Comment by mentalpiracy
8 years ago
It's certainly not immaterial.
The Intercept did not encourage her to steal this information, nor did it give her any direction on how to do so. She chose her own method of exfiltrating the data, and in this case it turned out to be an quickly identifiable one. She knew this document was going to be published by the Intercept; that was the entire point of leaking it. Once published, regardless of form, you can bet that the FBI would have agents knocking on the Intercept's door asking to see the physical source material.
Furthermore, In order to prove the veracity of its published claims, the Intercept provides its source documents - if they do not, they simply open themselves up to accusations of fake news and falsified material. Any editing they do to the document will be ammunition for the FAKE NEWS crowd - so where is the compromise here?
The compromise is that you should assume that if the material is genuine that someone will end up in a large amount of trouble if you go about your verification round in a dumb way. That she stole the information and made mistakes does not excuse the Intercept for making mistakes of their own.
Greenwald is not located in the United States for a reason (so good luck knocking on that door), and if they wanted to verify the documents they could have done so with a bit more care.
Assuming the text did not contain steganographic tricks (yes, that works) they could have cited back a few paragraphs and the document title. That would have been enough.
I partly agree with your concerns that the Intercept should be more cautious about attribution of leaks, although there may not have been anything they could have done to protect this alleged source in this situation. I just wanted to respond to
> Greenwald is not located in the United States for a reason (so good luck knocking on that door),
Greenwald has said he moved to Brazil because he wanted to be with his partner and that was the solution that they chose; at the time, one couldn't sponsor an immigrant visa for a same-sex partner in the United States.
This document wasn't reported by Glenn Greenwald, but rather by Matthew Cole, Richard Esposito, Sam Biddle, Ryan Grim, who all appear to live in the United States. Almost all of the Intercept's reporters who report on and publish leaked classified materials live and work in the U.S.
> That would have been enough.
While you have some good points, I think hanging your argument on a 'would' is not really convincing :)
As opposed to sending the originals back to them...
I am trying to come up with a suitable analogy to illustrate how stupid this is. I imagine a WWII intercept of an Enigma message being decoded and the clerk in charge then calling up the German High Command to verify the accuracy of the decoder. It is totally baffling to me that they did this in the way described without for one second thinking about how vulnerable their source was.