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Former WSJ reporter says law firm used Indian hackers to sabotage his career

reuters.com

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Re: Former WSJ reporter says law firm used Indian hackers to sabotage his career

#21

Post by 1letterunixname »

nier wrote: post #16

It surprised me to read that reporters for the Wall Street Journal communicate with their sources via email. That’s careless.

securedrop, pastebin GPG communiques from coffee shop WiFi + VPN, i2p, or something with a buffer between them and their sources. Perhaps include journalism security hygiene similar to foreign intelligence HUMINT and compartmentalization. Journalists have to realize they don't know their adversaries and should "fail-safe" to assume they include state actors and megacorps with unlimited resources. To not do so is to recklessly underestimate the threat.

Re: Former WSJ reporter says law firm used Indian hackers to sabotage his career

#22

Post by redanddead »

swayvil wrote: post #20

This is an angle of the uneven distribution of wealth that you seldom hear about. As long as there are rich and poor people, a rich person can hire a poor person to do basically anything. Overriding legality, decency, safety. Because the poor person just needs the money that bad. So you get people renting out their backyard as a toxic waste dump. Or murdering people. Or breathing smog. Or selling children. Crazy horr…

Yeah and the problem is getting worse. sometimes it seems that even institutions are trying to maximize human pain.

I thought of writing an economics book about this phenomenon.

I have no idea how we can fix this problem and hope someone else can chime in

Re: Former WSJ reporter says law firm used Indian hackers to sabotage his career

#23

Post by iinnPP »

1letterunixname wrote: post #21
nier wrote: post #16

It surprised me to read that reporters for the Wall Street Journal communicate with their sources via email. That’s careless.

securedrop, pastebin GPG communiques from coffee shop WiFi + VPN, i2p, or something with a buffer between them and their sources. Perhaps include journalism security hygiene similar to foreign intelligence HUMINT and compartmentalization. Journalists have to realize they don't know their adversaries and should "fail-safe" to assume they include state actors and megacorps with unlimited resources. To not do so is to r…

Or just join the dark side as many have.

Re: Former WSJ reporter says law firm used Indian hackers to sabotage his career

#24

Post by epicureanideal »

swayvil wrote: post #20

This is an angle of the uneven distribution of wealth that you seldom hear about. As long as there are rich and poor people, a rich person can hire a poor person to do basically anything. Overriding legality, decency, safety. Because the poor person just needs the money that bad. So you get people renting out their backyard as a toxic waste dump. Or murdering people. Or breathing smog. Or selling children. Crazy horr…

I assume this has more to do with absolute poverty than relative poverty. If a person is starving they’ll do almost anything to eat. If they’re merely relatively poor, having an old car instead of a new one, a small house instead of a large house, it’s unlikely they’d go to extremes.

Re: Former WSJ reporter says law firm used Indian hackers to sabotage his career

#25

Post by swayvil »

epicureanideal wrote: post #24
swayvil wrote: post #20

This is an angle of the uneven distribution of wealth that you seldom hear about. As long as there are rich and poor people, a rich person can hire a poor person to do basically anything. Overriding legality, decency, safety. Because the poor person just needs the money that bad. So you get people renting out their backyard as a toxic waste dump. Or murdering people. Or breathing smog. Or selling children. Crazy horr…

I assume this has more to do with absolute poverty than relative poverty. If a person is starving they’ll do almost anything to eat. If they’re merely relatively poor, having an old car instead of a new one, a small house instead of a large house, it’s unlikely they’d go to extremes.

Don't diminish it by choosing an innocuous characterization. You see the range of it as clearly as the rest of us.

Re: Former WSJ reporter says law firm used Indian hackers to sabotage his career

#26

Post by the_optimist »

nier wrote: post #16

It surprised me to read that reporters for the Wall Street Journal communicate with their sources via email. That’s careless.

Maybe not careless, but not a good convention. Incidentally, securedrop is set up only to communicate with specific journalistic organizations. I'd be very hesitant to send information to a journalistic org without an understanding of who's involved. In no way have the vast majority of journalistic orgs established the trust necessary to receive leaks:

https://securedrop.org/directory/

Re: Former WSJ reporter says law firm used Indian hackers to sabotage his career

#27

Post by seibelj »

swayvil wrote: post #20

This is an angle of the uneven distribution of wealth that you seldom hear about. As long as there are rich and poor people, a rich person can hire a poor person to do basically anything. Overriding legality, decency, safety. Because the poor person just needs the money that bad. So you get people renting out their backyard as a toxic waste dump. Or murdering people. Or breathing smog. Or selling children. Crazy horr…

An underappreciated negative aspect of equality is total lack of enthusiasm and incentive.

As inequality is a guarantee - no two people are alike in any aspect and neither are their abilities as an employee - mandating (either by gun or union contract) lockstep equality in payments and job security, the highest performers are demoralized and put in the bare minimum or quit (if they can). The result is the ever-increasing shitty quality of the firm and its behavior. For modern examples see the NHS (bleeding doctors and nurses to the private sector) and American public schools in inner cities (highest global costs per student yet abysmal results).

There are valid criticisms about inequality but the pros far out way the cons.

Re: Former WSJ reporter says law firm used Indian hackers to sabotage his career

#28

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

One thing that I should point out, is that he is not going after the WSJ, for any impropriety in his firing. They are really the ones that damaged his career.

So I suspect that there is more to this story than is apparent.

Re: Former WSJ reporter says law firm used Indian hackers to sabotage his career

#29

Post by PuppyTailWags »

epicureanideal wrote: post #24
swayvil wrote: post #20

This is an angle of the uneven distribution of wealth that you seldom hear about. As long as there are rich and poor people, a rich person can hire a poor person to do basically anything. Overriding legality, decency, safety. Because the poor person just needs the money that bad. So you get people renting out their backyard as a toxic waste dump. Or murdering people. Or breathing smog. Or selling children. Crazy horr…

I assume this has more to do with absolute poverty than relative poverty. If a person is starving they’ll do almost anything to eat. If they’re merely relatively poor, having an old car instead of a new one, a small house instead of a large house, it’s unlikely they’d go to extremes.

Relative poverty is also involved imo. Many people would go to extremes to ensure their children and their loved ones are guaranteed brighter economic futures. Life insurance companies wouldn't both explicitly exclude suicide and also do investigation to ensure a death wasn't suicide if it people weren't willing to literally die to ensure a brighter economic future for their dependents.

Hell, I live very comfortably, am not at risk of homelessness or starvation. But there is a lot I would do for money that guarantees the best start in life for my children, the best end of life (medical care, treatments, etc) for my parents.

Re: Former WSJ reporter says law firm used Indian hackers to sabotage his career

#30

Post by sandGorgon »

pempem wrote: post #3

I'm not sure I understand the importance of these hackers being Indian as opposed as from any other region?

US and India have very enforceable bilateral cybercrime treaties. And it is very well enforced on both sides.

The article makes it seem that India as a whole is operating in some North Korea-ish way.

A US citizen can well complain to CERT-IN (https://www.cert-in.org.in/) for any reported cybercrime with proper documents and it will be treated as an enforceable crime.

In fact, quite funny considering the US Chambers of Commerce have filed an appeal with CERT-IN that the compliance requirements are very stringent (https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/tech/technology/cert-in...)

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