11 ms·

Open Letter from Laura Poitras

277 points by jashkenas 6y ago

walrus01 6y ago
> Glenn Greenwald Oh yeah, the guy who decided that the Giuliani/Randomly chosen computer repair shop/Hunter Biden laptop story was of such earth-shattering, incredible importance that he chose it as the hill he wanted to die upon, resigning from The Intercept in protest because the editors wouldn't let him publish stories about it. Seriously? Greenwald has lost all credibility. https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=giuliani+biden+laptop+greenwald https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=giuliani+...
- seppin 6y ago
  Yes, but Glenn and Snowden are deities on HN. Your comment won't stand for long.
  - dang 6y ago
    Please don't post unsubstantive comments. Edit: you've been using HN primarily (exclusively?) for political and ideological battle. We ban accounts that do that, regardless of what ideology they're battling for (and regardless of overgeneralizations about "deities"). We have to, because this is the #1 thing that destroys HN for its intended purpose of curious conversation, and because raging hellfires have burning all over this site lately. You've also broken the site guidelines egregiously and repeatedly in other ways, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25694321 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25694321. That's not cool. I've therefore banned your account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They are here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. No, we don't agree with whoever your political adversaries are. We're merely trying to maintain some semblance of an interesting internet forum, or at least to stave off decline: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=stave%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....
    - seppin 6y ago
      I have been talking politics due to a recent coup attempt. This bubble you are attempting to create here, in the name of "content moderation", is just weird. I am not lighting fires, I am pointing out unpopular opinions and statements of fact. I see where you are coming from, but this is enforcing group think under the guise of community management. Banning me for pointing out attacking sacred cows is not allowed here is as much of a bookend as I require.
      - dang 6y ago
        It isn't just recent. For example, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25549202 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25549202 is the sort of ideological blast we don't want here, regardless of which way you point. Earlier too: e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24961547 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24961547. When accounts build up a pattern of abusing HN like that, we ban them. "Pointing out unpopular opinions and statements of fact" and "banning me for attacking sacred cows" are what every troll says (right or left). Even if that were a fair description of snarky flaming, which it isn't, you don't need to break the site guidelines to do those things. That's the issue here. Most commenters manage to stay within the guidelines, so it's not hard if you choose to. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
        seppin 6y ago
        > "Pointing out unpopular opinions and statements of fact" and "banning me for attacking sacred cows" are what every troll says (right or left). So i'm a 'troll' now. I believe Ad hominem attacks are in violation of your TOS, who do I report your post to? Good luck at your attempts to create a walled garden of civility while the world burns. I'll admit to being more antagonistic than needed be at times, but this idea that you can stay above the discourse happening everywhere else is silly. But you're small enough to ban your way to a nice uniform echo chamber of non-controversy. You will drift further away from accurately representing the world we live in, but I don't think that was ever your goal.
- monocasa 6y ago
  I mean, he left because as a founder of the intercept, he had a contract item that editors couldn't deny him the ability to publish in the intercept on the grounds of content. When they told him that he couldn't publish anything that could be construed as against Biden, he left as they had broken their contract with him.
  - edlebert 6y ago
    Yes. IIRC they were going to let him publish the story, he just had to remove everything about Joe Biden, lol.
- greenburger 6y ago
  The letter only mentions Greenwald to appropriately credit his reporting along with hers for the founding basis of The Intercept. Otherwise the mention of his departure from The Intercept is notably absent.
  - walrus01 6y ago
    Lack of mention of the manner and specific reason for his departure are highly suspicious in and of themselves.
- dang 6y ago
  Please don't take HN threads on flamewar tangents. Jumping into the nearest lava pit immediately upon some provocation is, to quote my son when he was two, "what we not do". https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
nr2x 6y ago
Meanwhile, Barton Gellman, who also worked with Snowden, has kept churning out great reporting [0], while Greenwald and Poitras kept trying to ride on the coattails of Snowden long past the point of relevance. [0] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/11/what-if-trump-refuses-concede/616424/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/11/what-if...
