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Why did journalists help the Justice Department identify a leaker?

theintercept.com

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Re: Why did journalists help the Justice Department identify a leaker?

#3
Primary sources are the biggest threat to Narrative-based media. This is why they never ever link to court documents for example, and also claimed that accessing WikiLeaks was illegal for non-"journalists" (a word they used to mean employees of Narrative media).

Re: Why did journalists help the Justice Department identify a leaker?

#4
> Why is the media so eager to help the Justice Department by supplying potentially viable leads?

Because journalist-activists are now part of the military-industrial complex and are fully aligned with the intelligence apparatus.

> Bellingcat, meanwhile, went further and virtually handed over the potential origin point of the leak by specifying the exact name of the chatroom where the documents appear to have first been shared.

Bellingcat is notoriously a CIA operation, with a long history of covert activity: https://thegrayzone.com/2021/02/20/reuters-bbc-uk-foreign-of...

Re: Why did journalists help the Justice Department identify a leaker?

#5
Bellingcat isn’t a news org. Most of what I saw was rehashes of their analysis.

Second, journalists use their own judgement or what to publish. Had the kid given it to a news org the reporting would have been redacted.

I object to the new definition of “leaking” that tries to make all cases of it unquestionably good. People can die due to info.

Re: Why did journalists help the Justice Department identify a leaker?

#6
post #2

Maybe it was a case where "practices fell short of the standards to which we hold ourselves” as in the events recounted in [1]. 1: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/real...

Full quote:

>The Intercept was widely criticized for its handling of the document Winner leaked—in particular, the decision to show the leaked document to the U.S. government. While attempting to verify its authenticity with the NSA, an Intercept reporter inadvertently revealed its provenance. According to an FBI affidavit, the document had a telltale crease in it, indicating it had been printed and folded. An FBI agent assigned to the case would later testify that a total of six people had printed the document. The pool of potential leakers was further narrowed to one — Winner — when investigators discovered she’d emailed The Intercept from her work computer. The Intercept would go on to conduct an internal review, which found that, in Winner’s case, its “practices fell short of the standards to which we hold ourselves” when it came to protecting sources.

Ouch.

That said this case seems quite different. The Intercept didn't do it on purpose, but instead had someone not competent in protecting the source while attempting verification. The case of Teixeira seems remarkably different, however, in that journalists actively did the investigative work for the government while also, to an extent, reporting on the leaks themselves.

Re: Why did journalists help the Justice Department identify a leaker?

#9
That this happened the way it did is deeply concerning and should anger you. The media worked with a rare diligence to help the government apprehend someone who made information about which we've been repeatedly lied to available to the public. Let's not forget both the media and the government have spent the last couple of weeks on a gaslighting tour telling us the leak was Russian propaganda, etc. The tenacity with which they pursued and arrested the leaker is astounding considering we still don't know who leaked the Supreme Court draft decision, or who was on the Epstein client list.

This is just gross. It doesn't matter where you align politically, the degree to which the media has been working with the government against the interest of the public is unprecedented. We have US troops on the ground presumably fighting Russia - who is, contrary to what we were told, winning the war - and there was no formal declaration of war, nor was the public informed of it. And not a single journalist in the recent WH press conferences has asked about it. Instead, we got questions such as "How do we prevent leaks like this in the future [so we can keep lying to the public]"?

Perhaps Elon was being a troll by labeling some of these outfits "state-sponsored", but they sure as hell have earned the moniker.

Re: Why did journalists help the Justice Department identify a leaker?

#10
post #2

Maybe it was a case where "practices fell short of the standards to which we hold ourselves” as in the events recounted in [1]. 1: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/real...

The Reality Winner leak wasn't real, it was intentional.

It was a leak of no importance (more summaries and assessments i.e. editorial) that claimed Russiagate stuff was true. The most important part of the leak was the identity of the woman who leaked it, who was a Bernie supporter with idiosyncratic politics. The goal was to bring the Bernie wing of the Democrats into the anti-Russian buildup by putting it into the mouth of a quirky left-leaning woman of pretty impeccable character (as far as that can be true for someone who works in US intelligence.) I absolutely guarantee that she wasn't in on it, they just played to her urge to feel heroic.

Richard Esposito (https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/news/pr0218/nypd-executive-app...) was part of handling her leak on the other side (The Intercept is lousy with spooks), so they had whatever help they needed for their parallel construction, which they would have no obligation to fully explain, anyway. The trial went perfectly because Omidyar was paying her lawyers, so spies on both sides.

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edit: the growing cynic consensus is that this leak is fake, too. The fact that there were "crudely altered" casualty figures and that point was repeated multiple times is bizarre. Why would Russians be altering information that they're meant to use? If it were meant for propaganda purposes, why would it be crude?

And for the papers: why were they immediately convinced of the authenticity of these "crudely altered" documents when past leaked documents that had no indication of falsehood and were easy to authenticate were held in question for months or years after discovery by these same outlets?

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