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Did the Intercept bungle the NSA leak?

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Re: Did the Intercept bungle the NSA leak?

#101

Post by VLM »

ForRealsies wrote: post #68
VLM wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>So I've got this direct report, and in public she hates the CEO In today's society, it's socially more acceptable to hate the President than to merely like the President. > And she identifies her own race as being terrorists If she was making these statements on any race other than 'white', I guarantee you she would have been dealt with immediately. What do we call these people? Radical, self-loathing white TrumpIsH…

Well, I guess what I'm getting at is a clearance is top down CYA, like say I sold 72 M-60 machine guns to MS13 to pay off my gambling debt, and a journalist discovers in 5 minutes that I posted that to twitter before I got my job of working at the armory, and the journalist is going to ask the Commanding General of the post why no one noticed that before I got the job and did exactly what I said I'd do. So thats very top down outside agency approves you.

That's different from bottom up, a supervisor is supposed to handle (aka, fire from job) someone who spouts off about how proud they are to be racist, etc. Nobody ever asked a commanding general "how come you hired someone who flaked out and went nuts" "well, stuff happens". On the other hand its precisely the job of her immediate supervisor in a bottom up fashion to notice she's, well, gone nuts and is saying stuff that opens the company to hostile working environment lawsuits.

I'm not even commenting on her, uh, peculiar belief system, but the mistaken idea about how clearances work.

Clearances are a mix of pre-crime / CYA / shouldda known type stuff.

A direct report going insane in public is totally a supervisor direct report problem.

Clearances also vary a lot over time... 50 years ago the Soviets could bribe a gay guy into giving up secrets... today the gay guy is probably happily married and nobody cares so its no longer a clearance disqualification. On the other hand I can't imagine any scenario in the history of business where an employee stating in public that they hate the race of their CEO and some managers and coworkers would result in anything but firing, like forever pretty much everywhere.

Someday, after we stop punishing people for it, I imagine weed use will no longer be a clearance issue. How do you extort someone for secrets because they're a casual user of a cool legal substance? I suspect it'll never be acceptable in any workplace to ever say in public "I hate (some level of manager) because he's a (insert race here)"

Re: Did the Intercept bungle the NSA leak?

#102

Post by mythrwy »

hdolt wrote: 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?

Don't handle them. Regardless of age. Pick out the worst and get rid of them. You may find the troubles with the others diminish.

Being fired once or twice in life is a character building experience. It often makes you re-assess your worth and take work more seriously. And later, as a person becomes (potentially) a manager, they realize the ego crush that is being fired and treat with respect, unlike "kid" managers who haven't been through the process and fire without understanding, sometimes for little more than an ego boost.

Also, removing impediments to the common goal is necessary for an organization to thrive.

Everyone eventually has to grow up. But it's a confusing world right now. There isn't anything to trust because we know so much more. And the school system has been preaching unrealistic pablum which gets under the skin after a bit.

Sometimes it takes a hard knock or two to understand the underlying nature of commerce and human interaction. Unfortunately, (like germophobe moms) we have made a bad habit of deferring these essential lessons thus weakening the ability to deal with the very real, very dirty world.

So for those two reasons, don't feel bad, don't try to fix and don't coddle. It won't work anyway.

Re: Did the Intercept bungle the NSA leak?

#103

Post by hsod »

throwaway-1209 wrote: post #24

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.

In your second paragraph, are you referring to the redactions? The document contains quotes like this:

"Russian General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate actors … executed cyber espionage operations against a named U.S. company in August 2016, evidently to obtain information on elections-related software and hardware solutions."

which seem to directly tie it to GRU.

Re: Did the Intercept bungle the NSA leak?

#104

Post by sfashset »

revelation wrote: post #29
user982 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It has all the appearances of the government trying to smear a news outlet and ensure no one leaks to them again. A scheme that would be less effective if not for The Intercept's demonstrably deficient opsec in protecting its source in this affair.