- kome 6y ago
  Greenwald did a quite an amazing job with Bolsonaro. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/25/world/americas/glenn-greenwald-brazil-bolsonaro-cybercrimes.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/25/world/americas/glenn-gree...
  - nr2x 6y ago
    Fair, that's a good point.
    - yepnopemaybe 6y ago
      Greenwald's work exposing the corruption of Sérgio Moro dwarfs his work exposing the NSA. Essentially, he obtained documents that proved Moro stage managed the prosecution's arguments in the case that banned incumbent President Lula da Silva from seeking reelection. This cleared the field for Bolsenaro, who put Moro in charge of the federal judiciary. Where Greenwald's reporting on NSA changed neither policy or public opinion, his reporting on Moro has transformed the political situation in Brazil and caused Moro to resign.
- DevKoala 6y ago
  How is this relevant? Poitras is highlighting that an informant was not protected accordingly, and that the Intercept is no longer a trustworthy resource.
  - nr2x 6y ago
    I think the Intercept discredited themselves as a place for sources to go after Reality Winner got arrested, so I've never seen the point of the enterprise past that event. Otherwise, my point is more she's complaining about being fired, but as far as I can tell, she hasn't produced much reporting. I still respect what she and Greenwald did, but I think Gellman has actually continued doing good work whereas they haven't impressed me as much past the one big scoop.
kome 6y ago
For context: this follow the departure of the other co-founder of the The Intercept, Glenn Greenwald. https://greenwald.substack.com/p/my-resignation-from-the-intercept https://greenwald.substack.com/p/my-resignation-from-the-int...
- walrus01 6y ago
  > "horrifyingly, took the lead in falsely branding the Hunter Biden archive as “Russian disinformation”" Calling it an "archive" is laughable at best, the provenance of the supposed Hunter Biden laptop which was left in the custody of a randomly chosen computer repair shop guy who has ties to Giuliani and the Trump apparatus is clear. The entire thing was an intelligence plant that Greenwald swallowed hook, line and sinker. There's a reason why dozens of highly respected, experienced investigative journalists took a good look at the information supposedly retrieved from this "laptop" and decided not to proceed with publishing any of it. Because they didn't want to embarrass themselves by publishing obvious fabrications. From USA Today: "John Paul Mac Isaac — owner of The Mac Shop — told reporters that a man who identified himself as Hunter Biden brought three liquid-damaged laptops to his repair shop in April 2019, per the Delaware News Journal. The man left one laptop for repair and never returned to retrieve it. Eventually, Mac Isaac gave a copy of the laptop's hard drive to Brian Costello, an attorney for Rudy Giuliani, who is the personal lawyer for President Donald Trump. Mac Isaac said he turned the hard drive over to Costello because of fears for his safety."
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - DevKoala 6y ago
    What are you talking about? The story was worth reporting and it wasn’t until the election was over and verified that major news sources decided to push it to the public. https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/09/politics/hunter-biden-tax-investigtation/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/09/politics/hunter-biden-tax-inv... Greenwald was right in calling the bias.
    - 6y ago
f430 6y ago
I just don't think that enough people are paying attention to the disappearing freedom of information and expression in America. I believe that it has reached a point of no return and that you should expect what you saw in China to be a precusor to what will come to America now. Congratulations! You've played yourself America.
- DevKoala 6y ago
  Seriously, these concerns shouldn’t be a partisan issue, but today everything is just so tribalistic. We are laying the floor for potential bad actors to remain unchallenged.
  - f430 6y ago
    We are going to have fabulously rich 1% more than ever in the history of human kind, free from all checks and bounds, they can just dictate what is "fake news" or "alt-right" or whatever taboo label. Even if we ever saw Jeffrey Epstein's tapes, a huge chunk of the population would deny it as "fake news" because it was reported by an "media outlet with poor reputation".
- nyokodo 6y ago
  > what you saw in China to be a precusor to what will come to America America is very culturally distinct from China. Of the negative outcomes institutional collapse or maybe secession are far more likely than one-party totalitarianism. Personally I think a counter-cultural backlash is most likely.
mrkstu 6y ago
Don't feed conspiracists by shutting down legitimate reporting, don't protect the powerful from inquiry, just because they are on 'your side,' don't feel the need to de-platform those with a record of truth-telling, when they go after those you admire. Let the muckrakers muck as much as they can and we'll all get closer to the truth, however uncomfortable it may be.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- aaron_m04 6y ago
  > ...when they go after those you admire I don't understand what this has to do with Poitras being let go.
