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How the NSA successfully manage to prevent the Washington Post and friends from discovering and reporting on this malicious backdoor? They've been sitting on th

How the NSA successfully manage to prevent the Washington Post and friends from discovering and reporting on this malicious backdoor? They've been sitting on these documents for a decade. Are the journalists just that *uncurious* about the deep contents of the documents they hold exclusive access to? Was this some kind of organizational failing?

erdos4d 3y ago
WaPo, NYT, et. al. are tied to DOD and the intel community. They are the anonymous sources that provide many of their story ideas as well as quotes and sourcing. That doesn't come for free.
syndicatedjelly 3y ago
Do you think there was a list in the document neatly titled “NSA_BACKDOORS_DONT_SHARE” or something?
- hammock 3y ago
  More likely an IC plant in the editorial office that said "NSA Backdoors Don't Share." NSA also pays the owner of the Washington Post upwards of $10 billion for cloud services
  - gruez 3y ago
    >NSA also pays the owner of the Washington Post upwards of $10 billion for cloud services That's not the only publication that had access to the documents. From wikipedia >the first of Snowden's documents were published simultaneously by The Washington Post and The Guardian. [...] The disclosure continued throughout 2013, and a small portion of the estimated full cache of documents was later published by other media outlets worldwide, most notably The New York Times (United States), the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Der Spiegel (Germany), O Globo (Brazil), Le Monde (France), L'espresso (Italy), NRC Handelsblad (the Netherlands), Dagbladet (Norway), El País (Spain), and Sveriges Television (Sweden).
  - dylan604 3y ago
    >More likely an IC plant in the editorial office that said "NSA Backdoors Don't Share." Wouldn't be more likely that a plant would actually not say that, but rather come up with something else? Seems much more likely that a plant would promote some other aspect of a leak that would be less damaging as the story. Or even possibly making part of the document dump disappear.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
michaelt 3y ago
I suspect when a trove of documents is big enough, newspaper readers lose interest before you run out of documents. I mean, even on this tech forum hardly anyone knows who Cavium are, let alone your average Washington Post reader.
- elif 3y ago
  Maybe the moral of the story is that future snowdens should leak to selected law firms instead of selected journalists? If there's one organization designed to comb through large documents for details and understand the impacts to potential parties, it is law organizations. Put 2-3 in time competition to make cases out of the documents and it will be a scramble race for justice.
  - hcurtiss 3y ago
    Law firms aren't terribly entrepreneurial. Absent somebody paying them their hourly rate, I suspect not a single document would be read. Newspapers regularly take risks deploying humans to investigate issues without any assurance there will be a story at the bottom, but even the newspaper business has less appetite for that these days (as an aside, I suspect it's that margin that the financial investors have exploited -- at the expense of high quality reporting).
    - hammock 3y ago
      >Law firms aren't terribly entrepreneurial. Personal injury guys are the most entrepreneurial people I know...
      - kube-system 3y ago
        And they make money by going after low-hanging fruit. Ever wonder why they advertise 90%+ success rates and work on contingency? Because if your case isn't easy, you aren't their customer.
        3y ago
orangepurple 3y ago
Operation Mockingbird never ended. Full stop. (2010) https://weirdshit.blog/2010/07/23/cointelpro-operation-mockingbird/ https://weirdshit.blog/2010/07/23/cointelpro-operation-mocki...
- BlueTemplar 3y ago
  Well, COINTELPRO certainly didn't : we've got recent examples about how the FBI monitored the Parler group discussions that were planning the January 6 2021 United States Capitol rally - including convincing some of the most risky elements to not participate, and (supposedly) warned Washington law enforcement about it well in advance. Which is fine I guess, as long as it doesn't go into the more abusive examples listed. One thing that jumped at me when (re-?)reading the letter to MLK from the FBI : first you have some very informal speech : "look into your heart", "you are done", "you are [] an evil, abnormal beast", "there is only one thing for you left to do" Then SUDDENLY : "You have just 34 days in which to do it (this exact number has been selected for a specific reason, it has definite practical significance)." Lol, talk about a change in tone, I wonder if MLK noticed it ? (The specific reason being Christmas, but still...)
- throwawayq3423 3y ago
  Cold war history really broke people's brains. Yes this took place in the 1970s, no such thing happens today.
garba_dlm 3y ago
