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I think Bloomberg was probably irresponsible to publish the Chinese spy chip story, whether it was true or false! Here's why: * If the story is false, it's irr

I think Bloomberg was probably irresponsible to publish the Chinese spy chip story, whether it was true or false! Here's why: * If the story is false, it's irresponsible because it causes severe monetary and reputational damage to companies that do not deserve it (e.g. Supermicro's stock is still down ~ 40%). * If the story is true, it's a MAJOR breach of classified information from US intelligence operations; operations which I assume (without evidence to the contrary) are operating in good faith -- in the interest of the US and its citizens. Breaching classified information of such ongoing investigations to trace supply chains of spy chips could very well compromise those investigations (which would be irresponsible to risk). So either way, it's irresponsible IMO. P.S. IMO you cannot justify leaking this kind of info by comparing to Snowden, for example, because Snowden was a whistle-blower revealing information about operations that compromised citizens rights, which even congress was lied to about.

twtw 8y ago
> may take a huge stock market and reputation hit I think you can use the past tense here.
- electrograv 8y ago
  Fixed!
IBM 8y ago
It's not irresponsible at all if the story is true. Bloomberg has no responsibility to Supermicro's stock (or anyone else's). They also aren't responsible for protecting classified information. But the story probably isn't true.
- electrograv 8y ago
  I'm not trying to argue that Bloomberg did anything illegal, so lets stay away from that red herring. I'm talking about whether their action was morally right; granted, morality and civic duty is a much more ambiguous topic, and I'm open to the possibility that my position is incorrect here. To make an analogy: What if a newspaper was given sensitive personal information about someone that was legal to publish, but could have damaging effects to that person and the population as a whole if published too soon? Do newspapers have a civic responsibility to hold off on publishing information that would only be damaging to everyone (at least until it's safe to do so)?
  - jstanley 8y ago
    Private people can have secrets, the government shouldn't. I don't think they did anything immoral by publishing (unless they believed what they wrote to be false).
    - electrograv 8y ago
      > Private people can have secrets, the government shouldn't. That's a rather extreme claim, isn't it? Are you saying that governments should widely publish all defense research? Are you saying governments should widely publish and distribute military plans before putting them into action? Are you saying governments should publish the locations of all defensive and offensive weaponry, as well as constant position updates of all military submarines? That kind of openness would be suicidal. I agree that governments should encourage transparency, but not when that transparency would endanger lives etc.
  - IBM 8y ago
    It's not immoral if what's being reported is in the public interest. It's questionable when it's something like "Brad and Angelina are breaking up", but obviously not illegal.
- panda888888 8y ago
  Why isn't the story true? It's the involvement of Elemental (now AWS Elemental) that really sticks out to me. Back in 2015 they were a 200 person startup with government clients. Perfect target for an attack. How else do you explain Elemental's involvement? If they weren't hacked, they would be too small of a company to even be worth mentioning. Bloomberg wouldn't have bothered.
blueboo 8y ago
Hold on. If a reporter is uncovers hostile, state-sponsored corporate espionage in extant, US hardware, it's "shockingly irresponsible" to report that? The putative fact that our supply chain is so totally compromised is immediately relevant to everyone. I'm sorry-not-sorry if that's inconvenient for the FBI and Tim Cook. In a context where the geopolitical and commercial forces would all strongly prefer that such things never come to light, I'm on the side of more sunlight, not less.
- macspoofing 8y ago
  Agreed. There are times when it is ethical for a news organization to either delay or scrap publishing a story with national security implications ... but the standard for that should be very high. This doesn't feel like it is one of those. If the facts as reported are true then it is newsworthy and should be reported. If the facts as reported are not true, then it is a colossal screw-up on the part of the paper as this will cause billions in monetary and reputational damage to all parties concerned.
- electrograv 8y ago
  It's not that the information is irrelevant, it's that knee-jerk responses to leaked information may be worse than coordinated and planned responses to national security threats. Shining a light on this too early (assuming this wasn't an intentional "leak") could be akin to applying antibiotics to an infection prior to actually knowing what exactly the infection consists of, and discontinuing the treatment too soon (we all know how short the attention span of our news cycles are). It doesn't seem unreasonable to analogize fighting spy networks to fighting an evasive infection: If you attack the infection with a half-baked or inconsistent treatment, you risk just breeding stronger infections that are even better at evading you. Maybe I trust the US intelligence agencies too much, but it seems likely that they know what they're doing here. And so far, I've seen no evidence contrary to my default assumption that they're operating in best faith for the interests of the US and its citizens in this case.
snowwrestler 8y ago
IMO the only intelligence info the press should really try to protect is foreign sources and methods. People could die--either sources directly, if they are exposed, or victims of future attacks that could have been prevented if the source/method had not been burned. But intelligence info it absolutely makes sense for the press to cover, is evidence of foreign intelligence activities that were domestically discovered. In this case, the "source" of the discovery would presumably some employee of Apple or Amazon, and their "method" of discovery would be inspecting their own systems. While I can understand why the govt might want to keep that classified, I think it's well within the realm of what citizens would like to know, without obvious and direct risk to lives.
philwelch 8y ago
> If the story is true, it's a MAJOR breach of classified information from US intelligence operations; operations which I assume (without evidence to the contrary) are operating in good faith -- in the interest of the US and its citizens. Breaching classified information of such ongoing investigations to trace supply chains of spy chips could very well compromise those investigations (which would be irresponsible to risk). Unless those counterintelligence operations were, by intention and policy, the original source of the story in the first place. I could easily imagine an FBI agent essentially telling Bloomberg, "Hey, we discovered this security vulnerability, but the only sustainable solution is to convince the tech industry to move hardware manufacturing out of PRC control--we'll feed you the story but don't say it came from us."
- electrograv 8y ago
  That's a really great point! That's a good third option I didn't really properly consider: Perhaps this is the intended means of propagating this information into actions across the industry, in which case Bloomberg definitely did nothing wrong here.
mtgx 8y ago
You have no idea what journalism represents if you think a report on something like that should be qualified as "irresponsible." Daniel Ellsberg leaked such "major classified information" (the Pentagon Papers) about the Vietnam war, which ended-up stopping the war in Vietnam (mind you for the better...). If the NSA has been using the Chinese' own spy chip against US citizens, it's the journalists' responsibility to report that to the public.
leroy_masochist 8y ago
> If the story is true, it's a MAJOR breach of classified information from US intelligence operations; operations which I assume (without evidence to the contrary) are operating in good faith -- in the interest of the US and its citizens. Breaching classified information of such ongoing investigations to trace supply chains of spy chips could very well compromise those investigations (which would be irresponsible to risk). Meh. I'm a former SIGINT guy and I think that democracy is well-served by investigative journalists (who are not cleared and have no ethical obligation to protect classified information) trying to dig up the classified details of sources and methods that are ultimately being employed in the taxpaying citizens' name. Clearly there are going to be times when the intel community is going to have sharp differences of opinion about what the public needs to know, e.g. with the Snowden-related disclosures or whatever else. The point is that continued journalistic attempts to divulge the details of classified programs constitutes an effective check on the potential excesses of these programs and has the additional salutatory effect of making people in the intel community more OPSEC-conscious.
- electrograv 8y ago
  I'm definitely with you when we're talking about journalists acting as a check-and-balance against information or operations that are ultimately harming or betraying the public. It's just that I've just seen no such evidence that there's any Snowden-style 'betrayals of the public' happening in this particular instance. Maybe I'm wrong, and maybe I'm overly trusting, but I like to default to innocence until evidence of guilt is on the table.