jacquesm 6y ago
She pretty much outed herself though by using her own computer to mail the document to the intercept. That the intercept then went and tried to verify the veracity of the documents does not give them much credit either, they didn't have to forward the actual scans, there would have been other ways of verifying that the documents were real. Finally, this was clearly careless on the part of the Intercept, no proof has ever been given that this was malicious, and I'm not seeing any here.
- walrus01 6y ago
  It has been some years since I read about the original document leak, but as I recall, she shared documents from her workplace that either had printer steganography ID codes embedded into them (images in a raster scan of a paper document), or some form of digital stego IDs in electronic documents. Basically not very different from how major motion picture studios embed some sort of unique ID code into the compressed video files given out pre-release, to reviewers (and workprints sent to 3rd party CGI studios) so that they can track down a leak. None of which Winner was aware of the existence at the time. Some of those codes made it through to the reporting, and were published to the Internet, making it fairly easy for federal law enforcement to track her down. I have also not seen any information saying that the journalists who received the documents, definitively were, or were not aware of the presence of the ID numbers stegoed into the documents. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/06/the-mysterious-printer-code-that-could-have-led-the-fbi-to-reality-winner/529350/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/06/the-m... https://blog.erratasec.com/2017/06/how-intercept-outed-reality-winner.html https://blog.erratasec.com/2017/06/how-intercept-outed-reali... On a more meta level, it's a hard problem to solve with handling and publishing leaked documents, because on one side you have the vast resources of the NSA and the US intelligence community coming up with new steganographic and other methods to embed tracking ID numbers into documents. The full size, scale, budget and weight of various federal agencies' "counterintelligence" efforts. And on the other side you have investigative journalists who do not have PhD level degrees in math/cryptography, and do not have the technical resources to definitely search through a huge pile of documents and say with 100% confidence that any possible tracking IDs have been stripped out. I don't think I could reasonably expect a person from a journalism/liberal arts degree educational and work experience background to identify steganography.
walrus01 6y ago
From the NYTimes article that Poitras links to, this really sounds to me like a perfect conjunction of mutual screwups on both sides. Winner didn't know that the documents had a stegonographic ID embedded into them, and the people at the Intercept who hastily published high-resolution raster scans of them didn't know or care either. Really seems like there's equal blame to go around on both sides. Just my opinion: Winner was either very naive or very ignorant to assume that any classified level document didn't have tracking IDs embedded into it. It's been a known thing for mole hunts for 70+ years... There's tons of declassified information that can be found in cold war era books on intelligence related matters about how false information is fed to known agents, and such. nytimes: "Ms. Winner, then 25, had been listening to the site’s podcast. She printed out a secret report on Russian cyberattacks on American voting software that seemed to address some of Mr. Greenwald’s doubts about Russian interference in the 2016 campaign and mailed it to The Intercept’s Washington, D.C., post office box in early May. The Intercept scrambled to publish a story on the report, ignoring the most basic security precautions. The lead reporter on the story sent a copy of the document, which contained a crease showing it had been printed out, to the N.S.A. media affairs office, all but identifying Ms. Winner as the leaker."
- Fnoord 6y ago
  IMO the journalists should be expert in protecting their sources, and they failed here (arguably, Winner picked the wrong ones). Winner is an expert in her own field (e.g. Farsi); not in journalism, steganography, or OPSEC. The steganography was well known in journalist circles I was into in, back in '00s.
  - kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
    She signed a document agreeing to keep secrets. That only requires modest reading skills.
    - colejohnson66 6y ago
      Part of that agreement is an oath to uphold the Constitution. The military also says you have a “duty to disobey” (as some call it) illegal orders. If the government is committing illegal acts, it’s in the interest of the citizens to know. Imagine if the government snatched people off the street and made them disappear. One of those police officers tells the press, and is subsequently arrested for violating an unlawful NDA. Is the officer in the wrong there? Should everything be declassified? No! There absolutely is a need to keep things secret. But the government’s knee jerk reaction to everything has led to a “classify everything and don’t ask questions” mentality. I’ve heard this is because they’re worried those in charge fear they have broken some laws (either knowingly or unknowingly). The solution to that is not to classify things, but to investigate and fix the problem. The problem (no pun intended) is that the government doesn’t do that. They double down on their lies and half truths which leads to situations like Clapper testifying to Congress that the NSA wasn’t doing the thing that they were doing.