> Was this some kind of organizational failing? sure, why not. and while we're on this deluded train: Julian Assange's legal problems are not political persecution
kome 3y ago
mainstream journalists are incredibly unreliable. it's absolutely clear to everyone that you cannot trust nyt and similar publications. i never read them anyway, and when I do come across articles on topics I'm knowledgeable about, i'm appalled by how wrong they are.
- bigger_inside 3y ago
  exactly. When I read things I KNOW about, it's incredibly obvious that the news entertainment business (which WP and NYT and CNN and Fox all are) exist to serve the prejudices of their audience. A few times I made the mistake to let myself be interviewed by a newspaper who wanted an "expert" on something (flattering, but meh); something copletely benign and harmless, nothing political. They twisted my words to serve up stuff that fit what their "normal reader" already believed about the world.
- colordrops 3y ago
  It's crazy to me that people pay for access to these outlets. I wouldn't pay for any content except from individual journalists and a few very small outlets, and even then, would immediately stop if things ever turn for the worse.
- dylan604 3y ago
  >i never read them anyway, and when I do come across articles on topics I'm knowledgeable about, i'm appalled by how wrong they are. I never do that, except when I do. What kind of soapbox are you trying to stand on. It looks more like a cardboard box collapsing under the weight of your own hubris. I get the suspicion of news outlets of any kind. It doesn't matter what stream the journalists are fished out of, but they cannot all be subject matter experts in all subjects. This is also an expectation full of hubris on your part.
- Workaccount2 3y ago
  Modern journalists are just terminally online twitter heads. "Why go out or talk to anyone when I can just stay home and be on twitter all day!?!" It's the absolute worst outcome for journalism, and none of publications seem to care. If I had a publication the first thing I would do is ban twitter use (and probably go bankrupt because of it.)
pangolinpouch 3y ago
Our media companies are rife with intelligence agents. Corporate / State media has no incentive to make you the wiser.
- ekianjo 3y ago
  > Our media companies are run by intelligence agents Fixed that for you
- hangonhn 3y ago
  It's quite a bit more subtle than that. News organization have their sources that are in the intelligence community. They use each other. Sometimes the journalist wants to use their sources for information. Other times their sources feed them disinformation disguised as information. Other times they want a back channel to leak some real information but can't be seem as coming from a government source. Being a good journalist is hard and often doesn't pay very well. I'm often remind of PG's essay on corporate PR and the media: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
  - the-dude 3y ago
    I have no sources at hand, but I understood the FBI/CIA is embedded within every major news org in the US.
    - Clubber 3y ago
      The twitter files showed government agencies were coercing Twitter into suppressing information. I would find it hard to believe they don't also coerce at newspapers, particularly with the cozy relationship they already have with "anonymous sources" from said agencies.
      - throwawayq3423 3y ago
        > The twitter files showed government agencies were coercing Twitter into suppressing information. They very much did not. Twitter's own lawyers when pressed in court (the place where there are consequences for lying) admitted that nothing in the "Twitter Files" cited by Donald Trump actually show that the social media platform was a tool of government censorship. https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.387133/gov.uscourts.cand.387133.195.0.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.38...
45y54jh45 3y ago
Well yes, why do you think the noise died after the initial hype of Snowden leaking the docs? Do you honestly believe the mechanisms of for-profit journalism lets journalists be journalists? They got to eat and in this world you don't eat by covering yesterdays news. NSA didn't have to lift a finger. Wait a few weeks and people move on to the next story, this should not be a shocking revelation to anyone.
- ben_w 3y ago
  The British intelligence agencies forced the Guardian to literally shred the laptop with the contents while they were in the swing of running headlines about the things it was revealing. While the USA and the UK are different, I suspect there was a bit more difficult for the NSA than "didn't have to lift a finger".
drak0n1c 3y ago
Closed orgs can take years to find what takes an open source crowd mere days. Regardless of organizational competence.
PKop 3y ago
Some of them are deputies for the state. State-run-media, or Media-run-state, whichever you prefer. The FBI and CIA had agents inside Twitter and Facebook. Of course they have them inside news agencies as well. Part of it over time is access-media, the ones that play ball get the stories and info, the others get weeded out.
- throwawayq3423 3y ago
