Micah Lee's comments on The Intercept's handling of Reality Winner's case can be found in "Working Securely", see pp. 2--3:
Sadly in both the Terry Albury and Reality Winner cases, I think there was little we could have done to prevent them from getting caught. In Reality’s case there’s a lot we should have done better, but even if we did it all perfectly, she almost certainly would still have gotten caught because of how things happened on her end that were outside of our control. In fact the affidavit against her doesn’t mention printer dots or anything like that.
I believe the lack of mention of specific identity tagging in affadavits is something of a red herring. Winner admitted in her interview with the FBI during the initial search to smuggling out the documents, as noted in the TAL re-enactment above. There's no need to go beyond the sufficient in establishing cause or belief.
NYT on The Intercept's handing of Winner's documents:
The startling carelessness about protecting Ms. Winner was particularly mystifying at an organization that had been founded on security. The Intercept had hired leaders in digital security, Ms. Clark and Micah Lee, for just such situations. [Intercept journalist] Mr. [Matthew] Cole did not involve them at all.
The Intercept has been sliding downhill for a while now. I'm not sure where Scahill was on the Glenn Greenwald exit. Although I do wish Glenn would jump from Substack to The Grayzone or Democracy Now!
True, though the headline at least avoids contradicting that. From another source found via Wikipedia, it looks like she's in a halfway house in Texas rather than actually at home:
Another important part of the submitted article which is not in the headline: her official release date is November 23 of this year. It's not clear to me from the article whether that date will be the end of her sentence
(no further supervision by the judiciary) or a transition to probation or supervised release for some unknown longer period.
> Her lawyer, Alison Grinter Allen, said in a statement that Winner and her family are working to “heal the trauma of incarceration and build back the years lost.”
She looks tough in the photo from the article, but I remember back when she was arrested she looked so young and innocent [1]. I wonder how prison has changed/traumatized her. Her sentence always seemed a little excessive to me.
I wonder how much of that toughness is context of instagram shots vs a candid of someone in an orange jumpsuit. She probably also had a lot more time to work out.
I realize this is off topic, but I just have to say… that is a pretty awesome name.
One joke we had in grad school is great roboticists had interesting names… one of my favorite examples was Howie Choset (How he choose it). One of the many interesting/colorful folk I have met on my journey.
I sometimes wonder that by having an “unusual name”, by making you “stand out”, further promotes you to deliberately stand out.
Doug Bowser is the president of Nintendo of America. Surname usually isn't exercised as a choice... but he probably got slightly more attention for it at Nintendo. Maybe that was enough!
I think there's something to the name theory, though it's probably ~1% of the equation. Someone with a colorful name probably has colorful parents, which would be the other ~99%.
You mean like the Austin urologist named Dick Chopp, who specializes in vasectomies? He even offers a t-shirt to his patients that reads "I was 'chopped' at the Urology Team."
I legally changed my name to Peacefully Revoking Consent To Be Governed/ For You/ And For/ All (/'s indicate name breaks). It definitely encourages me to deliberately stand out.
In general you should expect the number of irregular verbs to shrink over time. If I see a regularized form that grates, I don't even bother to check anymore; I just sigh a "kids these days" and move on.
It doesn't seem like this was a proper whistle blower case. She did not use good judgement here, in my opinion.
But her punishment was overly harsh. Especially if you consider how much the federal government leaks, and how few people are prosecuted for it, and how little harm it does in most cases.
She was made an example of precisely because she was a low-level employee with no power or connections. Which is obviously wrong on a very deep level. And that's the big story here.
My thoughts as well. She obviously did something wrong and should be punished, but man, so many more powerful people have gotten away with way less punishment for much worse transgressions.
Why do you say that the sentence was overly harsh? Chelsea Manning got a 35 year sentence, and would still be in prison had Obama not granted a pardon. Do you know of comparable cases where significantly lighter sentences were imposed?
Thank you, commuted, not pardoned. But whether he was right or not in thinking that sentence was disproportionate, it does not inform us about whether Winner’s sentence was appropriate. Note that revealing classified information can expose you to a charge of aiding the enemy, which carries a death sentence.
I think “good judgment” is somewhat relative. She was in her early 20s at the time. I think it’s hard to grasp the reality of potential legal consequences and the full weight of the American government at that age.
I disagree, she had previously Served in the Military and was working at a D.o.D (NSA JOINT) facility. She was also working within those walls during the Snowden leaks. It was probably the opposite, she was likely constantly inundated with the legal consequences of leaks and disclosures.
I would argue many people don't fully process the consequences of their actions regardless of age. That's a separate issue we have to solve for.
