7 ms·

The Worst Journalism of 2014

60 points by samclemens 12y ago

lpsz 12y ago
It's okay, because with decreasing attention spans, journalism will eventually be swallowed by click-bait BuzzFeeds of this world. If you disagree, it's because on HN you're among peers that can actually read an entire NYT article or a think tank report. In one sitting. Without a Snapchat break. And HN is not representative of the general population.
- Blackthorn 12y ago
  I really don't understand why people bash on BuzzFeed, especially when talking about an article like this. It's a place where real journalism gets done. One of the few that are left, really.
  - sp332 12y ago
    My only exposure to BuzzFeed was the flood of listicles that swamped my Facebook feed until I blocked the website. I didn't even know they tried to do journalism until the Uber scandal.
    - notahacker 12y ago
      Until reading that article I'd have said the only thing that could be said in favour of Buzzfeed is that their listicles had fewer pretensions towards journalism (and better pictures) than most blogspam.
    - deleted 12y ago
      [deleted]
  - nailer 12y ago
    > I really don't understand why people bash on BuzzFeed Probably because they Buzzfeed published a hypothetical suggestion by an Uber exec at a dinner party as an actual plan.
    - Blackthorn 12y ago
      Ah Hacker News, the only place I go where they'll actually defend the bad behavior of a technology company.
Pxtl 12y ago
Start suing them.
- protomyth 12y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times_Co._v._Sullivan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times_Co._v._Sullivan makes it very, very hard
- dghughes 12y ago
  Contact the major advertisers and tell them you won't be buying their product. My idiot redneck neighbor had a stock car and was always making noise at all hours. One night at 1am he arrived home after a race and started up the engine to back it off the car trailer. So I called his major advertisers listed on the side of the car, they didn't like to hear their phone ring at 1am.
itg 12y ago
The Uber controversy showed me what journalism is all about. It's ok for them to dig as much dirt on you as possible and present half-facts, but they go into a rage the moment you question their motives and try to find any info on them.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- knowtheory 12y ago
  You're letting a single Buzzfeed article define what journalism is to you, and then complain about others presenting half-facts? c'mon.
pollinaise 12y ago
You can do your part to fix this by not watching TV news and not reacting to clickbait in any medium, on sheer principle. If you can't manage that, at least don't spread the disease to others by bringing up the latest hypes and scares.
- AndrewKemendo 12y ago
  You can do your part to fix this by not watching TV news and not reacting to clickbait in any medium Funny, I don't do any of those things, yet this stuff seem to continue unabated. How many people need to (not) do it for a critical mass?
danso 12y ago
I'm glad to see the Rolling Stone debacle at the top of this list...to me, it's one of the appalling examples of journalistic dysfunction that I can recall off-hand. Yes, I know that the media's overall screwup up of the Iraq War was "worse" in many regards...but on the other hand, it was a much more diffuse and broad situation...not only the scope of the topic, but the coverage (within the same publication, different articles had different levels of critique). The RS article, in contrast, involved a pretty simple reporting obstacle: did the main character accurately describe events? Even if she wouldn't allow herself to be identified, nor (inexplicably) identify her attackers, there were many ways to circumstantially confirm her story...and RS did none of them. It's come out that the RS reporter may have lied about even contacting "Jackie's" friends. One reporter's lies and incompetence is bad enough...but the fact that her work just passed through RS's reportedly legendary fact-checking process, its editors, and its lawyers...is just devastating. The best thing that could come out of this is that Rolling Stone as a journalistic institution falls on its sword and cleans house. At any of the other news outlets I've worked for, even my college paper, I can't imagine being able to publish a story like this doing as little verification as the RS reporter did. One of the worst collateral damages from this (aside from the obvious harm to rape victims who now have even more reason to fear publicity) is seeing how easy it is to co-opt the journalistic institution. Few people questioned the RS reporter's ethics because Hey, she's written several well-regarded stories about rape for Rolling Stone...there's no way she'd have the standards of an intern for this story, right? Even worse were the people (including the reporter herself) who said: "Well, the gang rape victim wasn't the story, the story was how U.Va ignored it"...Um yeah, how exactly does U.Va ignore an egregious incident that we don't know if the victim actually reported it to U.Va? For my part, when I first read the story, I immediately tweeted/shared it as one of the most compelling stories I read all year. I didn't even think to notice the unsaid implication that the reporter never located the accused, nor talked to anyone besides the victim herself...that was my professional bias (i.e. Of course the reporter talked to them and got no comment...that's what every reporter is supposed to at least do). But my bias about college fraternities and the problems of rape reporting, and my previous respect for Rolling Stone as a news source, made me accept with little hesitation a story that, in retrospect, was too awful (and perfect in its details) to be true. So the RS U.Va story may not have been the worst journalistic fuckup when it comes to consequences...but it's definitely was the worst in terms of showing the flaws in the reporting process, and in how poorly we are able to evaluate the truth behind a story.
