Comment by qq66
8 years ago
Something smells fishy here. How did the Intercept maintain enough opsec to stay in contact with Snowden (who would have dropped them like a hot potato if they didn't seem competent) and then do this, with the same general staff in place?
From what I learned in Citizenfour, Snowden had to walk his contacts Laura Poitras(Citizenfour maker)/The Intercept through all the steps needed before he would communicate with them, and this latest person mistakenly trusted The Intercept with the original paper document (instead of passing it through a b/w filter, second step as recommended by the link).
I believe you're wrong...
Before they even meet, Snowden asked Greenwald to set-up PGP/GPG so they can securely talk/he can tell them what he has, Greenwald didn't manage to do that/ignored this "anonymous person", Snowden found that Laura had a GPG key, and knew Greenwald, so he asked her to help him set that up. This all happened pre-Intercept, Greenwald was working for The Guardian at that time.
Despite his technical ineptitude, Greenwald was the only journalist Snowden trusted with the info, he didn't go to NYTimes after the NYT delayed a story about surveillance during the Bush admin until after Bush's reelection, he was afraid the NYT would just go straight to the government before publication, asking "So is this story legit?"...
> How did the Intercept maintain enough opsec to stay in contact with Snowden
It was the Guardian who maintained opsec to stay in contact with Snowden, and even then it took plenty of handholding from Snowden himself.
It might not be The Intercept, although timing suggests it was. She could have sent it to multiple organizations, one (based in Atlanta, perhaps CNN) sent them to NSA for "verification" according to [1]
[1] https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/06/06/contractor_leaked_r...
A) People make mistakes B) Snowden is likely more savvy about his own opsec C) The Intercept is more than 1 person.
It's interesting that the reaction by many here isn't "gee, this was an unfortunate mistake, but the work the Intercept does is valuable, so let's hope they do a better job going forward."
Instead, it's more along the lines of "The Intercept should never be trusted, they need to shut down!" without any discussion of how or who or what to use to disseminate national security leaks going forward. Sounds an awful lot like cheap opportunism from people who didn't even like the Intercept to begin with.
1. The message, from multiple messengers, is diverse.
2. There are people who'd like to see The Intercept shut down. Any excuse will serve a tyrant, as Aesop noted, some time ago. http://www.bartleby.com/17/1/2.html
3. My own view is very much "this was a massive fuck-up on the part of The Intercept, who have staff with opsec talent (Micah Lee) on board for specifically this purpose, and I hope to see a post-mortem on the situation, how the Intercept failed, and what it plans to change in future."
I'd pay close attention, for now, in #2, though.
Snowden was is Hong Kong before he gave anything to anyone
Laura had a flash drive with some documents, which she gave to Glenn on their flight there. He spent most of the flight reading through those documents.
But Snowden was already out of the USA at that point, right? That's how I remember it. Or at the very least he was out of the USA before anything got published.
the intercept != greenwald