  The casual nature of stating a completely impossible conspiracy theory has been common place online for years, HN news used to be immune. It's illegal for FBI or CIA to actively target a US company. Anyone doing so would be fired for cause.
  - logicchains 3y ago
    It's illegal to lie under oath to Congress, did James Clapper go to jail? It's illegal to sleep with underage girls, how many people on Epstein's client list went to jail?
    - throwawayq3423 3y ago
      So, rank and file gov employees will risk their jobs to break the law because powerful people away with it, why wouldn't they? Does that make sense to you? It doesn't to me.
0xDEF 3y ago
Why are you surprised that backdoors in "boring" non-consumer facing hardware didn't get much attention?
some_random 3y ago
Snowden leaked a shit ton of documents, the vast majority of which had absolutely nothing to do with any kind of NSA wrongdoing. Journalists then had to go through and try to figure out what these documents actually meant (which they frequently misunderstood). Obviously they're still doing it to today.
- mindslight 3y ago
  As a general rule when criminal conspiracies are taken to task, they don't retain a right to privacy for their communications that aren't about the criminal conspiracy. Rather it all comes out in court. I understand why Snowden released the way he did, and given how it kept attention on the subject for longer than Binney/Klein it was probably the right call. But there should have also been an escrow/intent to dump the whole trove raw after some time period.
  - some_random 3y ago
    Do you really think the entire American IC is a "criminal conspiracy", or are you just trying to justify the fact that Snowden is an angry and vindictive sharepoint admin who simply dumped everything he had access to without regard for what was actually in those documents?
    - mindslight 3y ago
      Yes. By the straightforward standards that non-governmental criminal conspiracies are prosecuted, a large chunk of the NSA is engaged in a criminal conspiracy. We don't hold back on prosecuting other criminal conspiracies just because their associations produce other results like financially supporting their communities and coaching their kids' soccer teams.
    - wnoise 3y ago
      The only way they're not is by the Nixonian "when the President does it, that means it's not illegal" standard.
  - 0xDEF 3y ago
what-no-tests 3y ago
> Was this some kind of organizational failing? No...the organization is behaving exactly as intended.
miguelazo 3y ago
Are you kidding? WaPo serves the intelligence community. >After creation of the CIA in 1947, it enjoyed direct collaboration with many U.S. news organizations. But the agency faced a major challenge in October 1977, when—soon after leaving the Washington Post—famed Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein provided an extensive exposé in Rolling Stone. Citing CIA documents, Bernstein wrote that during the previous 25 years “more than 400 American journalists…have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency.” He added: “The history of the CIA’s involvement with the American press continues to be shrouded by an official policy of obfuscation and deception.” Bernstein’s story tarnished the reputations of many journalists and media institutions, including the Washington Post and New York Times. While the CIA’s mission was widely assumed to involve “obfuscation and deception,” the mission of the nation’s finest newspapers was ostensibly the opposite. https://www.guernicamag.com/normon-solomon-why-the-washington-posts-new-ties-to-the-cia-are-so-ominous/ https://www.guernicamag.com/normon-solomon-why-the-washingto...
- pxc 3y ago
  The WaPo is relentlessly pro-US and pro-'intelligence community' in its writings today, too. It's transparent. Idk how it could be missed, even without knowing the history. Just read a couple articles about contemporary whistleblowers or US involvement in the Syrian civil war or the war in Ukraine or whatever.
  - mcpackieh 3y ago
    > It's transparent. Idk how it could be missed, Support or criticism for the intelligence community became very partisan during Trump's campaign and presidency. Once something like this becomes partisan, the average political creature loses some degree of rationality for it. The IC becomes patriotic good guys, stalwart defenders of American democracy standing up to fascism; their past and present malfeasance goes unnoticed, forgotten, or simply ignored. This is how the WaPo's relentless pro-IC stance could be missed; they've been telling a lot of people what they want to hear and all people are less critical and suspicious of things that support their biases and prejudices.
- wsc981 3y ago
Consultant32452 3y ago
Supposed news organizations openly employ spooks as commentators on things like foreign policy. Journalists knowingly report lies, acting as the mouthpiece of the government. We know at least one news organization had the whole Epstein story locked down and they buried it because they were afraid they’d lose access to the royal family for future news/puff pieces. You think you hate journalists enough, but you don’t.
ramesh31 3y ago
