to be published elsewhere." --Betsy Reed

> So that is stating very clearly: No we won't publish it. No you can't publish it elsewhere.

You are just embarrassing yourself here.

> “Make of the story Greenwald wrote what you will. There's been plenty of opportunity to falsify it and discredit it.“

It has already been widely discredited by every major news room, including the Republican-leaning Wall Street Journal.

At this point, there is utterly no sense in which a person can believe the unsubstantiated allegations against Hunter Biden or the completely ridiculous found laptop story, other than literally supporting a fascist presidential regime.

What you’re suggesting is a deeply radical and extreme point of view that has been overwhelmingly dismissed by every credible news source. You’re taking a stance on both the Greenwald story and the Hunter Biden story that is wildly and ridiculously decoupled from reality, in a seriously extreme manner that deserves to be called out as totally debunked and inappropriate.

I can't help anyone who thinks that is Betsy Reed, in response to a question about publishing the article elsewhere saying "yes, go ahead and do that" I don't see holding that view as embarrassing and genuinely can't see how it could be. Do you really, honestly see it like that?

The story has been discredited right up to the point of the emails. Nobody I'm aware of has said they are fake. Not even the Bidens. That makes them interesting concerning a presidential candidate and his response to shady dealing in his own immediate family based on his political profile. That makes them interesting if you are a Democrat. That makes them interesting if you think Biden is a great candidate and the possible person to be President.

If you really want Trump gone at all costs you might want to suppress it. That's a huge cost.

You don't have to trust Rudy Giuliani and i don't as far as i can drop kick him. Does anyone? The "it's the Russians" as a source also lacks evidence.

Where the hell is the laptop from? How did it happen? No clue. Why isn't that being followed with some vigor? It's strange that it isn't, no?

I sure won't be hitching my wagon to the honesty and integrity of Hunter Biden. The emails don't detract at all from the stench.

There's still a belief that we got Trump because Russians and Wikileaks and not because some run of the mill Democrat party corruption came to light and was widely reported on. There's still a belief that reporting on that Hilary Democrat corruption was doing the work of Russia. You either decide that it's your job to report on corruption every single time it comes to light regardless of who or you don't. Washington corruption is endemic. Perhaps we can agree on that.

"Inappropriate" I'd agree with. We clearly see that very differently. I want Glenn being inappropriate regarding the powerful. I'd like it if more journalists were inappropriateb when it comes to highlighting corruption.

>I don't think Greenwald and Poitras see eye to eye on this one.

This: https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/1349790954107138050

Suggests otherwise.

I find it weird how the co-founders were fired or basically forced to resign. Shouldn't they be the ones with the most power?

When external funding is involved and there are determined parties, things will happen. It happens all too often.

When they took the investor’s money, Greenwald and Poitras both explicitly decided to focus almost exclusively on their jobs rather than becoming media execs; they weren’t their own boss as much as they had an arrangement where the boss would never speak. Obviously that was a strategic mistake on their part, in hindsight, but there is no proof they would have been good managers anyway. I guess they underestimated how quickly a well can be poisoned by just a few individuals, once steering is agreed up top.

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.

She signed a document agreeing to keep secrets. That only requires modest reading skills.

Part of that agreement is an oath to uphold the Constitution. The military also says you have a “duty to disobey” (as some call it) illegal orders.

If the government is committing illegal acts, it’s in the interest of the citizens to know. Imagine if the government snatched people off the street and made them disappear. One of those police officers tells the press, and is subsequently arrested for violating an unlawful NDA. Is the officer in the wrong there?

Should everything be declassified? No! There absolutely is a need to keep things secret. But the government’s knee jerk reaction to everything has led to a “classify everything and don’t ask questions” mentality. I’ve heard this is because they’re worried those in charge fear they have broken some laws (either knowingly or unknowingly). The solution to that is not to classify things, but to investigate and fix the problem. The problem (no pun intended) is that the government doesn’t do that. They double down on their lies and half truths which leads to situations like Clapper testifying to Congress that the NSA wasn’t doing the thing that they were doing.

@kevin_thibedeau: "She signed a document agreeing to keep secrets. That only requires modest reading skills."

Perhaps, the leak and the subsequent outing was part of a deep-state plot to legitimize the assertion that Russia manipulated the 2016 United States election to get their man elected President.

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.

I highly suspect that whole story, 'Reality Winner' was outed by some yellow dots in the printout.

I just don't think that enough people are paying attention to the disappearing freedom of information and expression in America.

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.

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.

We are going to have fabulously rich 1% more than ever in the history of human kind, free from all checks and bounds, they can just dictate what is "fake news" or "alt-right" or whatever taboo label.

Even if we ever saw Jeffrey Epstein's tapes, a huge chunk of the population would deny it as "fake news" because it was reported by an "media outlet with poor reputation".

> 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.

It didn't work.

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.

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 .

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.

[0] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/11/what-if...

Greenwald did a quite an amazing job with Bolsonaro. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/25/world/americas/glenn-gree...

Fair, that's a good point.

Greenwald's work exposing the corruption of Sérgio Moro dwarfs his work exposing the NSA. Essentially, he obtained documents that proved Moro stage managed the prosecution's arguments in the case that banned incumbent President Lula da Silva from seeking reelection. This cleared the field for Bolsenaro, who put Moro in charge of the federal judiciary. Where Greenwald's reporting on NSA changed neither policy or public opinion, his reporting on Moro has transformed the political situation in Brazil and caused Moro to resign.

How is this relevant? Poitras is highlighting that an informant was not protected accordingly, and that the Intercept is no longer a trustworthy resource.

I think the Intercept discredited themselves as a place for sources to go after Reality Winner got arrested, so I've never seen the point of the enterprise past that event. Otherwise, my point is more she's complaining about being fired, but as far as I can tell, she hasn't produced much reporting. I still respect what she and Greenwald did, but I think Gellman has actually continued doing good work whereas they haven't impressed me as much past the one big scoop.

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.

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