brbrodude 6y ago
Ah, this is one of those that can only make me think of how news outlets, especially since in Brazil they're even more tightly controlled and aligned and oligarchic, report on governments from other countries, of political prisoners and messed up stuff going elsewhere(specially if it's in 'countries we dont like' of course), and how it is when it's an 'us' story(and of course put Assange in here too).. And that then it drips down to partially informed ppl that are basically tamed into whatever position interests oligarchs and that it becomes useless to try to discuss anything because information is just not reaching the overwhelming majority of people. That's how you end up with a Bolsonaro. Yeah, sure, democratic/western ideals and blah blah, how about when it's time to put them into practice? I think sadly we all know what happens, and we mostly just look away. To be clear, I'm not talking about any single case in particular, it's more of an essence thing.
TeaDrunk 6y ago
> The Intercept’s claim that an independent investigation was conducted is false. The so-called “independent” review was done by the same lawyer who worked on the NSA/Winner story. The Intercept should correct the record and apologize to its readers. At this point, plus Greenwald's resignation, should we have any respect of the Intercept, or should it always be regarded with some suspicion like Bloomberg and the supermicro fiasco?
pessimizer 6y ago
I'm sorry, but I'm a real conspiracy theorist on this. Winner was a woman tricked into leaking a story that supported the Russiagate yarn, and part of the team on the Intercept side is clearly a federal agent/independent contractor: https://thegrayzone.com/2020/05/20/the-intercept-reality-winner-richard-esposito-nypd/ https://thegrayzone.com/2020/05/20/the-intercept-reality-win... IMO they would have found her no matter what; the reasons they gave for finding her could well be a parallel construction, and they had Esposito as an insider who could "accidentally" out her if all else failed. This was a media operation to leak the standard Russiagate stuff through a Bernie-supporting (biased against Russiagate) peripheral insider and to make a great show of prosecuting her to give the leak more credibility than it would normally be given, from an audience (lefties) that was normally very critical. It didn't work.
- tootie 6y ago
  What? I'm legit not understanding. I def think there is something fishy here. I think Poitras and Greenwald are both very dedicated and courageous journalists but they also have a screw loose and are prone to grandstanding. I also can't help but think First Look bought their credibility to gain an audience and are going to pivot to something more profit-driven now.
- zzzeek 6y ago
  So you're into conspiracy theories, but the collusion of the Trump campaign with Russian intelligence agents, which was voluminously documented in the Mueller report, is a "yarn". Conspiracies just aren't any fun when they're blindingly obvious to anyone who can read .
smoyer 6y ago
Cross "The Intercept" off the list of organizations I donate to.
- ProAm 6y ago
  100% completely. This is disgraceful.
- api 6y ago
  It took this? Greenwald has been a crackpot and possibly a closet fascist for years. The only reason anyone ever took him or the Intercept seriously is that Snowden dropped a huge story right in his lap. All he had to do was to be mildly competent at handling that and he was assured a reputation.
  - Terretta 6y ago
    Early Greenwald was interesting. Recent Greenwald seems off the deep end, such as his flat assertion that nobody organized anything about 6 Jan on Parler, only on Facebook. He used to uncover inconvenient facts, facts that challenged both sides’ tight narratives. Now he seems to cherry pick or manufacture fact-ish soundbites to push a contrarian or click-bait position. There’s not a lot of daylight between these, but I suspect the difference has to do with the tedious work needed for being a great reporter. Early Greenwald method seemed to be “do the homework”, recent Greenwald method seems more akin to Fox’s opinion hosts the Fox legal team disclaims as nobody reasonably believing are real news.
    - boomboomsubban 6y ago
      >his flat assertion that nobody organized anything about 6 Jan on Parler, only on Facebook. His accusation was that none of the thirteen people arrested actively used Parler, something he "did the homework" on by checking with Parler executives. Virtually all the criticism I see of Greenwald seems based on false strawman versions of his arguments ignoring what he is actually writing about.
    - ncmncm 6y ago
breatheoften 6y ago
She should never have been put in jail and each day she remains increases the injustice. US society is absolutely unhinged with its extremely assertive willingness to punish the most vulnerable while simultaneously bending over backwards to avoid accountability for anyone with money or belonging to the correct political clubs ...
Stierlitz 6y ago
I highly suspect that whole story, 'Reality Winner' was outed by some yellow dots in the printout.