>How the NSA successfully manage to prevent the Washington Post and friends from discovering and reporting on this malicious backdoor? They've been sitting on these documents for a decade. Washington Post -> Bezos -> AWS -> Cavium Pretty simple to understand, really.
luxuryballs 3y ago
that moment you realize “democracy dies in darkness” is a mission statement
KaiserPro 3y ago
The snowden leak was huge and reverberated for weeks. There were lots of followups. However at the time it was the more sexy things like tapping google's fibre and backdoors in cisco's kits that were more interesting. This is because the public could understand those things and therefore it sold papers. The difference between "cisco, dell and many other leading manufacturers shipped backdoors in their kit" and "cavium the small provider you've not really heard of" is large. Most people reading the snowden stuff will have assumed that the NSA had put in backdoors to most things.
denton-scratch 3y ago
I don't think the journos were lazy, and I don't think there was an organisational failing. The Guardian, in particular, evidently fell out with Snowden and his collaborators; they turned on him. I assume that was coordinated with Washpo and Spiegel. That is: I think there was a decision made, to stop publishing information from the Snowden trove. I don't know what the reason for the betrayal was. I'm pretty sure Alan Rusbridger knows though. He resigned as Editor-in-chief shortly after these events. I don't get why whistleblowers rely on newspaper publishers to unpack their leaks for the public; it's not as if the press are known for either their honesty or their scruples.
- jstarfish 3y ago
  > I don't get why whistleblowers rely on newspaper publishers to unpack their leaks for the public They have an interest in drama and a platform to publish on.
chillbill 3y ago
[dead]
TheRealDunkirk 3y ago
In the US, we have this passionate fantasy about Woodward and Bernstein and the Post and the Pulitzer and the movie and Redford and Hoffman and the Academy Award, about how the Press played the part of the "fourth estate" as the Founders intended, and rooted out a corrupt politician, and forced him to resign. It's all bullshit. The people who broke into the Watergate Hotel were CIA, Woodward was formerly CIA, and "Deepthroat" was a Deputy Director of the FBI. It was all a deep state plot to get rid of Nixon. Any time the deep state wants to get rid of a politician, the "press" does its "job" by exposing things. When the deep state likes a politician, the "press" ALSO does its "job" by covering things up. Look absolutely no further than Hunter Biden. The hypocrisy is utterly astounding, even to someone who is deeply cynical at this point. The rest of the US needs to wake up to the fact that the press is just another branch of the deep state, and stop pretending that there's ANYTHING useful being fed to us through ANY of the large media corporations.
- calgarymicro 3y ago
  Wow, the deep state is so powerful that they got Nixon to say on tape that he was going to try to get the CIA to falsely use national security as an excuse to stonewall an FBI investigation. Poor innocent Nixon was no match for their telepathic powers.
  - TheRealDunkirk 3y ago
    Whoosh. You went clean over my head, anyway.
    - calgarymicro 3y ago
      What's so hard to understand? Nixon was literally caught on tape[0] conspiring to cover up CREEP payments; it's a bit funny to claim Watergate was all a deep stage conspiracy to screw Nixon when he was recorded committing crimes. [0]https://watergate.info/1972/06/23/the-smoking-gun-tape.html https://watergate.info/1972/06/23/the-smoking-gun-tape.html
      - 3y ago
rdtsc 3y ago
WP is a very close ally to the government agencies in general. That's where it gets those juicy "anonymous government sources claim ..." news. If WP all of sudden wanted to prevent democracy from dying "in darkness" as their motto says, it would mean to start digging a lot harder going against the government as a whole. Don't think they are prepared for it.
theropost 3y ago
Lack of real journalistic resources - Meta has more "journalists" then the Washington Post.
londons_explore 3y ago
I personally suspect that security services visited the newspapers a few days after the leak [1], and ever since then, every article has been about stuff that wouldn't be a surprise to rival security services. Sure - it was a surprise to the public. But rival security services I'm sure would expect US controlled backdoors in US made technology. [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/jan/31/footage-released-guardian-editors-snowden-hard-drives-gchq https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/jan/31/footage-rele...
boomboomsubban 3y ago
According to Appelbaum, the person publishing these new leaks, >Primarily these documents remain unpublished because the journalists who hold them fear they will be considered disloyal or even that they will be legally punished Whether that's true I can't say. But as a reminder, despite constant claims that Assange is being extradited over hacking charges, something like 17 of his 18 charges are over publishing documents.

