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Did the Intercept bungle the NSA leak?

washingtonpost.com

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Re: Did the Intercept bungle the NSA leak?

#91

Nah. Only 6 people have printed the doc and of those only one could be found in phone call metadata making a call to a press related contact. I don't know what the leaker was thinking. And in the end even this leak doesn't contain any evidence of anything that would even tie it to Russia, let alone GRU. On the internet no one knows you're a dog. So she will get 10 years in the slammer for nothing.

Nah. I think she was careless on purpose. Imagine if she transferred it using encryption and Russia got ahold of it, and then claimed she gave it to them. I think she wanted people to know so that she could claim that she was doing the right thing.

Re: Did the Intercept bungle the NSA leak?

#92
post #66
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Says the person linking to "informationliberation dot com". Pot, meet kettle. Sure her twitter profile is highly politically charged and should likely have made her unfit for clearance, but citing that as evidence that she should be institutionalized is ridiculous. She'd likely say the same about you given your proclivity for "informationliberation". Where does that leave us for discourse?

Have either of you been thru clearance? I have. They're really excited to know if you can be bribed with drugs or sex or simple money. If you have the politics of a typical college professor they're not terribly interested. The clearance process was mostly CYA, was this candidate dumb enough to say he'd sell secrets to the soviets for weed or cash to pay loansharks or kinky sex? I've read this woman's weird social me…

How likely is it that an employee like the one you describe could have been selected specifically to burn Intercept? After all TFA is published in the official CIA press organ.

Still, Intercept should try to do better.

Re: Did the Intercept bungle the NSA leak?

#93
post #26
post #14

Check their very public social media profiles[0], Reality Winners reads like she escaped a psych ward so how she was ever given clearance should be an issue in itself. [0] http://www.informationliberation.com/?id=56840

Says the person linking to "informationliberation dot com". Pot, meet kettle. Sure her twitter profile is highly politically charged and should likely have made her unfit for clearance, but citing that as evidence that she should be institutionalized is ridiculous. She'd likely say the same about you given your proclivity for "informationliberation". Where does that leave us for discourse?

Yeah, she shouldn't have had a clearance, but if anyone thinks her posts are particularly unusual, they haven't been following politics on Twitter this spring.

Re: Did the Intercept bungle the NSA leak?

#94
post #66
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Says the person linking to "informationliberation dot com". Pot, meet kettle. Sure her twitter profile is highly politically charged and should likely have made her unfit for clearance, but citing that as evidence that she should be institutionalized is ridiculous. She'd likely say the same about you given your proclivity for "informationliberation". Where does that leave us for discourse?

Have either of you been thru clearance? I have. They're really excited to know if you can be bribed with drugs or sex or simple money. If you have the politics of a typical college professor they're not terribly interested. The clearance process was mostly CYA, was this candidate dumb enough to say he'd sell secrets to the soviets for weed or cash to pay loansharks or kinky sex? I've read this woman's weird social me…

[deleted]

Re: Did the Intercept bungle the NSA leak?

#95
>The leaks contain no "raw" evidence

Something stinks here. Both WaPo and the NSA, who Greenwald has picked fights with, get to smear The Intercept, while we are supposed to bekieve the leaker has extreme incompetence (flagrantly incriminating herself while using a pseudonym), and meanwhile the public still has no evidence of the election tampering.

It's not like the Deep State didn't lie to the country to wage a war in Iraq not long ago.

The public deserves to see proof.

Re: Did the Intercept bungle the NSA leak?

#96
I wonder whether NSA uses syntactic watermarking[1], imperceptible changes to word order or sentence form, keyed to the user accessing a document. This, or other techniques of embedding a fingerprint in the text itself, would allow a leaker to be identified from just a transcription of the document.

What is the right amount of fuzzing for a news organization to perform on leaked documents, to protect a source while providing credible evidence to support a claim?

Meral, H. M., Sevinc, E., Ünkar, E., Sankur, B., Özsoy, A. S., & Güngör, T. (2007, February). Syntactic tools for text watermarking. In Electronic Imaging 2007 (pp. 65050X-65050X). International Society for Optics and Photonics.

Re: Did the Intercept bungle the NSA leak?