jsnk 12y ago
My pick: The Face Behind Bitcoin by Leah McGrath Goodman [Newsweek: http://www.newsweek.com/2014/03/14/face-behind-bitcoin-247957.html http://www.newsweek.com/2014/03/14/face-behind-bitcoin-24795...]
- atmosx 12y ago
  Oh NewsWeek is toasted anyway. I've encountered too much bad journalism and extremely short-righted opinions in its columns. No wonder they are financially diseased, their content has no real value.
- mtgentry 12y ago
  Mine too. Here was a case where they repeatedly looked the other way when the evidence didn't serve their narrative. To me it's the first example of link-bait style reporting in print journalism.
  - dllthomas 12y ago
    "To me it's the first example of link-bait style reporting in print journalism." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism
harry8 12y ago
Fox should not be present in this list. In no way is what Fox & Friends doing journalism. It's not even worthy of being described as an impersonation of journalism a la Wolf Blitzer and co. on CNN or the cavalcade of idiots on CNBC. Giving fox & friends an award for bad journalism, even the worst journalism, is actually giving it credibility that it has earned the right not to have. It is literally beneath this sort of contempt. If it were written in a satirical novel the critics would call the reality of fox and friends an unrealistically drawn hyperbole.
- nailer 12y ago
  Sure, but the same logic could be be applied to Rolling Stone for the UVa hoax. There is no journalism involved - the publication simply acted as a mouthpiece to a deranged individual and harmed innocent people as a result. Part of it is older publications having to compete with online sources who often have lower standards than traditional print journalism.
  - d23 12y ago
    > Sure, but the same logic could be be applied to Rolling Stone for the UVa hoax. Eh, I don't think it's the same line of reasoning though. Rolling Stone has some very serious pieces that are well researched, with sources cited. They made a mistake in trusting a source, which is embarrassing, but doesn't detract from their overall seriousness. Fox and Friends is a show that peddles propaganda and talking points in-between hokey feel-good stories. It just isn't journalism.
    - nailer 12y ago
      I think it's the same in terms of forgoing basic research in the pursuit of a political agenda.
- AndrewKemendo 12y ago
  If it were written in a satirical novel the critics would call the reality of fox and friends an unrealistically drawn hyperbole I've yet to read a more apt description of the network than thus.
vrao423 12y ago
None of the morning or prime time shows should be considered journalism. This article has no credibility in my eyes as the author cannot differentiate between 60 minutes and Fox & Friends. Also, not sure how mentioning that he can smell marijuana is bad journalism. He is suppose to report what he sees, smells or hears. Is a journalist suppose to edit himself to push a particular view?
- hga 12y ago
  Oh, I'm sure the author knows the difference, it's just that he/the CJR had to dig that deep to find something, anything on Fox, it would appear (it isn't even as bad as the article makes it out to be, if you listen to the clip the questionable comments came after remarks on some women who've notoriously stayed with physically abusive men). No narrative about MSM problems can be complete without a dig at Fox, it is axiomatically evil.
- notahacker 12y ago
  You honestly can't see how the remark "obviously there's marijuana in the air" might be considered bad journalism? Observing that there's the smell of marijuana in the air is journalism, though you'd have to balance that against the relative importance of other observations he could have made within the same time frame. It's a entirely different thing to express the view that "obviously" the protests involve a lot of marijuana and push - intentionally or otherwise - the particular view that one should expect protests against alleged police brutality to be under the influence of drugs [especially with all those poor black people around?]. As the original article strongly hinted, that was probably a slip rather than an attempt to push a particular agenda... maybe he even actually meant the smell was readily detectable rather than inevitable at that sort of protest. He's far from likely to have wanted to imply anything about the inevitability of a certain demographic behaving a certain way. It's bad journalism to make those kind of insinuations for intentional effect, rank bad journalism to do it without an agenda to push or even awareness of what might be implied.
Spooky23 12y ago
The worst journalism are the stories that aren't printed. In my city, the local rag is tightly affiliated with the city administration. So when stories appear that don't jive with the desired narrative (like two armed robberies in busy pedestrian neighborhoods in the span of a week), they just don't get reported. The decline of old-school publications undermines the profession... One newspaper and a couple of lousy TV stations provide no incentive to be aggressive, especially with government officials. It's easier to print softballs and be friends.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
