Comment by Izkata
8 months ago
I'd go with b: They've been talking for a while about finding information leaks, and the messages themselves seem a bit staged. They probably did it intentionally with different people, with slightly different wording, and because of which version got published they just identified a leak.
A barium meal is for finding leakers within an organization. IF you send material to a journalist, unsolicited, and they report on it, what exactly have you established?
Like, do you think they did the same thing with multiple journalists in an attempt to see who would publish and who would keep their mouths shut?
Bear in mind, when you join a Signal group you don't see the conversation history from before you arrived, only the live updates that take place during the time you're a member. Also, anyone in the group can view the list of group members and receives notifications about people being added to/removed from/leaving the group.
My guess would be the journalist wasn't the one being tested, it was one of the other members. Adding the journalist would be how it was leaked.
I can't buy this, because everyone in the group can see who added other members (at least until disappearing messages time out that information). If it was just someone leaking they could do that by taking screenshots of the government group and then sending them to Jeffrey Goldberg in a separate chat.
This doesn't make any sense. They were the ones who added the journalist to the chat. The chat wasn't covertly relayed to a journalist by one of the members.
That would require coordinated competence. Testing for these kind of leaks is much easier with paper than live chats too