#97

Have we learned nothing about the NSA's tactics? The Intercept publishes reporting that they would rather not have been printed, and the very day the DOJ unseals charges where they try to say they learned about the leak from a paper crease from what can be reasonably inferred to be The Intercept. Meanwhile the alleged leaker allegedly used her work computer to contact The Intercept (in contradiction with their recomm…

Seriously seems like this was a whistleblower with a legitimate concern for the American people. Maybe she was careless on purpose. If you know you are going to get caught, might as well make your trail obvious so that you can claim that you are a whistleblower.

...and use a pseudonym?

Re: Did the Intercept bungle the NSA leak?

#98
post #8

It's getting complicated managing 25 year olds at work these days. Lot of mistrust and entitlement issues I have never seen before. If you are a manager any suggestions about how to handle this stuff?

As an older worker, I'd say the mistrust issues of younger workers are entirely justified. If that is a problem, corporate management is hoist on its own petard.

If you wanted Gen Y to trust you, you should have treated Gen X better--or at least hidden the mistreatment better.

As for the entitlement, that's probably on their Boomer parents/grandparents. You could shove them down and kick them in the teeth until they become bitter and jaded, just like Gen X. But then you're back to the trust thing again.

So if I may humbly suggest, start treating your older workers better. First, have some to treat better. Then, give them back all the crap that Boomers once enjoyed, but which later got stripped from standard employment arrangements, like actual vacation weeks and sick days, longer-term employment contracts, career ladders without important rungs missing, viable retirement plans, job security, etc.

The younger workers were born into the networked world. They rely on friends and family to judge your company's reputation. And the source of that reputation is largely going to be people that worked for you in the past. Those older people have all been screwed by their employers in one way or another. Kids are usually naive, ignorant, and inexperienced, but they aren't stupid. They see what happens to uncles and cousins and friends of their parents.

Sadly, there's not much an individual manager can do about any of it. Those young workers are coming in expecting to get stabbed in the back, and one day, your CEO or Head of HR will call a meeting and issue you your knife--or maybe your axe. Those kids know it's coming; they have seen it happen over and over again to other people. So maybe validate the mistrust, and admit that the company doesn't care about them. Let them know that the one and only way to keep a job is to be productive enough to pay their own wage, and then some, and that everyone should plan to eventually jump ship near a port, before the captain gets the chance to throw them overboard in the middle of a crossing. Recognize that a mercenary attitude puts self first. That makes the manager's job harder, of course. Why should a mercenary work any harder than necessary to earn the paycheck?

I would (as a non-manager) use discretionary cash bonuses to reward good employee behavior, with intermittent reinforcement. Cultivate trust in you, personally, rather than trust in the company. Punishments and the threat of termination simply won't work. Just put everyone on a secret carrot schedule, and when it comes time for the next reward, set up a plausible reason to hand it over.

Re: Did the Intercept bungle the NSA leak?

#99

Have we learned nothing about the NSA's tactics? The Intercept publishes reporting that they would rather not have been printed, and the very day the DOJ unseals charges where they try to say they learned about the leak from a paper crease from what can be reasonably inferred to be The Intercept. Meanwhile the alleged leaker allegedly used her work computer to contact The Intercept (in contradiction with their recomm…

People shouldn't necessarily trust the Washington Post either, who is beholden to their sources in the NSA. The Washington Post covered Snowden's leaks of unconstitutional actions by the NSA, won a Pulitzer Prize for the coverage, only to then stab him in the back and call for his prosecution. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/edward-snowden-doesn...

> The Washington Post covered Snowden's leaks of unconstitutional actions by the NSA, won a Pulitzer Prize for the coverage, only to then stab him in the back and call for his prosecution.

I've heard speculation that the change in attitude was tied to regime change at the Post in the wake of the Bezos acquisition.

Re: Did the Intercept bungle the NSA leak?

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except it sure seems like in this case, yeah, they bungled it. At the very least a total lack of awareness or care towards infosec to help protect sources (regardless of the fact that the lack of awareness extends to the source - I'd want a journalist to be better at this than I am if I were leaking information). [ The article doesn't mention this, but I wouldn't be surprised if these microdots, rather than "a crease…

Whoa - sure enough, there they are. The microdots seem to be the usual xerox-style microdots, and decode properly: Printer serial number: 535218 [or 29535218] Date: May 9, 2017 Time: 06:20

If anyone is interested in seeing for themselves how this information is encoded, read this.

http://blog.erratasec.com/2017/06/how-intercept-outed-realit...

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