hawkice 12y ago
This is an incredibly hard list to crack, and I don't think the author took their task seriously. I think, instead, they went with things that might be interesting to get angry about. Misphrasing or being rude during an interview is bad, for instance, but how did it leap above all the lies produced by laziness? For example: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=16641 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=16641 It's not sexy -- which is precisely why journalists simply lie to you about it. You don't care, they don't care, no one really cares except experts and the PR company that gives them the story. And it happens in almost every field of expertise (I notice it a lot more in sciences, but that probably only reflects my relative expertise in that cluster of ideas).
- d23 12y ago
  > You don't care, they don't care, no one really cares Well, why should they be in this list then? I really don't care if some local rag told their city of 2000 the intricacies of cow speech, even if completely fabricated. I think most of us have learned to collectively skip the nonsense anyway. What I do care about are large institutions that are manipulating the thinking of entire voting blocks, swaying the public discourse, and affecting the outcome of elections.
deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
iconjack 12y ago
Last year's winner should have been NPR's U.S. Worries NSA Leaker's Files Could Be Hacked (Tom Gjelten) [0] http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=203531584 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=2035315... This story came out when Snowden was still at the Moscow airport. At issue is whether Snowden's files can fall into the hands of the Russians or Chinese. This is a fair question. But the piece focuses on physical access to the files on Snowden's laptops, which is simply comical. Of course they can take his files. A listener would get the impression that Snowden's protection of the data consists of holding tight to his computers while the Russians attempt to wrest them from his arms, or his ability to sleep with one eye open and his laptops at his bedside. My favorite gem was when security expert Lee explained that you can get at a laptop's hard drive using nothing more than an ordinary screwdriver. Will the Russians be able to locate a screwdriver? Only time will tell. Gjelten tells us: "For Snowden to have kept his files secure, he would have had to keep his laptops powered off and disconnected from the Internet. Plus, he'd need physical control of the machines at all times." This statement is irresponsibly misleading. A trusting listener would have no choice but to conclude that Snowden's secrets are unprotectable after hearing this. But the truth, access to the files themselves are unimportant, because they are surely encrypted. Eventually they did get around to talking about encryption. Their experts on the matter were the likes of Mark Weatherford, ex-DHS undersecretary who now works at the Chertoff Group (as in Michael Chertoff), who told us that "Encryption really only buys you time. You can eventually decrypt it. It just takes time to do that, and it's really dependent on the algorithm and the keys." Again, it's being emphasized that it's only a matter of time before the Russians have the goods. What is not mentioned is that a modest-sized encryption key buys billions of billions of billions of years [1]. It would be an earth-shattering breakthrough if the Russians or the Chinese or the Americans had an algorithm that could beat this. At one point, Michael Sutton of Zscaler admits: "If Snowden were using the best possible encryption and he was using a strong key, it would be virtually impossible for NSA, China, Russia - anyone - to access that data." But Gjelten immediately smothers this thought: "At least in the short run. There are ways to break a code, if only by what cyber technologists call brute force - essentially having a computer try every possible key combination until the correct one is found. Mark Weatherford, now at the Chertoff Group, points out that no encryption lasts forever." Not forever, but much longer than the age of the universe. At no time in this story is it revealed the kinds of time frames we are talking about. By the way, "the best possible encryption" is available for free and runs on any computer, and a strong key takes an insignificant amount of effort to generate. Finally, the piece ends with "In all, cyber security experts agree, the likelihood is good that the Chinese or the Russians or both, will sooner or later have whatever documents Snowden has taken with him, whether he intended to share them, or not." This is false. Not only is it untrue that the Russians are likely to get the data, it is also untrue that cyber experts agree that they will, which Tom Gjelten would have known had he asked any non-government-affiliated encryption expert. In short, Gjelten spent the first half of the piece addressing physical access to the files, which is ludicrous, and the second half convincing us that encryption is futile, which is the opposite of the truth. [0] http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=203531584 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=2035315... [1] http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1279619 http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1279619
joyrider 12y ago
I'm surprised Forbes didn't make the list. It has to be the worst of the major business publications in terms of low quality content and high ratio of ads.