The leaker first contacted them through her work email . It was game over at that point. Nothing they could do would have fixed that.

No she didn't. Please stop repeating this claim.

She signed up for an email subscription from her personal gmail, on her work computer.

That would certainly have been enough to raise her superiors' hackles when discovered, but the result would have been her getting fired, not indicted.

The bottom line is having a personal subscription to the Intercept was not ever going to be enough to build a case against her. You repeating that claim is victim blaming, and more importantly, wrong.

Re: Did the Intercept bungle the NSA leak?

#105

Post by zerohm »

cmiles74 wrote: post #69
strictnein wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Intercept scanned the document and posted high quality versions of them online. They were of such quality that the embedded dots modern printers add to each page were readily available: http://blog.erratasec.com/2017/06/how-intercept-outed-realit... It pointed to the exact printer being used and the exact time and date the document was printed. They didn't need her email to figure out it was her, but I'm sure tha…

In the vast majority of cases, the watermark data wouldn't point anywhere interesting. Maybe the serial number would point to a public library or a warehouse where the printer was stored prior to sale. Certainly The Intercept had no way of knowing that the serial number would correspond to an office printer at the NSA or one of their contractors. I don't think we should expect news outlets to scour every printed docu…

Actually the Intercept should have known. Margaret Thatcher used water marking to find which Ministry was leaking stories in the 80s. It's standard practice to retype documents before sharing, set up well thought out, secure amnesty boxes, etc.

Re: Did the Intercept bungle the NSA leak?

#106

Post by kharms »

I think the real fuckup is including in the article the method for IDing a Russian agent - registering with a personal phone number. That's the kind of mistake that could have been made again, but now probably won't be.

On the whole I think this information needed to get out. There were reports of people all over the US being dropped from voter registration rolls, and now proof that the Russian military targeted voter registration companies.

Re: Did the Intercept bungle the NSA leak?

#107

Post by kharms »

ucaetano wrote: post #53
CogitoCogito wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no evidence that it was The Intercept's actions that caused her to be found. I agree that they should be more careful (they should _always_ be more careful), but there are many ways the source could have been found independent of the newspaper. Regardless, the government has many incentives to claim that it was The Intercept's deficient opsec that caused them to find the leaker. There really isn't much you ca…

Plenty of evidence: https://arstechnica.com/security/2017/06/how-a-few-yellow-do... Massive incompetence and amateurish stuff on part of the leaker and The Intercept. Yellow dots have been known for ages.

Do you think the NSA wouldn't have checked access logs and the emails if not for the scan? The difference isn't between getting caught vs. not, it's between getting caught in days vs weeks.

Re: Did the Intercept bungle the NSA leak?

#108

Post by interrupt13 »

I can't help but feel a Zen-like sense of balance and bliss over this. An NSA contractor violated her employment agreement and the law in providing Top Secret info to The Intercept, who then published it.

The Intercept got a story published and is enjoying great attention (and ad revenue), and the guilty party was caught. Everyone can be happy.

"God’s in His heaven — All’s right with the world!" [R. Browning]

Re: Did the Intercept bungle the NSA leak?

#109

Post by slantyyz »

sfashset wrote: post #104
revelation wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The leaker first contacted them through her work email . It was game over at that point. Nothing they could do would have fixed that.

No she didn't. Please stop repeating this claim. She signed up for an email subscription from her personal gmail, on her work computer. That would certainly have been enough to raise her superiors' hackles when discovered, but the result would have been her getting fired, not indicted. The bottom line is having a personal subscription to the Intercept was not ever going to be enough to build a case against her. You r…

>> You repeating that claim is victim blaming, and more importantly, wrong.

I think that really depends on whether you perceive the leaker as a perpetrator or a victim. Valid arguments can be made for either side.

Re: Did the Intercept bungle the NSA leak?

#110

Post by cwkoss »

tanderson92 wrote: post #5

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…

Also, article is on the Washington Post, possibly the most propagandist of mainstream media outlets.
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