In this instance (right or wrong) she was found guilty, she admitted to the action, and she did the time. Hopefully she's able to find gainful employment moving forward.
She was in the Air Force a full term before she was a contractor, and the UCMJ is beat into you in the military. Also, being in an intelligence squadron stationed at Ft Meade no less, she would have had tons of annual training on security requirements and their consequences. It's possible being younger meant she thought she was more likely to get away with it, but she certainly had enough briefings on the legal consequences to know what could happen if caught.
I'm surprised there is more noise about her story than about the content of the leak. "Is it fair to prosecute her? Was she wrong? Should there be laws to make this information public to the people?" Shouldn't the question be: What about the content of the leak?
Same thing with Snowden. The question turns from how is the government spying on you, to is it fair to prosecute him? Is he a hero? Should he be pardoned? What about "is the government still spying? Did we shut down the program?"
I think this is a perfect example of information control.
The content of the leak is where all the real blame is – for those near the top crafting narratives, that is arguably something they actively want to avoid :)
If I wanted to be real cheeky, I would say the government has an incentive to not investigate things that would cause it to make self-incriminating statements.
Because the content of the leak was not interesting, it was pretty much just an executive summary of previous public releases. I've always suspected that they let her leak it (or even tricked her into leaking it) in order to get lefty support for Russiagate allegations. The Intercept's bad handling of the documents would be a sort of material parallel construction (especially with Esposito on the receiving end of them, an obvious spook.)
News and discussions tend to eventually move their focus onto single individuals.
I guess one can learn two things from that:
1. If you want an issue discussed, find a person who can symbolize it. i.e. who is the single individual spying on us? Should he be allowed to do that?
2. If you want to avoid having what you're doing discussed, make sure there isn't a single identifiable individual available to blame. Works wonders to avoid focus.
This is why many big events in civil rights history involve carefully picked individuals working with a rights organization doing a protest. It's easier to win if the person brings the right stuff for the empathy of people who make the decision.
This "information control" continues in present time. Remember a few months ago when an elected official lying was a big deal? Then K. Harris goes on tv last week in a major network news interview and says "we've been to the border." (Kudos to Lester Holt for immediately calling her out). Where's the condemnation?
Or consider the narrative around Hunter Biden's laptop. Mainstream news would have you think the "story" is that Russians are planting disinfo with Rudy Giuliani's help. Never mind the fact that there are photos of him smoking crack, discussions of business deals juicing in "the big guy", tax fraud investigations, and now, casually tossing around the n-word. NYT or MSNBC simply chooses not to report this information, despite reporting on the previous president's children at every possible opportunity.
Thanks for proving my, and "foxfired" above's point. Anything inconvenient is simply not covered, and when it is brought up, labeled as a conspiracy theory. Actual truth is not determined, investigated, or reported, simply ignored. Instead, simply mentioning Kamala Harris's very clear statement on NBC has now become a conspiracy, according to "chillwaves"
Nothing of the sort happened, but I am sure you can take any reply and make it "prove your point".
So this is the real reason why I said don't post conspiracy nonsense -- because frankly, no one cares. And it's annoying to sit here and reply with logic when you clearly do not care about the merit of whatever I have to say.
No one covered those stories? Fox News is the number one rated cable news station. Tucker Carlson has the number one rated show on that number one station and he covered it for weeks on end before the election. So that point of yours is as ridiculous as it is baseless.
Secondly, hello we live in the modern era. Post a blog if you care so much. If the story had merit, if you had evidence, then what is stopping you from making this huge scoop? There are definitely financial incentives to do so. The reason is because you, just like Tucker Carlson on Fox News, are full of shit.
The difference between you and him is at least Tucker Carlson knows he is lying and at least he's getting paid to do so. I assume you are doing this for free.
Looks programmatically generated. The whole account is the same style of incoherent nonsense. Probably powered by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPT-3
There's a few other accounts I've seen here on HN that just spout random incoherent nonsense text, presumably to accumulate karma so they can power their sockpuppet ring and upvote any story they wish to the frontpage of HN.
Mental illness, intense boredom, weird autistic sense of humor, or being absolutely serious at being a network fuzzing troll farm. It's not fair to put such a fine point on it really.
Greenwald says[1]: "The most egregious, but by no means only, example of exploiting my name to evade responsibility was the Reality Winner debacle. As The New York Times recently reported[2], that was a story in which I had no involvement whatsoever. While based in Brazil, I was never asked to work on the documents which Winner sent to our New York newsroom with no request that any specific journalist work on them. I did not even learn of the existence of that document until very shortly prior to its publication. The person who oversaw, edited and controlled that story was Betsy Reed, which was how it should be given the magnitude and complexity of that reporting and her position as editor-in-chief."