twtw 8y ago

> may take a huge stock market and reputation hit I think you can use the past tense here.

electrograv 8y ago
Fixed!

IBM 8y ago

It's not irresponsible at all if the story is true. Bloomberg has no responsibility to Supermicro's stock (or anyone else's). They also aren't responsible for protecting classified information. But the story probably isn't true.

electrograv 8y ago
I'm not trying to argue that Bloomberg did anything illegal, so lets stay away from that red herring. I'm talking about whether their action was morally right; granted, morality and civic duty is a much more ambiguous topic, and I'm open to the possibility that my position is incorrect here. To make an analogy: What if a newspaper was given sensitive personal information about someone that was legal to publish, but could have damaging effects to that person and the population as a whole if published too soon? Do newspapers have a civic responsibility to hold off on publishing information that would only be damaging to everyone (at least until it's safe to do so)?
- jstanley 8y ago
  Private people can have secrets, the government shouldn't. I don't think they did anything immoral by publishing (unless they believed what they wrote to be false).
  - electrograv 8y ago
    > Private people can have secrets, the government shouldn't. That's a rather extreme claim, isn't it? Are you saying that governments should widely publish all defense research? Are you saying governments should widely publish and distribute military plans before putting them into action? Are you saying governments should publish the locations of all defensive and offensive weaponry, as well as constant position updates of all military submarines? That kind of openness would be suicidal. I agree that governments should encourage transparency, but not when that transparency would endanger lives etc.
- IBM 8y ago
  It's not immoral if what's being reported is in the public interest. It's questionable when it's something like "Brad and Angelina are breaking up", but obviously not illegal.
panda888888 8y ago
Why isn't the story true? It's the involvement of Elemental (now AWS Elemental) that really sticks out to me. Back in 2015 they were a 200 person startup with government clients. Perfect target for an attack. How else do you explain Elemental's involvement? If they weren't hacked, they would be too small of a company to even be worth mentioning. Bloomberg wouldn't have bothered.

