Ex-CBS Reporter Claims Government Agency Bugged Her Computer

RoccamOccam writes A former CBS News reporter who quit the network over claims it kills stories that put President Obama in a bad light says she was spied on by a "government-related entity" that planted classified documents on her computer. In her new memoir, Sharyl Attkisson says a source who arranged to have her laptop checked for spyware in 2013 was "shocked" and "flabbergasted" at what the analysis revealed. "This is outrageous. Worse than anything Nixon ever did. I wouldn't have believed something like this could happen in the United States of America," Attkisson quotes the source saying.

Comments

She's..

[Anonymous Coward]

..CLEARLY a crackpot ...right?

Re:She's..

[i kan reed]

Yes.
"And as I was typing and working on questions for a Benghazi-related story, the data started wiping kind of at hyperspeed"

Not how someone with remote control over a computer would wipe data. Not deleting it in the fucking editor. A quick console deltree "My Documents/Bengazi" while the computer is idle is easier and less obvious to the user.

She almost certainly held down control and backspace by accident and blamed it on the government. Classic paranoid ideation.

Re:She's..

[i kan reed]

Actually. Better theory. She was on a laptop, didn't have the touchpad disabled, and accidentally highlighted some text while typing. Poof gone, and happens to all over us.

Re:She's..

[seepho]

Sounds like someone needs to explain to her what the "Insert" key does.

Re:She's..

[neonv]

And as I was typing and working on questions for a Benghazi-related story, the data started wiping kind of at hyperspeed

I've done that to people before. Remote log in and start keyboard presses like delete as a prank. It may not have been to delete the data so much as to drive them crazy. If she was hacked by specific people to cause problems, that's a very logical tactic.

Re:She's..

[MrEricSir]

She almost certainly held down control and backspace by accident and blamed it on the government.

Yup. It's almost like there's a reason she's a former CBS reporter. But on the bright side, maybe she can get a job working for Alex Jones or Orly Taitz.

Re:She's..

[drpimp]

.... selling a book! Also, I am not sure why she feels the need to say she had a phone next to her and that gave her a tilted look into data she was seeing deleted. I just saved a bunch of money by switching to Geico.

Re:She's..

[Anonymous Coward]

"Yet another" Benghazi-related story.

Color me surprised that someone who chases that boogieman doesn't understand what it means to prove an outrageous assertion like the one she's pushing. In her book, no less.

Re:She's..

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, probably nothing to see here. If they wanted to wreck her work they'd just crash the machine and it would come back up with a corrupted file system. Nobody would think there was a conspiracy about a hard-drive crash.

Re:She's..

[Anonymous Coward]

"..CLEARLY a crackpot ...right?"

A 'journalist' working for CBS in this day and age? Obviously.

She mistook perhaps 'Nigerian Prince' as an euphemism for Obama.
Or she watched The Good Wife episode featuring ransomware.

Re:She's..

[roc97007]

Yes.
"And as I was typing and working on questions for a Benghazi-related story, the data started wiping kind of at hyperspeed"

Not how someone with remote control over a computer would wipe data. Not deleting it in the fucking editor. A quick console deltree "My Documents/Bengazi" while the computer is idle is easier and less obvious to the user.

She almost certainly held down control and backspace by accident and blamed it on the government. Classic paranoid ideation.

Later in the same article "It was described to me by the computer experts I consulted with afterwards that that was purely an attempt to let me know that they could do that, that they were watching, that they were in my computer."

You're right, nobody would break into a computer that way, unless, perhaps, if they were powerfully arrogant, and wanted to make a point.

Re:She's..

[Yakasha]

Yes. "And as I was typing and working on questions for a Benghazi-related story, the data started wiping kind of at hyperspeed"

Not how someone with remote control over a computer would wipe data. Not deleting it in the fucking editor. A quick console deltree "My Documents/Bengazi" while the computer is idle is easier and less obvious to the user.

She almost certainly held down control and backspace by accident and blamed it on the government. Classic paranoid ideation.

The other option being: read the story.

Per her source, the deletion of data while she was using it was a warning. Warnings don't work that well when they're less obvious to the user. (I think Tom Clancy actually invented that move originally).

Knowing tech, ya, her story sounds like fiction. But then again a few years ago, so did dragnet surveillance, warrant-less/trial-less asset seizures, and drones executing US Citizens without trials With stuff like that, the known illegal spying, secret courts, secret laws, and fighting terrorism for the sake of the children, who could have predicted most of what is going on these days besides the likes of Grisham & Clancy?

Re:She's..

[neilo_1701D]

"And as I was typing and working on questions for a Benghazi-related story, the data started wiping kind of at hyperspeed"

Sounds like a scene from the first episode of Torchwood. In fact, the whole story sounds like a failed pilot TV show.

My favorite quote from the story:

But the most shocking finding, she says, was the discovery of three classified documents that Number One told her were “buried deep in your operating system. In a place that, unless you’re a some kind of computer whiz specialist, you wouldn’t even know exists.

"They probably planted them to be able to accuse you of having classified documents if they ever needed to do that at some point,” Number One added.

Documents magically being deleted at hyperspeed, other documents planted "deep in the operating system"... yeah, right.

Re:She's..

[roc97007]

Yeah, probably nothing to see here. If they wanted to wreck her work they'd just crash the machine and it would come back up with a corrupted file system. Nobody would think there was a conspiracy about a hard-drive crash.

Especially since there's been so many high-profile hard drive crashes recently.

Re:She's..

[Anonymous Coward]

Even better, she was on a Lenovo Thinkpad, docking station, and lid closed. Known defect, the lid presses the delete key. It took us a while to track this one down where I work. Lots of deleted everything. Why, they even have a BIOS update for this. Apparently that was easier than fixing the manufacturing defect.