If you don't believe Greenwald, try the NYT article.
Ms. Winner may have thought she was mailing the documents to Mr. Greenwald and Ms. Poitras, who went to great lengths to protect Mr. Snowden. But Mr. Greenwald was in Brazil and when he heard about the document, he was not interested. ...
Ms. Reed and her deputy, Roger Hodge, gave the story to a pair of established television journalists: Matthew Cole and Richard Esposito. ...
Mr. Cole put the document in his bag and got on a train to New York. ... Later, he called a source in the intelligence community in an attempt to verify the document, and casually revealed its postmark. ...
Mr. Cole and Mr. Esposito said they’d been pushed to rush the story to publication, but Mr. Cole also acknowledged that failing to consult with the security team was a “face plant.” ...
And so a key question was who to blame for this catastrophe and what consequences they should suffer. Ms. Dombek, who helped conduct the internal investigation, concluded that the editors — Ms. Reed and Mr. Hodge — needed to take responsibility. Others, including Mr. Greenwald, were demanding that Mr. Cole and Ms. Reed be fired, and The Intercept provide a public reckoning. (Mr. Greenwald later relented, and said he understood the desire not to “scapegoat” for an institutional failure.)
No, he stated he had no part in her debacle. How plausible is that he wasn't involved in handling a major leak from NSA at his rag is left as an exercise.
thanks, I think the headline can be misleading, he ignored his mails that contained a guide to set encryption and not ignored setting up encryption out of carelessness and exchanged sensitive stuff.
FWIW: Greenwald, as odd as his recent flip to Q-adjacency has been, doesn't seem to have been involved with the Winner episode.
It seems like Winner got burned as a source by a plain old journalist who fucked up badly while making a good faith attempt to validate a story. They got a bunch of scanned documents purporting to be from the NSA, so they called up the NSA to see if these documents were real. And in the process they provided the original scans, which identified the source printer and user.
But no, Glen Greenwald didn't have anything to do with this.
I’d like to say I’m being glib here, but doesn’t the fact that the NSA gives someone named Reality Winner a clearance kind of put the blame on them for this one?
You hire a flake, you’re gonna have to deal with the fallout.
Maybe their parents were an odd bunch. Should we behave differently towards the person for that? Or, am I talking out my rear because the person changed their name? (In that case, yeah, it's on the NSA).
"Reality Winner: is her "legal name, but I very much doubt it is the name she was born with. I find it very odd that none of the articles I've seen answer this one way or the other.
See, that’s exactly my point. If her parents were an “odd bunch” then that’s exactly the sort of thing that an investigator should flag as a no no in terms of national security roles. If there is even the slightest whiff that someone’s an odd duck then you shouldn’t go there.
They did that, and got bit on the ass for it. Simple as that.
I don’t think you’re talking out your ass, but I’m a former intelligence puke and I am honestly shocked at how stupid our intelligence agencies have become over the last few decades. For me, it’s just a simple black and white calculus - if you want to keep secrets, you don’t hire flakes. That’s neither here nor there on the moral spectrum, I’m just talking about keeping secrets secret, which is really hard no matter how you slice it.
this sounds a lot like the rationale given for denying security clearances to LGBT people up through the 90s. there were gay spy rings back in the day, but that's precisely because being gay was blackmailable - if we're allowed to serve openly, it's not a security risk.
calling a huge segment of the population "flakes" for matters outside their control, and denying them clearances, isn't just unfair, it's likely contributing to the massive brain drain going on in intelligence. I'm treated a lot better in industry, thank you.
I'm sorry, but no - a "huge segment the population" does not consist of people with screwy names. The reason for that is that most parents follow cultural / social norms when naming their kids, which reduces friction for their kids as they grow up, go to school, go to work, and so on. In the context of keeping secrets, people that stand out from the crowd are usually more of a liability than not. As Remo says in Goodfellas - why take a chance?
As someone who has been a big fan of Wikileaks, something about this story has always felt off to me - like this is some sort of state disinfo op rather than a 'real' leak.
The revelations from Winner's leak didn't seem subversive - rather they seemed to bolster arguments for RussiaGate and the new digital cold war - both of which were growing DNC talking points.
Does anyone else feel the same way? Or do I just have too much tinfoil on my head?
I've got some additional tinfoil for you: both Bush and Obama worked to rollback safeguards, in place since the 70s, that protected citizens from US military counter-intel operations. I personally saw more than one operation ruined when domestic news picked up and began repeating one of our controlled opposition assets, and we had to immediately pull the plug - it was a frustrating but necessary constraint. Well, that isn't the way it is done anymore. Oh, and on a totally unrelated note: aliens! Look over here, so many aliens and UFOs! Wow - all these authorized interviews with personnel complemented by fancy video evidence!
