8 ms·

The real story in the NSA scandal is the collapse of journalism

201 points by daigoba66 13y ago

waterphone 13y ago
Not really, no. It's not clear what's happening yet. The Washington Post has backed down somewhat, but additional information from other sources, as well as the initial document which was only partially leaked previously, is still coming out which appears to further contradict the denials.
zwieback 13y ago
I wouldn't call it the collapse of journalism. Over time the big brands will learn how to wait out the initial twitter storm and then do what journalists are supposed to do. Either that or they will become irrelevant.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
trevelyan 13y ago
Just saw the "Page One" documentary about the NYT and came to the same conclusion. While the NYT staff spent most of their time talking about how technology is affecting their "interests" there were only two people in the documentary who mentioned the importance of a free press for promoting justice and disseminating truth: Julian Assange and Markos Moulitsas. So we see shots of NYT reporters checking Google News and talking about twitter. And then the most appalling bit of the film where Judith Miller justifies her behavior by trying to pass the buck to the government, as if anti-war sources (like the FAS) who were actively debunking the crap she was publishing and clamoring for attention did not actually exist.
- gwright 13y ago
  Not sure if you really mean 'social justice' or the less controversial good-old-fashioned 'justice'. The overreach by various government agencies has been an injustice that needs to be addressed but the issue doesn't have to be clouded by pulling in the complicated disputes about 'social justice'
  - trevelyan 13y ago
    You're right. Assange uses the term "justice" in the documentary. It just surprised me that he and Markos were the only two people quoted in the documentary who actually referenced moral values when talking about why society needs a free press.
scribu 13y ago
Besides the usual damage caused by false allegations, the PRISM story also confuses people into thinking that the other recent NSA-related story [1] isn't true either, but it is. [1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/06/confirmed-nsa-spying-millions-americans https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/06/confirmed-nsa-spying-m...
kunai 13y ago
PRISM and the Verizon scandal are two completely different fiascoes. PRISM was a supposed program that archived and collected data of American citizens in a widespread data mining project. The Verizon scandal was one where Verizon agreed to the NSA allowing tapping of phones in specific areas. Both are equally suspicious and egregious in their own rights. What is important is the investigation of both of these programs and the final conclusion. Until that conclusion is met, I think it's best for everybody to shut up and get on with their lives. It was bad, and I, like many others, was angry. But now is the time to wait, and be careful about which services we decide to use.
pfortuny 13y ago
It has become a topic but once again, Orwell to the rescue: "the past is alterable." 1984. How true, in this case. But it has been the Post, not the Government, who altered it. Sad, shameful and pathetic.
- ommunist 13y ago
  In the US conditions censorship does not come from outer pressure, but from inner servility. To add: it is not a cage for what you call free speech, it is its skeleton.
- kllrnohj 13y ago
  Correcting your mistakes is not shameful or pathetic.
  - pfortuny 13y ago
    Rewriting an article is. You can add a list of errata or write a new one.
AnthonyMouse 13y ago
I don't know about the collapse of journalism. What it seems to me is the collapse of credibility. Here we have major publications publishing something and then major corporations denying it. Then the publications step back from it, but not entirely. At the same time, this is an issue about which the parties involved may be under a legal obligation to lie. If there is a room at Facebook that does the same thing as the room at AT&T, would Facebook be allowed to tell you about it? Of course not. So now we have media outlets contradicting each other and genuine sources legally prohibited from providing true answers, which means we'll never know what actually happened. This is what you get when you pass laws that prohibit the public from knowing the truth and wage a campaign against leakers. So now the media looks incompetent, the corporations look like government shills and the government looks like an authoritarian nightmare -- and this even though they maybe haven't actually done anything. All because they attacked our method of finding the truth and destroyed its credibility.
- res0nat0r 13y ago
  If the story was 100% correct then they wouldn't have to alter it, even if said companies were somehow forced to lie to the public. It would stand up on its own merits.
  - mtgx 13y ago
    It says right there in the slides PRISM has direct access to their servers. How the media and the public interpret that, that's different. Maybe if the government was more transparent, this wouldn't happen.
    - res0nat0r 13y ago
      Or maybe the slides are inaccurate?
      - AnthonyMouse 13y ago
        Maybe. Hey, why don't we ask someone with first hand knowledge? ...
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
jdp23 13y ago
Talk about click-baiting ... Based on what we know so far, the stories have at a minimum gotten significant press coverage about the volume of FISA requests and (per the NY Times and Marc Ambinder) the cooperation of many US tech companies (though not Twitter) in building a streamlined approach to surveillance of nonUS persons. With public discussion, it ay be harder to invoke the state secrets clause. And we're not done yet. "Collapse" seems a litte overstated.
eupharis 13y ago