erdos4d 3y ago

WaPo, NYT, et. al. are tied to DOD and the intel community. They are the anonymous sources that provide many of their story ideas as well as quotes and sourcing. That doesn't come for free.

syndicatedjelly 3y ago

Do you think there was a list in the document neatly titled “NSA_BACKDOORS_DONT_SHARE” or something?

hammock 3y ago
More likely an IC plant in the editorial office that said "NSA Backdoors Don't Share." NSA also pays the owner of the Washington Post upwards of $10 billion for cloud services
- gruez 3y ago
  >NSA also pays the owner of the Washington Post upwards of $10 billion for cloud services That's not the only publication that had access to the documents. From wikipedia >the first of Snowden's documents were published simultaneously by The Washington Post and The Guardian. [...] The disclosure continued throughout 2013, and a small portion of the estimated full cache of documents was later published by other media outlets worldwide, most notably The New York Times (United States), the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Der Spiegel (Germany), O Globo (Brazil), Le Monde (France), L'espresso (Italy), NRC Handelsblad (the Netherlands), Dagbladet (Norway), El País (Spain), and Sveriges Television (Sweden).
- dylan604 3y ago
  >More likely an IC plant in the editorial office that said "NSA Backdoors Don't Share." Wouldn't be more likely that a plant would actually not say that, but rather come up with something else? Seems much more likely that a plant would promote some other aspect of a leak that would be less damaging as the story. Or even possibly making part of the document dump disappear.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]

michaelt 3y ago

I suspect when a trove of documents is big enough, newspaper readers lose interest before you run out of documents. I mean, even on this tech forum hardly anyone knows who Cavium are, let alone your average Washington Post reader.

elif 3y ago
Maybe the moral of the story is that future snowdens should leak to selected law firms instead of selected journalists? If there's one organization designed to comb through large documents for details and understand the impacts to potential parties, it is law organizations. Put 2-3 in time competition to make cases out of the documents and it will be a scramble race for justice.
- hcurtiss 3y ago
  Law firms aren't terribly entrepreneurial. Absent somebody paying them their hourly rate, I suspect not a single document would be read. Newspapers regularly take risks deploying humans to investigate issues without any assurance there will be a story at the bottom, but even the newspaper business has less appetite for that these days (as an aside, I suspect it's that margin that the financial investors have exploited -- at the expense of high quality reporting).
  - hammock 3y ago
    >Law firms aren't terribly entrepreneurial. Personal injury guys are the most entrepreneurial people I know...
    - kube-system 3y ago
      And they make money by going after low-hanging fruit. Ever wonder why they advertise 90%+ success rates and work on contingency? Because if your case isn't easy, you aren't their customer.
      - 3y ago

orangepurple 3y ago

Operation Mockingbird never ended. Full stop. (2010) https://weirdshit.blog/2010/07/23/cointelpro-operation-mockingbird/ https://weirdshit.blog/2010/07/23/cointelpro-operation-mocki...

BlueTemplar 3y ago
Well, COINTELPRO certainly didn't : we've got recent examples about how the FBI monitored the Parler group discussions that were planning the January 6 2021 United States Capitol rally - including convincing some of the most risky elements to not participate, and (supposedly) warned Washington law enforcement about it well in advance. Which is fine I guess, as long as it doesn't go into the more abusive examples listed. One thing that jumped at me when (re-?)reading the letter to MLK from the FBI : first you have some very informal speech : "look into your heart", "you are done", "you are [] an evil, abnormal beast", "there is only one thing for you left to do" Then SUDDENLY : "You have just 34 days in which to do it (this exact number has been selected for a specific reason, it has definite practical significance)." Lol, talk about a change in tone, I wonder if MLK noticed it ? (The specific reason being Christmas, but still...)
throwawayq3423 3y ago
Cold war history really broke people's brains. Yes this took place in the 1970s, no such thing happens today.