Can you explain a bit more? Are you telling us that you ran counter-intel operations? In America? And, American domestic news would report on something your counter-intelligence asset was saying? Because neither of those make sense
lol, no - in almost every sense. I was intentionally cryptic, but hopefully only to a degree that reduces the likelihood of prosecution without making a productive discussion impossible. Security classification can be weird, and it rarely aligns with any kind of sensible risk management posture. This is why Snowden, despite disclosing some of the most highly restricted material that exists (ELINT TS/SCI, only topped by nuke stuff), is viewed much more positively than Manning (who dumped low level secret material) by the military rank and file. One disclosed strategic information and the other dumped operational details of no whistleblowing value. No joke - a couple of years ago I spotted a fragment of an inconsequential patrol report I filed in Fallujah, totally useless to anyone but jihadists. So I've got no interest in discussing operational stuff - which is what 99.9% of CI falls into.
Anyway, it wouldn't really change anyone's pre-existing opinion if I directly made any kind of claim without evidence... teach a man to fish, etc. So with that in mind: can you think of any really silly stories, published by an American... uh, "science" magazine, that purported something totally impossible - and then never got brought up again? Something of the GWOT vintage? Something scientifically impossible, due to the way radio propagation works? Ah, I'm so tempted to do a "rhymes with"... but I know better.
Actually I can think of something I can openly discuss as an example - because it was pulled by those damn dirty ruskies, not our boys, and I was long out of the know when it happened: cell tower upgrades to combat cruise missiles [0], and super advanced ballistic calculators being used against ISIS [1]. Can you see what these things have in common? Despite technically impossible claims (15m CEP for unguided munitions dropped from 6km... lol, anybody know how Kalman filters work?) - the message is uncritically spread by western media.
"Collateral Murder" was of no value? Yikes. So much for the judgment of the "rank and file", if we can actually credit your opinions on that. If anyone had ever been harmed as a result of Manning's disclosures, the war media would have trumpeted that story for the last decade. We've never heard a peep about that, so apparently the "jihadists" didn't find anything useful at Wikipedia.
ps. I'm guessing you're referring to the silly "sonic embassy attacks" as the "science" story, but it could have been basically anything else published by the war media in the last several decades.
Oh boy, you might actually be in for a very rewarding moment of personal development if you can muster the will to follow that thought through to the logical conclusion! So, what happened next with "Collateral Murder"? Then what happened in that region? What about the US public, the supposed beneficiaries of a whistleblower's labors? What about policy changes? I genuinely hope you can read that as intended - written with zero sarcasm. Because it seems obvious to me that you've actually just reinforced my point. Unfortunately it is the least interesting point in all of what I wrote that you chose to latch onto, so thats a bummer.
RE sonic attacks: nah - you have to consider it from an operational, boots on the ground, strategic perspective: what purpose is being served, what is being protected by way of misdirection (CI is primarily defensive in nature and misdirection is the absolute best way to lie). I can't think of anything useful to lie about in the sonic attack story... which wouldn't really have had anything to do with anyone outside of DoS. DoS hasn't gotten along with anyone but the CIA for a very long time - so I'd have a hard time trying to guess at their motives for anything anyway.
In general I eschew "personal development". Of course we haven't left Iraq yet; we haven't even left Afghanistan yet. That ain't Wikileaks' fault. Next you'll be telling us about the important work we've been doing there: something about women's rights no doubt! Guesses at the hidden meanings of pseudo-spook ramblings are rarely accurate; even if they're exactly correct the story will change in the next comment. Maybe that's how "CI" people convince themselves they ever do anything useful.
To spell it out, the entire thing is a lie from the top to the bottom. USA military murdering children on the other side of the world only ever harms USA interests and USA security. Our wars are evil, done for the sake of evil. We fear brown people so that we might enrich armaments manufacturers by murdering brown people. Dress it up however you want, but that doesn't change what it is and what any thinking person who has actually spent any time doing this evil knows it to be.
Well I guess it could be worse, you could be unaware of this self destructive tendency. Actually, that is the only thing worse - so not much of a silver lining.
> Of course we haven't left Iraq yet... Next you'll be telling us about the important work we've been doing there
You are really bad at this, presumably because your world model has been totally warped by a constant consumption of cartoonish misrepresentation. I'm pretty confident that your mental image of me is a complete inversion of reality. For things that actually matter anyway - like I doubt you imagine me to be an 86 year old black lesbian... so you've gotten warmer in that regard, but not much else.
