Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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