blueboo 8y ago

Hold on. If a reporter is uncovers hostile, state-sponsored corporate espionage in extant, US hardware, it's "shockingly irresponsible" to report that? The putative fact that our supply chain is so totally compromised is immediately relevant to everyone. I'm sorry-not-sorry if that's inconvenient for the FBI and Tim Cook. In a context where the geopolitical and commercial forces would all strongly prefer that such things never come to light, I'm on the side of more sunlight, not less.

macspoofing 8y ago
Agreed. There are times when it is ethical for a news organization to either delay or scrap publishing a story with national security implications ... but the standard for that should be very high. This doesn't feel like it is one of those. If the facts as reported are true then it is newsworthy and should be reported. If the facts as reported are not true, then it is a colossal screw-up on the part of the paper as this will cause billions in monetary and reputational damage to all parties concerned.
electrograv 8y ago
It's not that the information is irrelevant, it's that knee-jerk responses to leaked information may be worse than coordinated and planned responses to national security threats. Shining a light on this too early (assuming this wasn't an intentional "leak") could be akin to applying antibiotics to an infection prior to actually knowing what exactly the infection consists of, and discontinuing the treatment too soon (we all know how short the attention span of our news cycles are). It doesn't seem unreasonable to analogize fighting spy networks to fighting an evasive infection: If you attack the infection with a half-baked or inconsistent treatment, you risk just breeding stronger infections that are even better at evading you. Maybe I trust the US intelligence agencies too much, but it seems likely that they know what they're doing here. And so far, I've seen no evidence contrary to my default assumption that they're operating in best faith for the interests of the US and its citizens in this case.

snowwrestler 8y ago

IMO the only intelligence info the press should really try to protect is foreign sources and methods. People could die--either sources directly, if they are exposed, or victims of future attacks that could have been prevented if the source/method had not been burned. But intelligence info it absolutely makes sense for the press to cover, is evidence of foreign intelligence activities that were domestically discovered. In this case, the "source" of the discovery would presumably some employee of Apple or Amazon, and their "method" of discovery would be inspecting their own systems. While I can understand why the govt might want to keep that classified, I think it's well within the realm of what citizens would like to know, without obvious and direct risk to lives.

philwelch 8y ago

electrograv 8y ago
That's a really great point! That's a good third option I didn't really properly consider: Perhaps this is the intended means of propagating this information into actions across the industry, in which case Bloomberg definitely did nothing wrong here.

mtgx 8y ago

You have no idea what journalism represents if you think a report on something like that should be qualified as "irresponsible." Daniel Ellsberg leaked such "major classified information" (the Pentagon Papers) about the Vietnam war, which ended-up stopping the war in Vietnam (mind you for the better...). If the NSA has been using the Chinese' own spy chip against US citizens, it's the journalists' responsibility to report that to the public.

leroy_masochist 8y ago

> If the story is true, it's a MAJOR breach of classified information from US intelligence operations; operations which I assume (without evidence to the contrary) are operating in good faith -- in the interest of the US and its citizens. Breaching classified information of such ongoing investigations to trace supply chains of spy chips could very well compromise those investigations (which would be irresponsible to risk). Meh. I'm a former SIGINT guy and I think that democracy is well-served by investigative journalists (who are not cleared and have no ethical obligation to protect classified information) trying to dig up the classified details of sources and methods that are ultimately being employed in the taxpaying citizens' name. Clearly there are going to be times when the intel community is going to have sharp differences of opinion about what the public needs to know, e.g. with the Snowden-related disclosures or whatever else. The point is that continued journalistic attempts to divulge the details of classified programs constitutes an effective check on the potential excesses of these programs and has the additional salutatory effect of making people in the intel community more OPSEC-conscious.

electrograv 8y ago
I'm definitely with you when we're talking about journalists acting as a check-and-balance against information or operations that are ultimately harming or betraying the public. It's just that I've just seen no such evidence that there's any Snowden-style 'betrayals of the public' happening in this particular instance. Maybe I'm wrong, and maybe I'm overly trusting, but I like to default to innocence until evidence of guilt is on the table.