> USA military murdering children... for the sake of evil ... We fear brown people ... Dress it up however you want, but that doesn't change what it is and what any thinking person who has actually spent any time doing this evil knows it to be.
This is the problem with going full emote psychobabble mode, it looks like you've just accidentally admitted to murdering some number of brown children in an evil racist killing spree. I suspect that is the opposite of what you intended to communicate.
I have no mental model of you. Only the shallow care about personalities and identities. You have implied that you have served in the USA military in the Middle East and rather more weakly implied that you have spent time in the unsupervised services stateside. Either or both of those claims might be true, but it doesn't matter. Your putative service has not provided you with insight you're able to share through HN comments.
I appreciate "Collateral Murder" and similar releases by Wikileaks and others because they opened my eye to the world as it really is. Maybe I should have known already, but in that case I would never have voted for Bush the Lesser. Somehow the history classes in my elementary and secondary public education left out the important parts.
Silly stories during GWOT era that seem scientifically impossible make me think of the "Voice of God" thing, about a system to beam sound into a targets head to make them think god was speaking to them directly, or similarly project a hologram of God in the sky to tell opposing religious fighters to lay down their weapons.
But the "radio propagation" part makes me think this isn't the right one.
That is a pretty good guess, if I remember that story correctly "radio propagation" wouldn't totally discount its candidacy - with fillings and dental implants being in the mix. But that would be a very ambitious force protection program - trying to impersonate God.
What I have in mind is far more modest - like "We have a really effective, non-technical, targeting methodology against very loosely connected cells that are receiving foreign assistance but also exercising increasing more effective opsec. How do we keep them from accurately attributing their misfortune to the vulnerability we are exploiting?"
On a related note: you remember when the rebuilt Iraqi military insisted on going with NATO everything for personal equipment (M16, AT4, body armor, etc), against the advice of NATO military advisors? That is because they were convinced that their repeated defeats could only be ascribed to a technological outclassing that bordered on the magical. They weren't the only ones, and it was unhelpful in most instances - like civilians somehow getting it into their heads that our super conspicuous sunglasses weren't for protecting our eyes from tiny bits of flying concrete during firefights. No, they were x-ray glasses that we were using to peep on their ladies. Easy fix, right? Just let them try on the glasses themselves. Nope, we obviously disabled the functionality using the very same magical technology before handing over the porno-shades.
A useful idiot. Somebody or something that is, unbeknownst to them or their allies, so strongly under adversarial influence that they can be controlled. Imagine the potential chaos made possible by a double agent - without the natural suspicion that accompanies a self admitted traitor.
Funny how things work out... just as the USG was regaining the legal ability to directly control domestic messaging by way of the US media - the media was feverishly working to obliterate the public's trust and ensure that it would take decades to rebuild its reputation. It almost looks intentional, if you are willing to ignore all the mixed messaging and self undermining - evident to any observer with attention span stretching beyond a single news cycle.
Many decent journalists have worked for USA news media firms. It is nearly certain that some of them would hear the directive "you work for the military-industrial complex now" and respond by burning the whole thing to the ground. Unfortunately those decent and visionary journalists seem to have overestimated the attention span and reasoning ability of the American public. Also they forgot that they have always worked for the military-industrial complex. "Remember the Maine!"
> ... decent journalists ... and respond by burning the whole thing to the ground.
By deceitfully feigning hyper partisanship and misleading the public for years? I think we disagree on the fundamental definition of several words, including "certain", "decent" and "journalist".
I've always thought that the real NSA ruthlessly prosecutes anyone who leaks to the press and the "anonymous intelligence sources" quoted in the press are always fake.
> I've always thought that the real NSA ruthlessly prosecutes
The NSA might do many things, but it absolutely does not prosecute anyone (though it same-head military command might prosecute service members within its command.)
I was going to comment similar as well. Anonymous leaks are typically "offical" sources releasing info as a trial balloon to test which way the political winds are blowing. This provides plausible deniablility if the winds blow in unfriendly directions.
Do you have a source on any instance where Wikileaks spread "disinfo"?
Wikileaks likely did spread information which was provided by and served the interests of Russia, but I've never seen a credible argument that false information was published.
The whole Seth Rich debacle is the most obvious example in which they strongly implied that he was the source of leaked DNC docs. We later found out that Wikileaks was still in contact with the source after Seth Rich was already dead.
There are plenty of source links in the Wikipedia article[1].
Ah, that's fair. Wikileaks' twitter account played much faster and looser than what they published on their website.