garba_dlm 3y ago

> Was this some kind of organizational failing? sure, why not. and while we're on this deluded train: Julian Assange's legal problems are not political persecution

kome 3y ago

mainstream journalists are incredibly unreliable. it's absolutely clear to everyone that you cannot trust nyt and similar publications. i never read them anyway, and when I do come across articles on topics I'm knowledgeable about, i'm appalled by how wrong they are.

bigger_inside 3y ago
exactly. When I read things I KNOW about, it's incredibly obvious that the news entertainment business (which WP and NYT and CNN and Fox all are) exist to serve the prejudices of their audience. A few times I made the mistake to let myself be interviewed by a newspaper who wanted an "expert" on something (flattering, but meh); something copletely benign and harmless, nothing political. They twisted my words to serve up stuff that fit what their "normal reader" already believed about the world.
colordrops 3y ago
It's crazy to me that people pay for access to these outlets. I wouldn't pay for any content except from individual journalists and a few very small outlets, and even then, would immediately stop if things ever turn for the worse.
dylan604 3y ago
>i never read them anyway, and when I do come across articles on topics I'm knowledgeable about, i'm appalled by how wrong they are. I never do that, except when I do. What kind of soapbox are you trying to stand on. It looks more like a cardboard box collapsing under the weight of your own hubris. I get the suspicion of news outlets of any kind. It doesn't matter what stream the journalists are fished out of, but they cannot all be subject matter experts in all subjects. This is also an expectation full of hubris on your part.
Workaccount2 3y ago
Modern journalists are just terminally online twitter heads. "Why go out or talk to anyone when I can just stay home and be on twitter all day!?!" It's the absolute worst outcome for journalism, and none of publications seem to care. If I had a publication the first thing I would do is ban twitter use (and probably go bankrupt because of it.)

pangolinpouch 3y ago

Our media companies are rife with intelligence agents. Corporate / State media has no incentive to make you the wiser.

ekianjo 3y ago
> Our media companies are run by intelligence agents Fixed that for you
hangonhn 3y ago
It's quite a bit more subtle than that. News organization have their sources that are in the intelligence community. They use each other. Sometimes the journalist wants to use their sources for information. Other times their sources feed them disinformation disguised as information. Other times they want a back channel to leak some real information but can't be seem as coming from a government source. Being a good journalist is hard and often doesn't pay very well. I'm often remind of PG's essay on corporate PR and the media: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html
- the-dude 3y ago
  I have no sources at hand, but I understood the FBI/CIA is embedded within every major news org in the US.
  - Clubber 3y ago
    The twitter files showed government agencies were coercing Twitter into suppressing information. I would find it hard to believe they don't also coerce at newspapers, particularly with the cozy relationship they already have with "anonymous sources" from said agencies.
    - throwawayq3423 3y ago
      > The twitter files showed government agencies were coercing Twitter into suppressing information. They very much did not. Twitter's own lawyers when pressed in court (the place where there are consequences for lying) admitted that nothing in the "Twitter Files" cited by Donald Trump actually show that the social media platform was a tool of government censorship. https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.387133/gov.uscourts.cand.387133.195.0.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.cand.38...

45y54jh45 3y ago

Well yes, why do you think the noise died after the initial hype of Snowden leaking the docs? Do you honestly believe the mechanisms of for-profit journalism lets journalists be journalists? They got to eat and in this world you don't eat by covering yesterdays news. NSA didn't have to lift a finger. Wait a few weeks and people move on to the next story, this should not be a shocking revelation to anyone.

ben_w 3y ago
The British intelligence agencies forced the Guardian to literally shred the laptop with the contents while they were in the swing of running headlines about the things it was revealing. While the USA and the UK are different, I suspect there was a bit more difficult for the NSA than "didn't have to lift a finger".

drak0n1c 3y ago

Closed orgs can take years to find what takes an open source crowd mere days. Regardless of organizational competence.

PKop 3y ago

Some of them are deputies for the state. State-run-media, or Media-run-state, whichever you prefer. The FBI and CIA had agents inside Twitter and Facebook. Of course they have them inside news agencies as well. Part of it over time is access-media, the ones that play ball get the stories and info, the others get weeded out.

throwawayq3423 3y ago
The casual nature of stating a completely impossible conspiracy theory has been common place online for years, HN news used to be immune. It's illegal for FBI or CIA to actively target a US company. Anyone doing so would be fired for cause.
- logicchains 3y ago
  It's illegal to lie under oath to Congress, did James Clapper go to jail? It's illegal to sleep with underage girls, how many people on Epstein's client list went to jail?
  - throwawayq3423 3y ago
    So, rank and file gov employees will risk their jobs to break the law because powerful people away with it, why wouldn't they? Does that make sense to you? It doesn't to me.