277 points by jashkenas 6y ago

> Glenn Greenwald Oh yeah, the guy who decided that the Giuliani/Randomly chosen computer repair shop/Hunter Biden laptop story was of such earth-shattering, incredible importance that he chose it as the hill he wanted to die upon, resigning from The Intercept in protest because the editors wouldn't let him publish stories about it. Seriously? Greenwald has lost all credibility. https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=giuliani+biden+laptop+greenwald https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=giuliani+...

seppin 6y ago
Yes, but Glenn and Snowden are deities on HN. Your comment won't stand for long.
- dang 6y ago
  Please don't post unsubstantive comments. Edit: you've been using HN primarily (exclusively?) for political and ideological battle. We ban accounts that do that, regardless of what ideology they're battling for (and regardless of overgeneralizations about "deities"). We have to, because this is the #1 thing that destroys HN for its intended purpose of curious conversation, and because raging hellfires have burning all over this site lately. You've also broken the site guidelines egregiously and repeatedly in other ways, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25694321 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25694321. That's not cool. I've therefore banned your account. If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They are here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. No, we don't agree with whoever your political adversaries are. We're merely trying to maintain some semblance of an interesting internet forum, or at least to stave off decline: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=stave%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so....
  - seppin 6y ago
    I have been talking politics due to a recent coup attempt. This bubble you are attempting to create here, in the name of "content moderation", is just weird. I am not lighting fires, I am pointing out unpopular opinions and statements of fact. I see where you are coming from, but this is enforcing group think under the guise of community management. Banning me for pointing out attacking sacred cows is not allowed here is as much of a bookend as I require.
    - dang 6y ago
      It isn't just recent. For example, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25549202 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25549202 is the sort of ideological blast we don't want here, regardless of which way you point. Earlier too: e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24961547 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24961547. When accounts build up a pattern of abusing HN like that, we ban them. "Pointing out unpopular opinions and statements of fact" and "banning me for attacking sacred cows" are what every troll says (right or left). Even if that were a fair description of snarky flaming, which it isn't, you don't need to break the site guidelines to do those things. That's the issue here. Most commenters manage to stay within the guidelines, so it's not hard if you choose to. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
      - seppin 6y ago
        > "Pointing out unpopular opinions and statements of fact" and "banning me for attacking sacred cows" are what every troll says (right or left). So i'm a 'troll' now. I believe Ad hominem attacks are in violation of your TOS, who do I report your post to? Good luck at your attempts to create a walled garden of civility while the world burns. I'll admit to being more antagonistic than needed be at times, but this idea that you can stay above the discourse happening everywhere else is silly. But you're small enough to ban your way to a nice uniform echo chamber of non-controversy. You will drift further away from accurately representing the world we live in, but I don't think that was ever your goal.
monocasa 6y ago
I mean, he left because as a founder of the intercept, he had a contract item that editors couldn't deny him the ability to publish in the intercept on the grounds of content. When they told him that he couldn't publish anything that could be construed as against Biden, he left as they had broken their contract with him.
- edlebert 6y ago
  Yes. IIRC they were going to let him publish the story, he just had to remove everything about Joe Biden, lol.
greenburger 6y ago
The letter only mentions Greenwald to appropriately credit his reporting along with hers for the founding basis of The Intercept. Otherwise the mention of his departure from The Intercept is notably absent.
- walrus01 6y ago
  Lack of mention of the manner and specific reason for his departure are highly suspicious in and of themselves.
dang 6y ago
Please don't take HN threads on flamewar tangents. Jumping into the nearest lava pit immediately upon some provocation is, to quote my son when he was two, "what we not do". https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

nr2x 6y ago

Meanwhile, Barton Gellman, who also worked with Snowden, has kept churning out great reporting [0], while Greenwald and Poitras kept trying to ride on the coattails of Snowden long past the point of relevance. [0] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/11/what-if-trump-refuses-concede/616424/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/11/what-if...