I'm curious if we'll ever get an accounting of the internal organizational power struggles that occurred during the 2016 election. It felt like Assange and his proxies were seeking vengeance through Twitter (to be fair, its claimed Hillary Clinton joked "Can't we just drone this guy" about Assange - no lack of bad blood between them), but that somehow never seemed to bleed onto the Wikileaks website itself.
While you might not know who your source was, if you're in contact with them after the proposed contact point's death you clearly are aware it is not that person. They played coy when they knew overtly he was not the contact point.
There is a difference between "playing coy" and defaming a dead person by implying they committed a crime. Denying Seth Rich as the source wouldn't have revealed the actual source.
Plus it was more than "playing coy". For example, they promised a reward for people who came forward with info on Rich's death. Why do that if they had no relation to him?
>Again, I really did miss the part where saying "we don't reveal who our sources are" is the same thing as calling a dead man a criminal.
Who said they are the same thing? I repeatedly used "implied". You are framing it as if they were asked a direct question about Seth Rich and their only response was "no comment." They said stuff like this[1]:
>“Whistleblowers go to significant efforts to get us material and often very significant risks. There is a 27-year-old, works for the DNC, who was shot in the back. Murdered just a few weeks ago for unknown reasons as he was walking down the street in Washington,” said Julian Assange appearing on a Dutch television program called Nieuwsuur.
>Assange added, “We have to understand how high the stakes are in the United States and that our sources are, you know, our sources face serious risks that is why they come to us so we can protect their anonymity.”
He is directly implying that Rich was killed for political reasons, that he was a whisleblower, and then in the next sentence he says "our sources". Do you not see the implication in talking like that?
>To try and uncover suspected corruption and leak it if there was more to his murder than met the eye. It was reasonable to suspect something was up.
The problem, like elsewhere with Wikileaks, is the selective search to uncover corruption. I would have no complaint if Wikileaks made it standard to always offer a reward for information on the death of any political staffer. The problem is that they only offered the reward for this specific staffer already knowing that there was a conspiracy theory that he was their source. That gives them plausible deniability that they are "just seeking truth" while also reinforcing the perceived connection between Seth Rich and Wikileaks.
Oh, I'm sorry did you get upset because somebody inferred something different from what you said to what you actually meant?
That must be upsetting.
Nonetheless in spite of what you said I think maybe you were implying something different?
>He is directly implying
that Rich was killed for political reasons, that he was a whisleblower, and then in the next sentence he says "our sources". Do you not see the implication in talking like that?
No, I categorically do not.
He was trying to illustrate the risks of revealing sources (i.e. people could get murdered) and he suspected something fishy was going on with the murder of Rich. As did a lot of people because it WAS fishy.
Once again, you KEEP ignoring that he said "WE DO NOT SHARE WHO OUR SOURCES ARE". You are deliberately ignoring that he stated that very clearly in favor of an incorrect reading between the lines.
>The problem, like elsewhere with Wikileaks, is the selective search to uncover corruption.
I honestly can't fathom the idea that uncovering corruption is just only if you manage to do it to every party equally.
The idea that truthfully informing voters about the views and actions of a candidate was reprehensible if it affected the outcome of the election was never actually justified, it was simply assumed.
Those two are not contradictory because the first one is based off the substance of the documents and the second one is based off the perception of the documents. Nothing too substantial was revealed but the existence of the emails was enough to feed into the existing narrative that Clinton couldn't be trusted and it therefore harmed her chances of winning.
>The idea that truthfully informing voters about the views and actions of a candidate was reprehensible if it affected the outcome of the election was never actually justified, it was simply assumed.
Because partial truthfulness isn't that different than lying. Imagine two scenarios:
1. Clinton gets the debate questions ahead of time.
2. Both candidates get the debate questions ahead of time. (Just a hypothetical and not a real accusation)
Story 1 would lead you to believe the Clinton is corrupt and will abuse the system for her advantage. Those two traits were already two of the biggest criticisms of her.
Story 2 would lead you to believe that it is the debate system that is corrupt and no specific candidate was at fault.
Story 2 being true automatically means story 1 is also true. However if you knew that story 2 was true and reported it as story 1, are you still "truthfully informing voters about the views and actions of a candidate"? You are reporting facts but in such a way as to bias the story. I think that is certainly reprehensible from a journalistic standpoint.
Many journalists believed that almost everything in the substance of these docs would be true for other candidates, they just didn't have the documents from other candidates as proof.
There was the email, if I remember, about expressing a heartfelt desire to see a FTA stretching across the whole continent.
This was right after Hillary decided to rally against the TPP. This undermined that move and made it ring hollow.