Washington Post did revise the story. And yes, they should have issued an explicit correction. But this is still a major story: > Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Mark Udall (D-Colo.), who had classified knowledge of the program as members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, were unable to speak of it when they warned in a Dec. 27, 2012, floor debate that the FISA Amendments Act had what both of them called a “back-door search loophole” for the content of innocent Americans who were swept up in a search for someone else. > “As it is written, there is nothing to prohibit the intelligence community from searching through a pile of communications, which may have been incidentally or accidentally been collected without a warrant, to deliberately search for the phone calls or e-mails of specific Americans,” Udall said. US Senators with classified knowledge of the program don't have knowledge of what exactly it entails or how it is being used. I can forgive the Post for getting some of the details wrong.
- brown9-2 13y ago
  They had the knowledge but they could not publicly disclose a classified program. That's what "unable" means here.
  - eupharis 13y ago
    Ah yes, I should've included the next sentence: > Wyden repeatedly asked the NSA to estimate the number of Americans whose communications had been incidentally collected, and the agency’s director, Lt. Gen. Keith B. Alexander, insisted there was no way to find out. Eventually Inspector General I. Charles McCullough III wrote Wyden a letter stating that it would violate the privacy of Americans in NSA data banks to try to estimate their number. This is what I was referring to when I said the Senators didn't know how exactly it was being used. It is pretty basic knowledge about the program. Has the NSA incidentally collected data on 300 Americans? On 3,000? On, say, 300 million?
    - AJ007 13y ago
      In the recent Senate Intelligence hearing Senator Wyden asked General James Clapper "Does the NSA collect any data at all on millions or hundred of millions of Americans?" Response: "No sir, it does not .. not wittingly, there are cases where they could inadvertently, perhaps, collect, but not wittingly." If ones assumes that William Binney both knows what he is talking about and is telling the truth, then the NSA has been collecting data on Americans since before September 11th. If the rest of what William Binney says is also correct, then the NSA initially was keeping the data on Americans anonymized, for viewing only after a court order -- but then after September 11th disabled data anonymization for some order of time. If the data has been anonymized once again, this may present legal problems in how officials can guarantee this because it would reveal past illegal activity which those same officials may have been involved in.
cozeulodorieso 13y ago
Yes, journalism truly has collapsed. That's why these scandals were outed by Reddit and Twitter users, not journalists working at more-than-a-century-old newspapers. </snark>
brown9-2 13y ago
As long as we are talking about jumping to conclusions, the author does the same thing here: Declan McCullagh of CNET examined the Washington Post story independently and concluded that the Post story was wrong. The Cnet "analysis" depends on the credibility of their unnamed source. The reader is left to decide whose source sounds more believable, Cnet's or the WaPo's, and which version of the story they find likely. The problem inherent to secrecy (which isn't an argument for abolishing it) is that the public is left to draw conclusions from partial facts and an unverifiable amount of misdirection.
ommunist 13y ago
Welcome to the Web 3.0.1984. It is the read-write-rewrite one.
bcoates 13y ago
McCullagh's star named source Stewart Baker is not a credible source on this sort of thing, he's effectively a PR flack. He's made a career of banging the drum that the cyber-boogeyman apocalypse is going to happen real soon now, and the ACLU and EFF are trying to get everyone killed, since the clipper chip era.
acqq 13y ago
It is a common praxis today to extend the online version of the stories. As far as I see, the changes aren't stepping back from the points already made, and the zdnet article doesn't point to any significant correction that would discredit the authors.
cpleppert 13y ago
The media needs to get more credible technology consultants they can turn to. The days when a brief but imprecise description was acceptable are over. In this case 'direct collection' i.e. a backdoor didn't make sense for a lot of reasons and didn't square with the program was described in other sources that came out after the slides were released. But the real problem is secrecy. This is a complicated program with many actors and the media can't be expected not to report information clearly contained in leaked NSA slides even if they can't get the context 100% right.
room271 13y ago
The collapse of journalism? Isn't this week's news some of the best journalism of recent times?! There are plenty examples of poor journalism, but I personally feel more encouraged that there is decent investigative and brave journalism going on after this week.
teeja 13y ago
None of this was news since William Binney, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Binney_%28U.S._intelligence_official%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Binney_%28U.S._intelli... who estimated "that the NSA (particularly through the Stellar Wind project) had intercepted 20 trillion communications 'transactions' of Americans (such as phone calls, emails, and other forms of data but not including financial data)" in the years following the 2005 James Riser NYTimes story. IMO both journalism and the American people failed to pay adequate attention to this issue, both have gotten what they paid for, and the faux-surprise act of both is hilarious.
yekko 13y ago
US justice system in ‘calamitous’ collapse

201 points by daigoba66 13y ago

Not really, no. It's not clear what's happening yet. The Washington Post has backed down somewhat, but additional information from other sources, as well as the initial document which was only partially leaked previously, is still coming out which appears to further contradict the denials.

zwieback 13y ago

I wouldn't call it the collapse of journalism. Over time the big brands will learn how to wait out the initial twitter storm and then do what journalists are supposed to do. Either that or they will become irrelevant.