kome 6y ago
Greenwald did a quite an amazing job with Bolsonaro. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/25/world/americas/glenn-greenwald-brazil-bolsonaro-cybercrimes.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/25/world/americas/glenn-gree...
- nr2x 6y ago
  Fair, that's a good point.
  - yepnopemaybe 6y ago
    Greenwald's work exposing the corruption of Sérgio Moro dwarfs his work exposing the NSA. Essentially, he obtained documents that proved Moro stage managed the prosecution's arguments in the case that banned incumbent President Lula da Silva from seeking reelection. This cleared the field for Bolsenaro, who put Moro in charge of the federal judiciary. Where Greenwald's reporting on NSA changed neither policy or public opinion, his reporting on Moro has transformed the political situation in Brazil and caused Moro to resign.
DevKoala 6y ago
How is this relevant? Poitras is highlighting that an informant was not protected accordingly, and that the Intercept is no longer a trustworthy resource.
- nr2x 6y ago
  I think the Intercept discredited themselves as a place for sources to go after Reality Winner got arrested, so I've never seen the point of the enterprise past that event. Otherwise, my point is more she's complaining about being fired, but as far as I can tell, she hasn't produced much reporting. I still respect what she and Greenwald did, but I think Gellman has actually continued doing good work whereas they haven't impressed me as much past the one big scoop.

kome 6y ago

For context: this follow the departure of the other co-founder of the The Intercept, Glenn Greenwald. https://greenwald.substack.com/p/my-resignation-from-the-intercept https://greenwald.substack.com/p/my-resignation-from-the-int...

walrus01 6y ago
> "horrifyingly, took the lead in falsely branding the Hunter Biden archive as “Russian disinformation”" Calling it an "archive" is laughable at best, the provenance of the supposed Hunter Biden laptop which was left in the custody of a randomly chosen computer repair shop guy who has ties to Giuliani and the Trump apparatus is clear. The entire thing was an intelligence plant that Greenwald swallowed hook, line and sinker. There's a reason why dozens of highly respected, experienced investigative journalists took a good look at the information supposedly retrieved from this "laptop" and decided not to proceed with publishing any of it. Because they didn't want to embarrass themselves by publishing obvious fabrications. From USA Today: "John Paul Mac Isaac — owner of The Mac Shop — told reporters that a man who identified himself as Hunter Biden brought three liquid-damaged laptops to his repair shop in April 2019, per the Delaware News Journal. The man left one laptop for repair and never returned to retrieve it. Eventually, Mac Isaac gave a copy of the laptop's hard drive to Brian Costello, an attorney for Rudy Giuliani, who is the personal lawyer for President Donald Trump. Mac Isaac said he turned the hard drive over to Costello because of fears for his safety."
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- DevKoala 6y ago
  What are you talking about? The story was worth reporting and it wasn’t until the election was over and verified that major news sources decided to push it to the public. https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/09/politics/hunter-biden-tax-investigtation/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/09/politics/hunter-biden-tax-inv... Greenwald was right in calling the bias.
  - 6y ago

f430 6y ago

I just don't think that enough people are paying attention to the disappearing freedom of information and expression in America. I believe that it has reached a point of no return and that you should expect what you saw in China to be a precusor to what will come to America now. Congratulations! You've played yourself America.

DevKoala 6y ago
Seriously, these concerns shouldn’t be a partisan issue, but today everything is just so tribalistic. We are laying the floor for potential bad actors to remain unchallenged.
- f430 6y ago
  We are going to have fabulously rich 1% more than ever in the history of human kind, free from all checks and bounds, they can just dictate what is "fake news" or "alt-right" or whatever taboo label. Even if we ever saw Jeffrey Epstein's tapes, a huge chunk of the population would deny it as "fake news" because it was reported by an "media outlet with poor reputation".
nyokodo 6y ago
> what you saw in China to be a precusor to what will come to America America is very culturally distinct from China. Of the negative outcomes institutional collapse or maybe secession are far more likely than one-party totalitarianism. Personally I think a counter-cultural backlash is most likely.

mrkstu 6y ago

Don't feed conspiracists by shutting down legitimate reporting, don't protect the powerful from inquiry, just because they are on 'your side,' don't feel the need to de-platform those with a record of truth-telling, when they go after those you admire. Let the muckrakers muck as much as they can and we'll all get closer to the truth, however uncomfortable it may be.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
aaron_m04 6y ago
> ...when they go after those you admire I don't understand what this has to do with Poitras being let go.