>the existence of the emails was enough to feed into the existing narrative that Clinton couldn't be trusted
As opposed to diffing her public moves with what she said in the emails? You seriously think that the mere existence of leaked emails was enough to sway voters regardless of what was actually said in them?
> As opposed to diffing her public moves with what she said in the emails? You seriously think that the mere existence of leaked emails was enough to sway voters regardless of what was actually said in them?
Those same emails motivated someone to drive 300 miles to fire a gun in a pizza shop looking for a child sex ring in a basement that didn't exist.
You are conflating leaks. There was a DNC leak and a Podesta personal email leak. The Podesta leak started the fire, so to speak, while the DNC leak was attributed to Russian meddling.
I understand that there's a long American tradition on blaming shooting sprees on everything BUT easy access to guns, but hear me out:
The fact somebody concocted an utterly absurd story from the leaks and used it to justify a killing spree demonstrates very clearly that the leaks themselves weren't at all necessary for the shooting spree.
They could have concocted pizzagate out of something else. In fact, they probably would have.
And the guy clearly wanted to shoot someone up and was looking for reasons.
A large mass of swing voters can't be expected to behave as irrationally as one crazed Trump supporter with a gun.
I don't think it is unusual for a politician to be in support of a general policy while objecting to a specific implementation and/or expansion of that policy.
And yes, the existence of the emails played a role in how people voted or whether they voted regardless of the content. I mean there was the whole pizzagate thing that was obviously independent of the actual substance of the emails.
You're saying that you think swing voters were probably more influenced by harebrained conspiracy theories pushed by meth addled Trump supporters than... the truth?
I don't know what "truth" you are remarking on here and pizzagate was just the most obvious and extreme example.
Clearly there were people who were turned off by the leaks without actually reading the entire collection or even any of documents. These people were more reacting to the perception of the leaks in the zeitgeist than the actual substance of the documents they didn't read. I don't know what to say to you if we can't agree on that.
Those aren't contradictory, and both are supported by the evidence.
Which do you actually disagree with, or do you simply not see how both can be true?
Affecting the outcome of an election is not inherently wrong. Foreign countries affecting the outcome of our elections is dangerous, and has historically been very frowned upon. There's reasons that only Americans are allowed to donate to election campaigns. Our elections are supposed to be for _us_. If whatever countries want a particular outcome start having an outsized voice, our elections will be even less connected to what's best for Americans than they already were.
I disagreed that there was nothing in the emails and explained below.
I also disagree with the notion that a foreign power revealing truths about a candidate is wrong. If you reject a foreign truth over a domestic lie you reject the very heart of democracy itself.
It's all the more ironic given the amount of meddling the US has done in foreign elections, including Russia's.
You didn't really say what was in them that you found valuable, unless I missed it? What important truths did they reveal?
Okay, but then you're welcoming well-funded nations to spend outsized money and effort on attacking whatever candidate they will get the least from. How does that not devolve into our elections just being playthings of our enemies?
What is ironic about this? I also do not think that the US should meddle in foreign elections, but that doesn't really have anything to do with this.
While the content in the Podesta emails was not of any interest in itself, the existence of the dump suggested there was something being revealed and Wikileaks hype and misleading editorializing around the leaks is how Pizzagate became a thing.
It's not schizophrenic - the reality is that false editorializing about a leak can deeply mislead people even if the real content of the leak is completely innocuous (e.g. someone ordering a pizza).
You seriously think pizzagate is what swung the election? That it was a conspiracy theory that you think resonated with multidinous swing voters as opposed to a core of rabid Trump supporters?
And that they couldn't have come up with something equally harebrained without the emails?
I don't think Pizzagate swung the election, but it shows how Wikileaks approach to disinformation works, and illustrates that despite the fact of there being nothing of any real note in the leaked emails, the mere fact of Wikileaks posting them and posting dishonest editorializing about them did have a real impact on public opinion with Pizzagatge being evidence of that.
It’s also worth asking how it fed into the backdrop of a multi-decade campaign portraying both Clinton as liars engaged in criminal conspiracies. It seems plausible that it wouldn’t have worked on most politicians but still could have been enough to get a few thousand people to stay home thinking that maybe this meant there was more to all of the other make believe tales which have been getting spread since the 1990s. They didn’t need to flip votes or even get a very long effect — a few days was enough.
Using the term "disinfo" for "accurate but incomplete info" seems like an Orwellian misuse of the term.
Are there any credible sources indicating that Wikileaks selectively edited or chose what to publish based on political goals? I think they have some sort of process to validate legitimacy of leaks before they publish them, but I've never heard claims that they intentionally edited or chose not to leak information for Wikileaks own political goals.
Certainly possible that Russia leaked true-but-incomplete information to Wikileaks, but isn't, like, all discussion of reality true-but-incomplete?