60 points by samclemens 12y ago

lpsz 12y ago

It's okay, because with decreasing attention spans, journalism will eventually be swallowed by click-bait BuzzFeeds of this world. If you disagree, it's because on HN you're among peers that can actually read an entire NYT article or a think tank report. In one sitting. Without a Snapchat break. And HN is not representative of the general population.

Blackthorn 12y ago
I really don't understand why people bash on BuzzFeed, especially when talking about an article like this. It's a place where real journalism gets done. One of the few that are left, really.
- sp332 12y ago
  My only exposure to BuzzFeed was the flood of listicles that swamped my Facebook feed until I blocked the website. I didn't even know they tried to do journalism until the Uber scandal.
  - notahacker 12y ago
    Until reading that article I'd have said the only thing that could be said in favour of Buzzfeed is that their listicles had fewer pretensions towards journalism (and better pictures) than most blogspam.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
- nailer 12y ago
  > I really don't understand why people bash on BuzzFeed Probably because they Buzzfeed published a hypothetical suggestion by an Uber exec at a dinner party as an actual plan.
  - Blackthorn 12y ago
    Ah Hacker News, the only place I go where they'll actually defend the bad behavior of a technology company.

Pxtl 12y ago

Start suing them.

protomyth 12y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times_Co._v._Sullivan http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times_Co._v._Sullivan makes it very, very hard
dghughes 12y ago
Contact the major advertisers and tell them you won't be buying their product. My idiot redneck neighbor had a stock car and was always making noise at all hours. One night at 1am he arrived home after a race and started up the engine to back it off the car trailer. So I called his major advertisers listed on the side of the car, they didn't like to hear their phone ring at 1am.

itg 12y ago

The Uber controversy showed me what journalism is all about. It's ok for them to dig as much dirt on you as possible and present half-facts, but they go into a rage the moment you question their motives and try to find any info on them.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
knowtheory 12y ago
You're letting a single Buzzfeed article define what journalism is to you, and then complain about others presenting half-facts? c'mon.

pollinaise 12y ago

You can do your part to fix this by not watching TV news and not reacting to clickbait in any medium, on sheer principle. If you can't manage that, at least don't spread the disease to others by bringing up the latest hypes and scares.

AndrewKemendo 12y ago
You can do your part to fix this by not watching TV news and not reacting to clickbait in any medium Funny, I don't do any of those things, yet this stuff seem to continue unabated. How many people need to (not) do it for a critical mass?

danso 12y ago

I'm glad to see the Rolling Stone debacle at the top of this list...to me, it's one of the appalling examples of journalistic dysfunction that I can recall off-hand. Yes, I know that the media's overall screwup up of the Iraq War was "worse" in many regards...but on the other hand, it was a much more diffuse and broad situation...not only the scope of the topic, but the coverage (within the same publication, different articles had different levels of critique). The RS article, in contrast, involved a pretty simple reporting obstacle: did the main character accurately describe events? Even if she wouldn't allow herself to be identified, nor (inexplicably) identify her attackers, there were many ways to circumstantially confirm her story...and RS did none of them. It's come out that the RS reporter may have lied about even contacting "Jackie's" friends. One reporter's lies and incompetence is bad enough...but the fact that her work just passed through RS's reportedly legendary fact-checking process, its editors, and its lawyers...is just devastating. The best thing that could come out of this is that Rolling Stone as a journalistic institution falls on its sword and cleans house. At any of the other news outlets I've worked for, even my college paper, I can't imagine being able to publish a story like this doing as little verification as the RS reporter did. One of the worst collateral damages from this (aside from the obvious harm to rape victims who now have even more reason to fear publicity) is seeing how easy it is to co-opt the journalistic institution. Few people questioned the RS reporter's ethics because Hey, she's written several well-regarded stories about rape for Rolling Stone...there's no way she'd have the standards of an intern for this story, right? Even worse were the people (including the reporter herself) who said: "Well, the gang rape victim wasn't the story, the story was how U.Va ignored it"...Um yeah, how exactly does U.Va ignore an egregious incident that we don't know if the victim actually reported it to U.Va? For my part, when I first read the story, I immediately tweeted/shared it as one of the most compelling stories I read all year. I didn't even think to notice the unsaid implication that the reporter never located the accused, nor talked to anyone besides the victim herself...that was my professional bias (i.e. Of course the reporter talked to them and got no comment...that's what every reporter is supposed to at least do). But my bias about college fraternities and the problems of rape reporting, and my previous respect for Rolling Stone as a news source, made me accept with little hesitation a story that, in retrospect, was too awful (and perfect in its details) to be true. So the RS U.Va story may not have been the worst journalistic fuckup when it comes to consequences...but it's definitely was the worst in terms of showing the flaws in the reporting process, and in how poorly we are able to evaluate the truth behind a story.

