Comment by edot
8 hours ago
"Natanson said her work had led to 1,169 new sources, “all current or former federal employees who decided to trust me with their stories”. She said she learned information “people inside government agencies weren’t supposed to tell me”, saying that the intensity of the work nearly “broke” her."
Wow. So they're going to plug her phone in to whatever cracking tech they have and pull down the names of everyone who has been helping her tell the story of the destruction of our government. The following question is "what will they do with the names of the people they pull?". I can only imagine. Horrible. Hopefully she had good OPSEC but she's a reporter, not a technologist. I bet enough mistakes were made (or enough vulnerabilities exist) that they'll be able to pull down the list.
In India we have been going through this the last 14 years or so.
Look up Stanswamy [0], an octagenarian jailed on the basis of trumped up charges and planted evidence (most likely with the help of Israeli companies). Journalists held in jail for five years without any charges pressed. Same fate for those who criticize the government too vocally.
Now pretty much all of the press is but a government press release with a few holding out here and there.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2022/12/13/stan-swamy-h...
It's important to note, that the law is not written such that it's only illegal to share classified information when you have a good president. I think a lot of us are very sympathetic when classified information is released to the public due to public interest, concern regarding government action, etc.
But it's still illegal. I'm not making a moral claim here. Rather, people who release classified information without authorization are breaking the law. If I rob a bank to feed my family vs. robbing a bank because it's fun, it's still illegal. A jury might be more or less sympathetic to my cause, but I will still be arrested and charged if the police can manage it.
But also note the government is punishing people for legal acts as well. It’s perfectly legal to tell a soldier they do not have to obey unlawful orders, in fact in many cases it’s a requirement. But the us military started court martial proceedings against a sitting congressman person for doing it.
Well yes, but you can't tell a judge "yes, I broke the law, but it's OK because the government broke the law first."
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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46617645
comments that it's only federal employees who are legally bound regarding classified documents, reporters are not.
They can and do make whatever they want illegal, but you're correct not to make a moral claim about it. I'm not making a moral claim, either, but a pragmatic one.
At the same time, it's entirely legitimate to look at a set of laws and think "fuck that". Just because you're correct that bad things might happen to folks doesn't mean I have to be happy with it.
At the end of the day, having bad laws doesn't make the rest of us cower in fear.
Rather, those laws help us understand that the folks protected by those laws (and the systems that they are using to harm us) neither have our interests in mind nor have any legitimate claim to authority.
So while your "bad things will happen if I break the law" is maybe pragmatic, consider a similar pragmatic point:
"writing laws that folks feel justified in breaking might lead to shifts in how legitimate people see that government".
I understand what you're saying, but we as a society need to have some sort of baseline above the law and order view of the world. I know a lot of people are either too stupid or too tied up in the propaganda machine but we DEEPLY need to agree on some sort of universal ethical standards as a country or we will die.
We used to have at least vague concepts like that but the admin has eroded that in the pursuit of "anything goes" political maneuvering.
Soap box > ballot box > jury box > ammo box
We are on step 3
I think you (the country, not you the writer) has been on the ammo box for a good number of years.
The number of police and public based killing is much higher than comparable countries elsewhere.
I fear over the past week we've hit 3.99
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The ballot has always been a proxy for the bayonet.
I reject the current legitimacy of that law. After Donald Trump claimed personal immunity for classified document violations in his interregnum, any prosecutions his government launches based on it are presumptively invalid.
That's all well and good, but the law stands because the administration has more firepower than you.
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Usually you would only communicate through secure drop. Looks like the Washington post uses it: https://www.washingtonpost.com/securedrop/
There’s a subreddit dedicated to fed employee opinions so I assume they already identified all active posters by now and the direct contacts are being correlated.
I hope Washington Post does a better job of training their reporters than my friend’s former employer did.
They sent her off to a certain country with highly repressive speech laws and secret police to interview and survey various civil rights activist groups. They gave her little to no guidance about how to protect herself aside from “Use a VPN to send any documents to us.” They didn’t even instruct her to use an encrypted email provider or to use a VPN for any online work that didn’t get sent to the employer.
It’s very fortunate she knew me and I could at least give her some basic guidance to use an encrypted email service, avoid doing any work on anything sensitive that syncs to a cloud server, make sure she has FileVault enabled, get her using a password manager, verify that her VPN provider is trustworthy, etc.
>They sent her off to a certain country with highly repressive speech laws and secret police to interview and survey various civil rights activist groups. They gave her little to no guidance about how to protect herself aside from “Use a VPN to send any documents to us.” They didn’t even instruct her to use an encrypted email provider or to use a VPN for any online work that didn’t get sent to the employer.
How would those advice have helped?
>an encrypted email provider
Unless this was in the early 2010s the email provider was probably using TLS, which means to the domestic security service at least, is as safe as a "encrypted email provider" (protonmail?)