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

trevelyan 13y ago

Just saw the "Page One" documentary about the NYT and came to the same conclusion. While the NYT staff spent most of their time talking about how technology is affecting their "interests" there were only two people in the documentary who mentioned the importance of a free press for promoting justice and disseminating truth: Julian Assange and Markos Moulitsas. So we see shots of NYT reporters checking Google News and talking about twitter. And then the most appalling bit of the film where Judith Miller justifies her behavior by trying to pass the buck to the government, as if anti-war sources (like the FAS) who were actively debunking the crap she was publishing and clamoring for attention did not actually exist.

gwright 13y ago
Not sure if you really mean 'social justice' or the less controversial good-old-fashioned 'justice'. The overreach by various government agencies has been an injustice that needs to be addressed but the issue doesn't have to be clouded by pulling in the complicated disputes about 'social justice'
- trevelyan 13y ago
  You're right. Assange uses the term "justice" in the documentary. It just surprised me that he and Markos were the only two people quoted in the documentary who actually referenced moral values when talking about why society needs a free press.

scribu 13y ago

Besides the usual damage caused by false allegations, the PRISM story also confuses people into thinking that the other recent NSA-related story [1] isn't true either, but it is. [1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/06/confirmed-nsa-spying-millions-americans https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/06/confirmed-nsa-spying-m...

kunai 13y ago

PRISM and the Verizon scandal are two completely different fiascoes. PRISM was a supposed program that archived and collected data of American citizens in a widespread data mining project. The Verizon scandal was one where Verizon agreed to the NSA allowing tapping of phones in specific areas. Both are equally suspicious and egregious in their own rights. What is important is the investigation of both of these programs and the final conclusion. Until that conclusion is met, I think it's best for everybody to shut up and get on with their lives. It was bad, and I, like many others, was angry. But now is the time to wait, and be careful about which services we decide to use.

pfortuny 13y ago

It has become a topic but once again, Orwell to the rescue: "the past is alterable." 1984. How true, in this case. But it has been the Post, not the Government, who altered it. Sad, shameful and pathetic.

ommunist 13y ago
In the US conditions censorship does not come from outer pressure, but from inner servility. To add: it is not a cage for what you call free speech, it is its skeleton.
kllrnohj 13y ago
Correcting your mistakes is not shameful or pathetic.
- pfortuny 13y ago
  Rewriting an article is. You can add a list of errata or write a new one.

AnthonyMouse 13y ago

I don't know about the collapse of journalism. What it seems to me is the collapse of credibility. Here we have major publications publishing something and then major corporations denying it. Then the publications step back from it, but not entirely. At the same time, this is an issue about which the parties involved may be under a legal obligation to lie. If there is a room at Facebook that does the same thing as the room at AT&T, would Facebook be allowed to tell you about it? Of course not. So now we have media outlets contradicting each other and genuine sources legally prohibited from providing true answers, which means we'll never know what actually happened. This is what you get when you pass laws that prohibit the public from knowing the truth and wage a campaign against leakers. So now the media looks incompetent, the corporations look like government shills and the government looks like an authoritarian nightmare -- and this even though they maybe haven't actually done anything. All because they attacked our method of finding the truth and destroyed its credibility.

res0nat0r 13y ago
If the story was 100% correct then they wouldn't have to alter it, even if said companies were somehow forced to lie to the public. It would stand up on its own merits.
- mtgx 13y ago
  It says right there in the slides PRISM has direct access to their servers. How the media and the public interpret that, that's different. Maybe if the government was more transparent, this wouldn't happen.
  - res0nat0r 13y ago
    Or maybe the slides are inaccurate?
    - AnthonyMouse 13y ago
      Maybe. Hey, why don't we ask someone with first hand knowledge? ...