0xDEF 3y ago

Why are you surprised that backdoors in "boring" non-consumer facing hardware didn't get much attention?

some_random 3y ago

Snowden leaked a shit ton of documents, the vast majority of which had absolutely nothing to do with any kind of NSA wrongdoing. Journalists then had to go through and try to figure out what these documents actually meant (which they frequently misunderstood). Obviously they're still doing it to today.

mindslight 3y ago
As a general rule when criminal conspiracies are taken to task, they don't retain a right to privacy for their communications that aren't about the criminal conspiracy. Rather it all comes out in court. I understand why Snowden released the way he did, and given how it kept attention on the subject for longer than Binney/Klein it was probably the right call. But there should have also been an escrow/intent to dump the whole trove raw after some time period.
- some_random 3y ago
  Do you really think the entire American IC is a "criminal conspiracy", or are you just trying to justify the fact that Snowden is an angry and vindictive sharepoint admin who simply dumped everything he had access to without regard for what was actually in those documents?
  - mindslight 3y ago
    Yes. By the straightforward standards that non-governmental criminal conspiracies are prosecuted, a large chunk of the NSA is engaged in a criminal conspiracy. We don't hold back on prosecuting other criminal conspiracies just because their associations produce other results like financially supporting their communities and coaching their kids' soccer teams.
  - wnoise 3y ago
    The only way they're not is by the Nixonian "when the President does it, that means it's not illegal" standard.
- 0xDEF 3y ago

what-no-tests 3y ago

> Was this some kind of organizational failing? No...the organization is behaving exactly as intended.

miguelazo 3y ago

Are you kidding? WaPo serves the intelligence community. >After creation of the CIA in 1947, it enjoyed direct collaboration with many U.S. news organizations. But the agency faced a major challenge in October 1977, when—soon after leaving the Washington Post—famed Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein provided an extensive exposé in Rolling Stone. Citing CIA documents, Bernstein wrote that during the previous 25 years “more than 400 American journalists…have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency.” He added: “The history of the CIA’s involvement with the American press continues to be shrouded by an official policy of obfuscation and deception.” Bernstein’s story tarnished the reputations of many journalists and media institutions, including the Washington Post and New York Times. While the CIA’s mission was widely assumed to involve “obfuscation and deception,” the mission of the nation’s finest newspapers was ostensibly the opposite. https://www.guernicamag.com/normon-solomon-why-the-washington-posts-new-ties-to-the-cia-are-so-ominous/ https://www.guernicamag.com/normon-solomon-why-the-washingto...

pxc 3y ago
The WaPo is relentlessly pro-US and pro-'intelligence community' in its writings today, too. It's transparent. Idk how it could be missed, even without knowing the history. Just read a couple articles about contemporary whistleblowers or US involvement in the Syrian civil war or the war in Ukraine or whatever.
- mcpackieh 3y ago
  > It's transparent. Idk how it could be missed, Support or criticism for the intelligence community became very partisan during Trump's campaign and presidency. Once something like this becomes partisan, the average political creature loses some degree of rationality for it. The IC becomes patriotic good guys, stalwart defenders of American democracy standing up to fascism; their past and present malfeasance goes unnoticed, forgotten, or simply ignored. This is how the WaPo's relentless pro-IC stance could be missed; they've been telling a lot of people what they want to hear and all people are less critical and suspicious of things that support their biases and prejudices.
wsc981 3y ago

Consultant32452 3y ago

Supposed news organizations openly employ spooks as commentators on things like foreign policy. Journalists knowingly report lies, acting as the mouthpiece of the government. We know at least one news organization had the whole Epstein story locked down and they buried it because they were afraid they’d lose access to the royal family for future news/puff pieces. You think you hate journalists enough, but you don’t.

ramesh31 3y ago

>How the NSA successfully manage to prevent the Washington Post and friends from discovering and reporting on this malicious backdoor? They've been sitting on these documents for a decade. Washington Post -> Bezos -> AWS -> Cavium Pretty simple to understand, really.