jsnk 12y ago

My pick: The Face Behind Bitcoin by Leah McGrath Goodman [Newsweek: http://www.newsweek.com/2014/03/14/face-behind-bitcoin-247957.html http://www.newsweek.com/2014/03/14/face-behind-bitcoin-24795...]

atmosx 12y ago
Oh NewsWeek is toasted anyway. I've encountered too much bad journalism and extremely short-righted opinions in its columns. No wonder they are financially diseased, their content has no real value.
mtgentry 12y ago
Mine too. Here was a case where they repeatedly looked the other way when the evidence didn't serve their narrative. To me it's the first example of link-bait style reporting in print journalism.
- dllthomas 12y ago
  "To me it's the first example of link-bait style reporting in print journalism." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism

harry8 12y ago

Fox should not be present in this list. In no way is what Fox & Friends doing journalism. It's not even worthy of being described as an impersonation of journalism a la Wolf Blitzer and co. on CNN or the cavalcade of idiots on CNBC. Giving fox & friends an award for bad journalism, even the worst journalism, is actually giving it credibility that it has earned the right not to have. It is literally beneath this sort of contempt. If it were written in a satirical novel the critics would call the reality of fox and friends an unrealistically drawn hyperbole.

nailer 12y ago
Sure, but the same logic could be be applied to Rolling Stone for the UVa hoax. There is no journalism involved - the publication simply acted as a mouthpiece to a deranged individual and harmed innocent people as a result. Part of it is older publications having to compete with online sources who often have lower standards than traditional print journalism.
- d23 12y ago
  > Sure, but the same logic could be be applied to Rolling Stone for the UVa hoax. Eh, I don't think it's the same line of reasoning though. Rolling Stone has some very serious pieces that are well researched, with sources cited. They made a mistake in trusting a source, which is embarrassing, but doesn't detract from their overall seriousness. Fox and Friends is a show that peddles propaganda and talking points in-between hokey feel-good stories. It just isn't journalism.
  - nailer 12y ago
    I think it's the same in terms of forgoing basic research in the pursuit of a political agenda.
AndrewKemendo 12y ago
If it were written in a satirical novel the critics would call the reality of fox and friends an unrealistically drawn hyperbole I've yet to read a more apt description of the network than thus.

vrao423 12y ago

None of the morning or prime time shows should be considered journalism. This article has no credibility in my eyes as the author cannot differentiate between 60 minutes and Fox & Friends. Also, not sure how mentioning that he can smell marijuana is bad journalism. He is suppose to report what he sees, smells or hears. Is a journalist suppose to edit himself to push a particular view?

hga 12y ago
Oh, I'm sure the author knows the difference, it's just that he/the CJR had to dig that deep to find something, anything on Fox, it would appear (it isn't even as bad as the article makes it out to be, if you listen to the clip the questionable comments came after remarks on some women who've notoriously stayed with physically abusive men). No narrative about MSM problems can be complete without a dig at Fox, it is axiomatically evil.
notahacker 12y ago
You honestly can't see how the remark "obviously there's marijuana in the air" might be considered bad journalism? Observing that there's the smell of marijuana in the air is journalism, though you'd have to balance that against the relative importance of other observations he could have made within the same time frame. It's a entirely different thing to express the view that "obviously" the protests involve a lot of marijuana and push - intentionally or otherwise - the particular view that one should expect protests against alleged police brutality to be under the influence of drugs [especially with all those poor black people around?]. As the original article strongly hinted, that was probably a slip rather than an attempt to push a particular agenda... maybe he even actually meant the smell was readily detectable rather than inevitable at that sort of protest. He's far from likely to have wanted to imply anything about the inevitability of a certain demographic behaving a certain way. It's bad journalism to make those kind of insinuations for intentional effect, rank bad journalism to do it without an agenda to push or even awareness of what might be implied.