I view the GRU stealing private data and using Wikileaks to coordinate releasing for the purpose of sowing discord and possibly to help Trump win the election as disinfo.
> After the Soviet term became widely known in the 1980s, native speakers of English broadened the term as "any government communication (either overt or covert) containing intentionally false and misleading material, often combined selectively with true information, which seeks to mislead and manipulate either elites or a mass audience."[3]
- March 16: Internal WikiLeaks messages indicate the purpose of the archive is to annoy Clinton and establish WikiLeaks as a "resource/player" in the election.[29]:44–45
- June 14: The GRU uses its @dcleaks_ persona to reach out to WikiLeaks and offer to coordinate the release of sensitive information about Clinton, including financial documents.[353][29]:45
- June 22: WikiLeaks reaches out to "Guccifer 2.0" via Twitter. They ask "Guccifer 2.0" to send them material because it will have a bigger impact if they publish it. They also specifically ask for material on Clinton they can publish before the convention.[256]
I'm not saying Assange is guilty of any crimes, or doctored evidence. But Wikileaks had an agenda beyond "the facts".
Even if selection of information released is determined 100% by bias, I still think it's dangerous and bad for society to label accurate information releases as "disinfo"
I think the
>containing intentionally false and misleading material
portion of the definition is crucial.
By all means, call it foreign election interference or a foreign propaganda campaign. But in my opinion, accurate information can never be 'disinfo'. I think this is a slippery slope towards discrediting all information that embarrasses or threatens the state: whistleblowers, investigative reporting on war crimes and corruption, etc.
This is like saying the definition of malevolent hacking does not include social engineering or phishing. You can try to define away the problem, but you're going to have some wide-open holes in your defenses as a result.
[on edit:] And the second point is that Wikileaks, as free-speech ideologues, didn't actually NEED to be explicitly complicit to act as a vector for psyops. If you know your opponent is going to throw rock every time, you can win by throwing paper every time. If you're a Fancy Bear and know that Wikileaks will publish whatever you give them, then you can selectively choose what to hand them.
Wikileaks disinfo has almost always been in deeply misleading and sometimes explicitly false editorializing and framing of leaks rather than the content.
They also post a lot of misinformation to their Twitter account - falsely claiming Bob Beckel was a Clinton staffer, boosting the false Seth Rich story, boosting bogus Clinton health claims, and much more besides.
They're very biased, and their biases come out in what they choose to publish, what they refuse to publish, and how they choose to editorialize, and in one known case in selective editing of a leak, but in general the leaks themselves aren't "false information" but are documents which they're spreading to create a specific narrative, and in several cases like the Syria, Podesta, DCCC, and DNC leaks it's clear they're serving as a front for Russian intelligence agencies to spread a specific narrative to aid Russian goals rather than further the truth. Since they serve as a front for foreign intelligence agencies, it's totally possible they're getting drops from other intelligence agencies with similar agendas.
Interesting, that's the first I've read of the selective editing claim. It seems like there is some room for ambiguity (What if RevoluSec intentionally withheld these emails to discredit wikileaks? Is RevoluSec CIA/NSA?) but certainly shifts my bayesian priors a bit. Thanks for sharing.
Short of evidence that they published falsehoolds, I'd still argue that "disinfo" is a misnomer. But your above points certainly demonstrate biased reporting, as is found in any other journalistic organization.
I think classifying 'stolen' data that is accurate being released as "disinfo" is a horrifying and dangerous precedent.
Where do you draw the line between what wikileaks did and other investigative reporting that uses information from whistleblowers? Were the pentagon papers disinfo?
It seems like your position taken to its extreme would disregard all information except info willingly broadcasted by the state, and make us blind to stories of war crimes, corruption, anything else that embarrasses or threatens the state.
The issue isn't the content of the data. It's the context of the release.
You're trying to threaten a slippery slope wherein all information needs to be state sanctioned, but the definition of disinformation makes it clear that the only time information gains that moniker is when it's actively being spread to mislead for malicious purposes.
Quite the contrary to your 'extreme' extrapolation, the term disinformation allows us to identify the use of malicious state-sponsored information warfare. It FIGHTS state sponsored narratives. It doesn't support it.
Wikileaks is a broken org, started by a narcissist and was only “made” by a criminal act committed by another narcissist. If anyone really cared about building a service that held nation states accountable, they would have built it to be decentralized and secure against discovery of the operators. Instead we got Manning on marketing and Assange and his cat running operations.
What's off? RussiaGate was a Democrat talking point which Trump hated. She was put away while Trump was president and released now that Biden is in power.