luxuryballs 3y ago

that moment you realize “democracy dies in darkness” is a mission statement

KaiserPro 3y ago

The snowden leak was huge and reverberated for weeks. There were lots of followups. However at the time it was the more sexy things like tapping google's fibre and backdoors in cisco's kits that were more interesting. This is because the public could understand those things and therefore it sold papers. The difference between "cisco, dell and many other leading manufacturers shipped backdoors in their kit" and "cavium the small provider you've not really heard of" is large. Most people reading the snowden stuff will have assumed that the NSA had put in backdoors to most things.

denton-scratch 3y ago

I don't think the journos were lazy, and I don't think there was an organisational failing. The Guardian, in particular, evidently fell out with Snowden and his collaborators; they turned on him. I assume that was coordinated with Washpo and Spiegel. That is: I think there was a decision made, to stop publishing information from the Snowden trove. I don't know what the reason for the betrayal was. I'm pretty sure Alan Rusbridger knows though. He resigned as Editor-in-chief shortly after these events. I don't get why whistleblowers rely on newspaper publishers to unpack their leaks for the public; it's not as if the press are known for either their honesty or their scruples.

jstarfish 3y ago
> I don't get why whistleblowers rely on newspaper publishers to unpack their leaks for the public They have an interest in drama and a platform to publish on.

chillbill 3y ago

[dead]

TheRealDunkirk 3y ago

In the US, we have this passionate fantasy about Woodward and Bernstein and the Post and the Pulitzer and the movie and Redford and Hoffman and the Academy Award, about how the Press played the part of the "fourth estate" as the Founders intended, and rooted out a corrupt politician, and forced him to resign. It's all bullshit. The people who broke into the Watergate Hotel were CIA, Woodward was formerly CIA, and "Deepthroat" was a Deputy Director of the FBI. It was all a deep state plot to get rid of Nixon. Any time the deep state wants to get rid of a politician, the "press" does its "job" by exposing things. When the deep state likes a politician, the "press" ALSO does its "job" by covering things up. Look absolutely no further than Hunter Biden. The hypocrisy is utterly astounding, even to someone who is deeply cynical at this point. The rest of the US needs to wake up to the fact that the press is just another branch of the deep state, and stop pretending that there's ANYTHING useful being fed to us through ANY of the large media corporations.

calgarymicro 3y ago
Wow, the deep state is so powerful that they got Nixon to say on tape that he was going to try to get the CIA to falsely use national security as an excuse to stonewall an FBI investigation. Poor innocent Nixon was no match for their telepathic powers.
- TheRealDunkirk 3y ago
  Whoosh. You went clean over my head, anyway.
  - calgarymicro 3y ago
    What's so hard to understand? Nixon was literally caught on tape[0] conspiring to cover up CREEP payments; it's a bit funny to claim Watergate was all a deep stage conspiracy to screw Nixon when he was recorded committing crimes. [0]https://watergate.info/1972/06/23/the-smoking-gun-tape.html https://watergate.info/1972/06/23/the-smoking-gun-tape.html
    - 3y ago

rdtsc 3y ago

WP is a very close ally to the government agencies in general. That's where it gets those juicy "anonymous government sources claim ..." news. If WP all of sudden wanted to prevent democracy from dying "in darkness" as their motto says, it would mean to start digging a lot harder going against the government as a whole. Don't think they are prepared for it.

theropost 3y ago

Lack of real journalistic resources - Meta has more "journalists" then the Washington Post.

londons_explore 3y ago

I personally suspect that security services visited the newspapers a few days after the leak [1], and ever since then, every article has been about stuff that wouldn't be a surprise to rival security services. Sure - it was a surprise to the public. But rival security services I'm sure would expect US controlled backdoors in US made technology. [1]: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/jan/31/footage-released-guardian-editors-snowden-hard-drives-gchq https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2014/jan/31/footage-rele...

boomboomsubban 3y ago

According to Appelbaum, the person publishing these new leaks, >Primarily these documents remain unpublished because the journalists who hold them fear they will be considered disloyal or even that they will be legally punished Whether that's true I can't say. But as a reminder, despite constant claims that Assange is being extradited over hacking charges, something like 17 of his 18 charges are over publishing documents.