Spooky23 12y ago

The worst journalism are the stories that aren't printed. In my city, the local rag is tightly affiliated with the city administration. So when stories appear that don't jive with the desired narrative (like two armed robberies in busy pedestrian neighborhoods in the span of a week), they just don't get reported. The decline of old-school publications undermines the profession... One newspaper and a couple of lousy TV stations provide no incentive to be aggressive, especially with government officials. It's easier to print softballs and be friends.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

hawkice 12y ago

This is an incredibly hard list to crack, and I don't think the author took their task seriously. I think, instead, they went with things that might be interesting to get angry about. Misphrasing or being rude during an interview is bad, for instance, but how did it leap above all the lies produced by laziness? For example: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=16641 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=16641 It's not sexy -- which is precisely why journalists simply lie to you about it. You don't care, they don't care, no one really cares except experts and the PR company that gives them the story. And it happens in almost every field of expertise (I notice it a lot more in sciences, but that probably only reflects my relative expertise in that cluster of ideas).

d23 12y ago
> You don't care, they don't care, no one really cares Well, why should they be in this list then? I really don't care if some local rag told their city of 2000 the intricacies of cow speech, even if completely fabricated. I think most of us have learned to collectively skip the nonsense anyway. What I do care about are large institutions that are manipulating the thinking of entire voting blocks, swaying the public discourse, and affecting the outcome of elections.

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

iconjack 12y ago

Last year's winner should have been NPR's U.S. Worries NSA Leaker's Files Could Be Hacked (Tom Gjelten) [0] http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=203531584 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=2035315... This story came out when Snowden was still at the Moscow airport. At issue is whether Snowden's files can fall into the hands of the Russians or Chinese. This is a fair question. But the piece focuses on physical access to the files on Snowden's laptops, which is simply comical. Of course they can take his files. A listener would get the impression that Snowden's protection of the data consists of holding tight to his computers while the Russians attempt to wrest them from his arms, or his ability to sleep with one eye open and his laptops at his bedside. My favorite gem was when security expert Lee explained that you can get at a laptop's hard drive using nothing more than an ordinary screwdriver. Will the Russians be able to locate a screwdriver? Only time will tell. Gjelten tells us: "For Snowden to have kept his files secure, he would have had to keep his laptops powered off and disconnected from the Internet. Plus, he'd need physical control of the machines at all times." This statement is irresponsibly misleading. A trusting listener would have no choice but to conclude that Snowden's secrets are unprotectable after hearing this. But the truth, access to the files themselves are unimportant, because they are surely encrypted. Eventually they did get around to talking about encryption. Their experts on the matter were the likes of Mark Weatherford, ex-DHS undersecretary who now works at the Chertoff Group (as in Michael Chertoff), who told us that "Encryption really only buys you time. You can eventually decrypt it. It just takes time to do that, and it's really dependent on the algorithm and the keys." Again, it's being emphasized that it's only a matter of time before the Russians have the goods. What is not mentioned is that a modest-sized encryption key buys billions of billions of billions of years [1]. It would be an earth-shattering breakthrough if the Russians or the Chinese or the Americans had an algorithm that could beat this. At one point, Michael Sutton of Zscaler admits: "If Snowden were using the best possible encryption and he was using a strong key, it would be virtually impossible for NSA, China, Russia - anyone - to access that data." But Gjelten immediately smothers this thought: "At least in the short run. There are ways to break a code, if only by what cyber technologists call brute force - essentially having a computer try every possible key combination until the correct one is found. Mark Weatherford, now at the Chertoff Group, points out that no encryption lasts forever." Not forever, but much longer than the age of the universe. At no time in this story is it revealed the kinds of time frames we are talking about. By the way, "the best possible encryption" is available for free and runs on any computer, and a strong key takes an insignificant amount of effort to generate. Finally, the piece ends with "In all, cyber security experts agree, the likelihood is good that the Chinese or the Russians or both, will sooner or later have whatever documents Snowden has taken with him, whether he intended to share them, or not." This is false. Not only is it untrue that the Russians are likely to get the data, it is also untrue that cyber experts agree that they will, which Tom Gjelten would have known had he asked any non-government-affiliated encryption expert. In short, Gjelten spent the first half of the piece addressing physical access to the files, which is ludicrous, and the second half convincing us that encryption is futile, which is the opposite of the truth. [0] http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=203531584 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=2035315... [1] http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1279619 http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1279619

joyrider 12y ago

I'm surprised Forbes didn't make the list. It has to be the worst of the major business publications in terms of low quality content and high ratio of ads.