jacquesm 6y ago

She pretty much outed herself though by using her own computer to mail the document to the intercept. That the intercept then went and tried to verify the veracity of the documents does not give them much credit either, they didn't have to forward the actual scans, there would have been other ways of verifying that the documents were real. Finally, this was clearly careless on the part of the Intercept, no proof has ever been given that this was malicious, and I'm not seeing any here.

walrus01 6y ago
It has been some years since I read about the original document leak, but as I recall, she shared documents from her workplace that either had printer steganography ID codes embedded into them (images in a raster scan of a paper document), or some form of digital stego IDs in electronic documents. Basically not very different from how major motion picture studios embed some sort of unique ID code into the compressed video files given out pre-release, to reviewers (and workprints sent to 3rd party CGI studios) so that they can track down a leak. None of which Winner was aware of the existence at the time. Some of those codes made it through to the reporting, and were published to the Internet, making it fairly easy for federal law enforcement to track her down. I have also not seen any information saying that the journalists who received the documents, definitively were, or were not aware of the presence of the ID numbers stegoed into the documents. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/06/the-mysterious-printer-code-that-could-have-led-the-fbi-to-reality-winner/529350/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/06/the-m... https://blog.erratasec.com/2017/06/how-intercept-outed-reality-winner.html https://blog.erratasec.com/2017/06/how-intercept-outed-reali... On a more meta level, it's a hard problem to solve with handling and publishing leaked documents, because on one side you have the vast resources of the NSA and the US intelligence community coming up with new steganographic and other methods to embed tracking ID numbers into documents. The full size, scale, budget and weight of various federal agencies' "counterintelligence" efforts. And on the other side you have investigative journalists who do not have PhD level degrees in math/cryptography, and do not have the technical resources to definitely search through a huge pile of documents and say with 100% confidence that any possible tracking IDs have been stripped out. I don't think I could reasonably expect a person from a journalism/liberal arts degree educational and work experience background to identify steganography.

walrus01 6y ago

From the NYTimes article that Poitras links to, this really sounds to me like a perfect conjunction of mutual screwups on both sides. Winner didn't know that the documents had a stegonographic ID embedded into them, and the people at the Intercept who hastily published high-resolution raster scans of them didn't know or care either. Really seems like there's equal blame to go around on both sides. Just my opinion: Winner was either very naive or very ignorant to assume that any classified level document didn't have tracking IDs embedded into it. It's been a known thing for mole hunts for 70+ years... There's tons of declassified information that can be found in cold war era books on intelligence related matters about how false information is fed to known agents, and such. nytimes: "Ms. Winner, then 25, had been listening to the site’s podcast. She printed out a secret report on Russian cyberattacks on American voting software that seemed to address some of Mr. Greenwald’s doubts about Russian interference in the 2016 campaign and mailed it to The Intercept’s Washington, D.C., post office box in early May. The Intercept scrambled to publish a story on the report, ignoring the most basic security precautions. The lead reporter on the story sent a copy of the document, which contained a crease showing it had been printed out, to the N.S.A. media affairs office, all but identifying Ms. Winner as the leaker."

Fnoord 6y ago
IMO the journalists should be expert in protecting their sources, and they failed here (arguably, Winner picked the wrong ones). Winner is an expert in her own field (e.g. Farsi); not in journalism, steganography, or OPSEC. The steganography was well known in journalist circles I was into in, back in '00s.
- kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
  She signed a document agreeing to keep secrets. That only requires modest reading skills.
  - colejohnson66 6y ago
    Part of that agreement is an oath to uphold the Constitution. The military also says you have a “duty to disobey” (as some call it) illegal orders. If the government is committing illegal acts, it’s in the interest of the citizens to know. Imagine if the government snatched people off the street and made them disappear. One of those police officers tells the press, and is subsequently arrested for violating an unlawful NDA. Is the officer in the wrong there? Should everything be declassified? No! There absolutely is a need to keep things secret. But the government’s knee jerk reaction to everything has led to a “classify everything and don’t ask questions” mentality. I’ve heard this is because they’re worried those in charge fear they have broken some laws (either knowingly or unknowingly). The solution to that is not to classify things, but to investigate and fix the problem. The problem (no pun intended) is that the government doesn’t do that. They double down on their lies and half truths which leads to situations like Clapper testifying to Congress that the NSA wasn’t doing the thing that they were doing.

