Comment by drzaiusapelord
8 years ago
>This was a significant clue that The Intercept did not have to give up.
I have no idea why people are leaking to rinky-dink operations like the Intercept. If you want to leak, then leak to the Washington Post or New York Times. I can't imagine the Intercept having the expertise to handle such documents. This was a fairly obvious screw up.
I also question their methods of receiving and storing such documents and if they aren't compromised by one or more nation state intelligence services. Are these documents being stored through a third party email or web server? Is there end-to-end encryption?
The copier explanation may be a believable fiction as not to reveal other sources.
You know who the intercept is, right? It was started by Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, specifically for safely handling, processing, and releasing the Snowden documents and others like it.
Personally I would trust them MUCH more than the New York Times. Well, unless the documents were specifically only damaging to Trump.
Here's how Greenwald initially handled Snowden's leak [1]:
Snowden anonymously sent him an e-mail saying he had documents he wanted to share, and followed that up with a step-by-step guide on how to encrypt communications, which Greenwald ignored. Snowden then sent a link to an encryption video, also to no avail.
“It’s really annoying and complicated, the encryption software,” Greenwald said as we sat on his porch during a tropical drizzle. “He kept harassing me, but at some point he just got frustrated, so he went to Laura.”
From another source [2] I cited in another comment:
"it took Greenwald several more months and help from experts before he could learn relatively basic tools like PGP encryption."
That's not exactly trust-inspiring, I'd say.
[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/18/magazine/laura-poitras-sno...
[2] https://www.dailydot.com/layer8/edward-snowden-gpg-for-journ...
1. That doesn't refute or otherwise respond meaningfully to parent's points.
2. It makes clear that providing better channels to enable legitimate whistleblowers to find a publication channel was critically important.
3. It's exceedingly easy for anyone to ignore a critical insight -- whether it's some annoying anonymous leaker, or an odd set of lab results, monitoring readings, etc. Those insights are critical in large part because they fall outside norms and expectations. (This is, generally, a major block to creativity.)
4. There are a lot of contacts which aren't of mind-blowing significance. Filtering the noise is another problem.
5. Greenwald and The Intercept were specifically created to address these shortcomings. Among The Intercept's staff is Micah Lee, technologist with the EFF. (I've pinged Lee on Mastodon over the Intercept's gross failure here -- it is a massive fuckup.)
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Who started it has no weight, that is just an appeal to authority. What does matter is how they conduct themselves and they made enough mistakes here to avoid them like the plague if you have something important.
>Glenn Greenwald
Uh, I suggest you read about how poorly he handled the Snowden materials and how he's about as tech savvy as my grandpa. This fuck-up alone is inexcusable.
Why is this downvoted, it is factually correct. Greenwald did not appear to be at all tech savvy or prepared to deal with such sensitive info. And this fuck up certainly does nothing to improve the picture.
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Notably, this article specifically points out a much more obvious NYT screwup - they released a Snowden doc using digital PDF 'black highlights' that didn't destroy the underlying data.
That's a mistake I think most security-conscious, tech-savvy non-professionals would avoid. The printer steganography here is a substantially more subtle error than the one we already say the NYT commit.
Even after this fuck up?
> Are these documents being stored through a third party email or web server? Is there end-to-end encryption?
This is something that can be learned with a few minutes research, so raising it as "questioning their methods" seems like FUD.
The answer is yes, there is end-to-end encryption handled via Tor. Using SecureDrop, the same tool as the Washington Post and New York Times. Treating that as some kind of distinction between these organizations is absurd.