>FileVault enabled
That might work in a country with due process, but in a place with secret police they can just torture you until you give up the keys.
>password manager
Does the chance of credential stuffing attacks increase when you're in a repressive state?
None of the advice is bad, but they're also not really specific to traveling to a repressive country. Phishing training is also good, but I won't lambast a company for not doing phishing training prior to sending a employee to a repressive country.
> Unless this was in the early 2010s the email provider was probably using TLS
It was the mid 2010s yes.
And they’re not going to abduct and torture and American citizen out of the blue. The more “intensive” methods are higher cost, the intention is just to increase the friction involved with engaging in the routine and scalable, ordinary forms of snooping.
Shouldn't this be basic knowledge for journalist?
Why would it be if nobody trains them on it?
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> The following question is "what will they do with the names of the people they pull?".
I'll take a shot at the answer -> Charge them with treason. Because that's the country we live in now, and most of us are just sitting by passively watching it happen.
There’s a good fraction of people, especially on this forum, who are actively encouraging this. Posts that criticize the administration consistently get flagged off the front page even when they’re related to tech
You are severely misreading why people flag posts about that discuss the administration (whether for or against): they are tiresome to read about, and it doesn't lead to productive interesting discussion (which is supposed to be what the vote buttons are for here). Politics isn't 100% off topic for HN but mostly I come here to get away from it and I'm sure others do too.
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It's pretty shocking how many people on HN are ok with government officials killing citizens in the streets, but writing diversity statements is just too far.
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Well it really depends on what was leaked.
Sadly, a lot of people in Silicon Valley now subscribe to this "dark enlightenment" nonsense.
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The seeds of fascism are in the hearts of well over 50% of the people around you.
It's flagged because its historically not Hacker News. Many of the newer accounts seem to bias towards using this forum as a "reddit" to discuss how much they hate the current administration or their mental issues. The technical "hacker" content is getting less and less -- thank God for https://lobste.rs/. So that's all fine and maybe hackers should just change be a reddit forum, but don't take it personally or be surprised if 15 old accounts are flagging your posts. I say this noting that the account you posted from is only 9 months old.
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Don't be ridiculous. Charging someone can be fraught. They will simply and quietly disappear.
But I would think they'd like to publicly make an example of them. So, disappear most, publicly flog the rest.
Denaturalize and deport?
https://www.npr.org/2025/12/24/nx-s1-5649729/trump-administr...
Or they'll have ICE take them and they'll be deported or made to disappear. Some might even end up dying.
That's how the US is right now.
They also lie to local police. There was a case here where they drove erratically to try and make it look like a legal observer rammed their vehicle. They hit him twice, called the local police, lied to the police and then said observer provided his dash cam footage and was released. Will ICE face any repercussions? Nope.
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That only works if they aren't U.S citizens... Which if they're working for the gov means they are. This administration is creative they will find other more 'legal' ways for retribution so the punishment sticks.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/13/us/prosecutors-doj-resign...
If you've got a way for us to not just passively sit by and watch it happen, well, we'd all love to see the plan.
Charging with a crime is so last decade. Nowadays they just shoot people they don't like.
Ironic that the orange man is telling Iranians to risk their lives.
His policy is very consistent and clear. He does not care about the form of government, how they treat the population etc, only that they show deference to him (personally).
That's always the country we've lived in.
If these people were caught, they'd always have been punished. What they did is extremely illegal. The issue is with the manner of obtaining evidence, not with the crimes being pursued.
You must accept that 3 letter agencies have full root access to any Tim Apple or Google device and will use it if they already went far enough to do an FBI raid on a reporter.
I don’t have to accept any assertion in the absence of evidence directly supporting it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM
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Counterpoint - if they have full root access to any phone, why did they need to do the raid?
To intimidate other reporters
So they don't burn their 0day
The same reason federal agents wear GoPros. Security theater, and to send the message that journalists should not pursue stories like this that put the federal government in a less-than-favorable light.
This isn't hyperbole. They literally went to the king with gold in hands. There's no WAY they didn't open up their platforms to him.
Appeasing a moron with a shiny, valuable object is low effort. Covering up and adding a backdoor to Apple's widely used iOS is not in the same ballpark.
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> They literally went to the king with gold in hands.
Exactly what I was thinking about when I was writing my comment.
I can understand that big corpos are not our friends and are purely money driven, but publicly bribing the president with gold is on a level no one ever expected. Right in line with the Fifa peace price.
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What is especially insane is people STILL praise Apple for championing "privacy" - after Snowden, after China, after Trump ... the well-engineered sunk-cost fallacy is just too potent to resist, I guess.
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I'm afraid Snowden was so long time ago, that the most vocal people don't even seemingly know about it, so yet again, we're in a period of time where assuming Apple/Google has full access to anything you do on your device, is seen as conspiracy theories. People seem to forget the past so damn quick, it's a wonder we humans manage to accomplish anything at all at this point.