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I found the following passage remarkable: In another recent incident that gave me chilling insight into the power of government surveillance, I met with a sens

I found the following passage remarkable: In another recent incident that gave me chilling insight into the power of government surveillance, I met with a sensitive and well-placed source through an intermediary. After the meeting, which occurred a few years ago in Europe, I began to do research on the source. About an hour later, I got a call from the intermediary, who said, “Stop Googling his name.”

VBprogrammer 8y ago
I think the implication is clearly that there existed a government survalence dragnet and that the source was well placed enough to have unfettered access to it. However, it strikes me that there are a number of other possibilities: perhaps his own computer had been specifically compromised; maybe they targeted his hotel room or WiFi network; or, one which I find really compelling, it was simply a well timed ruse intended to bolster the legitimacy of whatever information the source was sharing.
- owenversteeg 8y ago
  [edit] Ok, so I actually read the whole article now. I still have a small amount of skepticism but two things sway me towards thinking this is real: 1) the author got called to the White House to sit down with the CIA director and Condoleezza Rice to shut down an earlier story, so clearly there are high-up people watching him and trying to shut him up at all costs. 2) there are a surprising amount of people in the CIA doing idiotic and more career-risky things here. My original idea of how it went down was that some mid-level Joe Schmoe looks him up and calls him to spook him, which I didn't believe for a number of reasons. But if, say, Condoleezza Rice was personally watching this guy (which she was) and ordered someone to go intimidate him, then I would not be surprised. [original comment] Yeah... I'm a little skeptical. I completely believe that there's horrifyingly extensive dragnet surveillance out there and something like this is _possible_. But if you've got access, why would you risk it with some stupid comment like this, to a reporter of all people? Seems a little fishy.
  - DoctorOetker 8y ago
    I think it would be a frequent occurence that ordinary people approached for whatever reason by members of intelligence community are suspected by these ordinary people to have a different role than their cover. When these ordinary people or sometimes targets proceed to google either the True Name or cover identity, it would seem like standard procedure to have an automated system immediately notify the agent that somebody is googling them, so they can make lessons about their poor tradecraft/cover/... It would be pretty negligent toward both the individual agent and the organizational mission as a whole not to detect these events. Since they are supposedly relatively frequent however (the web of lies gets ever more complicated, and different people pay attention to different details) those red flags would usually be ignored by other agents or datasharing allies, but as the person in question you would still prefer your journalist not to generate these red flags nonetheless..
iaw 8y ago
Hypothesizing how this could be done... The simplest method may be to plant a web page that has high ranking for the sources name that phones home details about all requests the the site. If the site normally only receives standard webcrawler traffic any human traffic after such a meeting would serve as a canary of sorts. I mean, presuming that they don't have an inside line with google.

VBprogrammer 8y ago

I think the implication is clearly that there existed a government survalence dragnet and that the source was well placed enough to have unfettered access to it. However, it strikes me that there are a number of other possibilities: perhaps his own computer had been specifically compromised; maybe they targeted his hotel room or WiFi network; or, one which I find really compelling, it was simply a well timed ruse intended to bolster the legitimacy of whatever information the source was sharing.

owenversteeg 8y ago
[edit] Ok, so I actually read the whole article now. I still have a small amount of skepticism but two things sway me towards thinking this is real: 1) the author got called to the White House to sit down with the CIA director and Condoleezza Rice to shut down an earlier story, so clearly there are high-up people watching him and trying to shut him up at all costs. 2) there are a surprising amount of people in the CIA doing idiotic and more career-risky things here. My original idea of how it went down was that some mid-level Joe Schmoe looks him up and calls him to spook him, which I didn't believe for a number of reasons. But if, say, Condoleezza Rice was personally watching this guy (which she was) and ordered someone to go intimidate him, then I would not be surprised. [original comment] Yeah... I'm a little skeptical. I completely believe that there's horrifyingly extensive dragnet surveillance out there and something like this is _possible_. But if you've got access, why would you risk it with some stupid comment like this, to a reporter of all people? Seems a little fishy.
- DoctorOetker 8y ago
  I think it would be a frequent occurence that ordinary people approached for whatever reason by members of intelligence community are suspected by these ordinary people to have a different role than their cover. When these ordinary people or sometimes targets proceed to google either the True Name or cover identity, it would seem like standard procedure to have an automated system immediately notify the agent that somebody is googling them, so they can make lessons about their poor tradecraft/cover/... It would be pretty negligent toward both the individual agent and the organizational mission as a whole not to detect these events. Since they are supposedly relatively frequent however (the web of lies gets ever more complicated, and different people pay attention to different details) those red flags would usually be ignored by other agents or datasharing allies, but as the person in question you would still prefer your journalist not to generate these red flags nonetheless..

iaw 8y ago

Hypothesizing how this could be done... The simplest method may be to plant a web page that has high ranking for the sources name that phones home details about all requests the the site. If the site normally only receives standard webcrawler traffic any human traffic after such a meeting would serve as a canary of sorts. I mean, presuming that they don't have an inside line with google.