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

jdp23 13y ago

Talk about click-baiting ... Based on what we know so far, the stories have at a minimum gotten significant press coverage about the volume of FISA requests and (per the NY Times and Marc Ambinder) the cooperation of many US tech companies (though not Twitter) in building a streamlined approach to surveillance of nonUS persons. With public discussion, it ay be harder to invoke the state secrets clause. And we're not done yet. "Collapse" seems a litte overstated.

eupharis 13y ago

Washington Post did revise the story. And yes, they should have issued an explicit correction. But this is still a major story: > Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Mark Udall (D-Colo.), who had classified knowledge of the program as members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, were unable to speak of it when they warned in a Dec. 27, 2012, floor debate that the FISA Amendments Act had what both of them called a “back-door search loophole” for the content of innocent Americans who were swept up in a search for someone else. > “As it is written, there is nothing to prohibit the intelligence community from searching through a pile of communications, which may have been incidentally or accidentally been collected without a warrant, to deliberately search for the phone calls or e-mails of specific Americans,” Udall said. US Senators with classified knowledge of the program don't have knowledge of what exactly it entails or how it is being used. I can forgive the Post for getting some of the details wrong.

brown9-2 13y ago
They had the knowledge but they could not publicly disclose a classified program. That's what "unable" means here.
- eupharis 13y ago
  Ah yes, I should've included the next sentence: > Wyden repeatedly asked the NSA to estimate the number of Americans whose communications had been incidentally collected, and the agency’s director, Lt. Gen. Keith B. Alexander, insisted there was no way to find out. Eventually Inspector General I. Charles McCullough III wrote Wyden a letter stating that it would violate the privacy of Americans in NSA data banks to try to estimate their number. This is what I was referring to when I said the Senators didn't know how exactly it was being used. It is pretty basic knowledge about the program. Has the NSA incidentally collected data on 300 Americans? On 3,000? On, say, 300 million?
  - AJ007 13y ago
    In the recent Senate Intelligence hearing Senator Wyden asked General James Clapper "Does the NSA collect any data at all on millions or hundred of millions of Americans?" Response: "No sir, it does not .. not wittingly, there are cases where they could inadvertently, perhaps, collect, but not wittingly." If ones assumes that William Binney both knows what he is talking about and is telling the truth, then the NSA has been collecting data on Americans since before September 11th. If the rest of what William Binney says is also correct, then the NSA initially was keeping the data on Americans anonymized, for viewing only after a court order -- but then after September 11th disabled data anonymization for some order of time. If the data has been anonymized once again, this may present legal problems in how officials can guarantee this because it would reveal past illegal activity which those same officials may have been involved in.

cozeulodorieso 13y ago

Yes, journalism truly has collapsed. That's why these scandals were outed by Reddit and Twitter users, not journalists working at more-than-a-century-old newspapers. </snark>

brown9-2 13y ago

As long as we are talking about jumping to conclusions, the author does the same thing here: Declan McCullagh of CNET examined the Washington Post story independently and concluded that the Post story was wrong. The Cnet "analysis" depends on the credibility of their unnamed source. The reader is left to decide whose source sounds more believable, Cnet's or the WaPo's, and which version of the story they find likely. The problem inherent to secrecy (which isn't an argument for abolishing it) is that the public is left to draw conclusions from partial facts and an unverifiable amount of misdirection.

ommunist 13y ago

Welcome to the Web 3.0.1984. It is the read-write-rewrite one.

bcoates 13y ago

McCullagh's star named source Stewart Baker is not a credible source on this sort of thing, he's effectively a PR flack. He's made a career of banging the drum that the cyber-boogeyman apocalypse is going to happen real soon now, and the ACLU and EFF are trying to get everyone killed, since the clipper chip era.

acqq 13y ago

It is a common praxis today to extend the online version of the stories. As far as I see, the changes aren't stepping back from the points already made, and the zdnet article doesn't point to any significant correction that would discredit the authors.

cpleppert 13y ago

The media needs to get more credible technology consultants they can turn to. The days when a brief but imprecise description was acceptable are over. In this case 'direct collection' i.e. a backdoor didn't make sense for a lot of reasons and didn't square with the program was described in other sources that came out after the slides were released. But the real problem is secrecy. This is a complicated program with many actors and the media can't be expected not to report information clearly contained in leaked NSA slides even if they can't get the context 100% right.

room271 13y ago

The collapse of journalism? Isn't this week's news some of the best journalism of recent times?! There are plenty examples of poor journalism, but I personally feel more encouraged that there is decent investigative and brave journalism going on after this week.

teeja 13y ago

None of this was news since William Binney, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Binney_%28U.S._intelligence_official%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Binney_%28U.S._intelli... who estimated "that the NSA (particularly through the Stellar Wind project) had intercepted 20 trillion communications 'transactions' of Americans (such as phone calls, emails, and other forms of data but not including financial data)" in the years following the 2005 James Riser NYTimes story. IMO both journalism and the American people failed to pay adequate attention to this issue, both have gotten what they paid for, and the faux-surprise act of both is hilarious.

yekko 13y ago

US justice system in ‘calamitous’ collapse