brbrodude 6y ago

Ah, this is one of those that can only make me think of how news outlets, especially since in Brazil they're even more tightly controlled and aligned and oligarchic, report on governments from other countries, of political prisoners and messed up stuff going elsewhere(specially if it's in 'countries we dont like' of course), and how it is when it's an 'us' story(and of course put Assange in here too).. And that then it drips down to partially informed ppl that are basically tamed into whatever position interests oligarchs and that it becomes useless to try to discuss anything because information is just not reaching the overwhelming majority of people. That's how you end up with a Bolsonaro. Yeah, sure, democratic/western ideals and blah blah, how about when it's time to put them into practice? I think sadly we all know what happens, and we mostly just look away. To be clear, I'm not talking about any single case in particular, it's more of an essence thing.

TeaDrunk 6y ago

> The Intercept’s claim that an independent investigation was conducted is false. The so-called “independent” review was done by the same lawyer who worked on the NSA/Winner story. The Intercept should correct the record and apologize to its readers. At this point, plus Greenwald's resignation, should we have any respect of the Intercept, or should it always be regarded with some suspicion like Bloomberg and the supermicro fiasco?

pessimizer 6y ago

I'm sorry, but I'm a real conspiracy theorist on this. Winner was a woman tricked into leaking a story that supported the Russiagate yarn, and part of the team on the Intercept side is clearly a federal agent/independent contractor: https://thegrayzone.com/2020/05/20/the-intercept-reality-winner-richard-esposito-nypd/ https://thegrayzone.com/2020/05/20/the-intercept-reality-win... IMO they would have found her no matter what; the reasons they gave for finding her could well be a parallel construction, and they had Esposito as an insider who could "accidentally" out her if all else failed. This was a media operation to leak the standard Russiagate stuff through a Bernie-supporting (biased against Russiagate) peripheral insider and to make a great show of prosecuting her to give the leak more credibility than it would normally be given, from an audience (lefties) that was normally very critical. It didn't work.

tootie 6y ago
What? I'm legit not understanding. I def think there is something fishy here. I think Poitras and Greenwald are both very dedicated and courageous journalists but they also have a screw loose and are prone to grandstanding. I also can't help but think First Look bought their credibility to gain an audience and are going to pivot to something more profit-driven now.
zzzeek 6y ago
So you're into conspiracy theories, but the collusion of the Trump campaign with Russian intelligence agents, which was voluminously documented in the Mueller report, is a "yarn". Conspiracies just aren't any fun when they're blindingly obvious to anyone who can read .

smoyer 6y ago

Cross "The Intercept" off the list of organizations I donate to.

ProAm 6y ago
100% completely. This is disgraceful.
api 6y ago
It took this? Greenwald has been a crackpot and possibly a closet fascist for years. The only reason anyone ever took him or the Intercept seriously is that Snowden dropped a huge story right in his lap. All he had to do was to be mildly competent at handling that and he was assured a reputation.
- Terretta 6y ago
  Early Greenwald was interesting. Recent Greenwald seems off the deep end, such as his flat assertion that nobody organized anything about 6 Jan on Parler, only on Facebook. He used to uncover inconvenient facts, facts that challenged both sides’ tight narratives. Now he seems to cherry pick or manufacture fact-ish soundbites to push a contrarian or click-bait position. There’s not a lot of daylight between these, but I suspect the difference has to do with the tedious work needed for being a great reporter. Early Greenwald method seemed to be “do the homework”, recent Greenwald method seems more akin to Fox’s opinion hosts the Fox legal team disclaims as nobody reasonably believing are real news.
  - boomboomsubban 6y ago
    >his flat assertion that nobody organized anything about 6 Jan on Parler, only on Facebook. His accusation was that none of the thirteen people arrested actively used Parler, something he "did the homework" on by checking with Parler executives. Virtually all the criticism I see of Greenwald seems based on false strawman versions of his arguments ignoring what he is actually writing about.
  - ncmncm 6y ago

breatheoften 6y ago

She should never have been put in jail and each day she remains increases the injustice. US society is absolutely unhinged with its extremely assertive willingness to punish the most vulnerable while simultaneously bending over backwards to avoid accountability for anyone with money or belonging to the correct political clubs ...

Stierlitz 6y ago

I highly suspect that whole story, 'Reality Winner' was outed by some yellow dots in the printout.