Re:She's..

[barc0001]

Absolutely. Remember Back Orifice? A roommate's hosebeast of a girlfriend would come over and sit on the spare computer in the living room muttering under her breath and making random sounds while chatting on ICQ (Yeah, that long ago...). I installed BO on it and then would use my laptop to send deletes, backspaces and when I got really bored, send program closes to it until she would get fed up and leave to go smoke on the deck and complain to her bf about the "possessed" computer.

Re:She's..

[nedlohs]

Or the delete key stuck down for one of numerous reasons. More than once I've had vi starts beeping like crazy because I've shifted the keyboard and the escape key has wedged under the monitor.

Re:She's..

[Stan92057]

What's your proof besides pure speculation and guessing on your part? Ever have someone in control of your PC? I have, its dam spooky. And I knew who it was and why I allowed them control. So I don't have a clue what she actually seen but I sure as hell believe her pc was under someone's control and it wasn't her.

Re:She's..

[TWX]

Per her source, the deletion of data while she was using it was a warning. Warnings don't work that well when they're less obvious to the user. (I think Tom Clancy actually invented that move originally).

The reference I remember was in Doctor Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, when it's revealed that the Soviets have a doomsday weapon that'll destroy the world if a nuke goes off in their territory, and the Americans comment how a deterrent weapon is only good if it's known.

Re:She's..

[Stan92057]

"Yup. It's almost like there's a reason she's a former CBS reporter"

Quote "A former CBS News reporter who quit the network." End Quote"

If you would have read it your wouldn't have egg on your face right now.

Re:She's..

[Anonymous Coward]

Absolutely. Remember Back Orifice?

Now it's called Barack Office. And yes, you can download it at a whitehouse.com*

*Which is sadly now defunc. It was so funny to send peoples there about political inquiry.

Re:She's..

[aaaaaaargh!]

The incredibility of such actions are one of the reasons why they are done, so I wouldn't discount her story so easily. The Stasi did similar things (well, of course, not on laptops but in the same spirit). It's very sad and hard to believe for halway decent folks but some people are extremely evil.

Re:She's..

[Anonymous Coward]

i kan reed is a paid DNC shill that posts to /. He doesn't understand any of the actual tech stories and sounds like a complete idiot when he does post to them. However, a political story comes up between 8am and 5pm on Monday through Friday and he will post about 50 times to it citing DNC talking points to the letter. He has been called out numerous times and doesn't even deny it.

Re:She's..

[lgw]

Because you know via your magic psychic powers that there's nothing interesting to report when the US left men behind to die when an embassy got overrun. It's not even possible someone in the chain of command made a newsworthy mistake, says your magic psychic powers?

This is why she quit - she was tired of being told they don't run stories that would reflect badly on the wrong people or causes, regardless of facts. This is also why "only old people" watch the broadcast news or read the newspaper for news - it's so blatantly biased these days, why bother?

Re:She's..

[AdamWill]

The article continues:

"It was described to me by the computer experts I consulted with afterwards that that was purely an attempt to let me know that they could do that, that they were watching, that they were in my computer."

Not saying that interpretation is correct, but it does seem reasonable to point out that she does in fact have a response to your objection.

Re:She's..

[Anonymous Coward]

How naive are you ?
You do realise it's common to let people have the choice of quit or be fired ?

Next you'll be saying you believe musicians quit bands due to "musical differences", and not because another member is being a Grade-A c*nt.

Re:She's..

[TechyImmigrant]

The events have been well documented.
The events were not at all well represented by the press.

Re:She's..

[Kohath]

You really think she's clinically insane?

Explanations more likely than insanity:
- she is non-technical and may be mistaken
- she's lying to sell books
- she's telling the truth
- she said something different and was misquoted or edited in some misleading way, possibly by accident

Re:She's..

[gatkinso]

I believe TFA said the point of deleting in that fashion *was* to be obvious,

Re:She's..

[steveha]

A quick console deltree "My Documents/Bengazi" while the computer is idle is easier and less obvious to the user.

From the article, quoting Ms. Attkisson:

It was described to me by the computer experts I consulted with afterwards that that was purely an attempt to let me know that they could do that, that they were watching, that they were in my computer.

She's not a computer expert and this part of the story I would want more proof before I buy it. I'd like to know who looked at her computer: what exactly this person's qualifications were and what exactly this person found.

She said that the malware found on her laptop was commonly used by the government... what was it exactly? Is there any malware in the world that is effective but isn't used by anyone except U.S. government agencies? From the article:

Attkisson says the source, who's "connected to government three-letter agencies," told her the computer was hacked into by "a sophisticated entity that used commercial, nonattributable spyware that's proprietary to a government agency: either the CIA, FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency or the National Security Agency."

Slashdot collectively knows a lot about computers. Has anyone heard of spyware that matches the above description?

If I were a government spook and I was trying to crack a reporter's computer, I would use an off-the-shelf exploit, not something that pointed straight back at the government. I presume that computer spooks know where the black-hat marketplaces are, and thus where to buy new cracks as they go up for sale.

As for the classified documents, again I want more evidence. She should have gone to the FBI immediately with those documents if they really were classified. On the one hand that seems like a far-fetched thing, but on the other hand, the current Presidential administration is the first administration ever to prosecute journalists as spies.

P.S. Ms. Attkisson's first-hand stories about her bosses spiking stories, White House staff yelling at her for not being "reasonable", and all the rest of it are completely plausible to me (and fall within her area of expertise).

Re:She's..

[Gr8Apes]

With stuff like that, the known illegal spying, secret courts, secret laws, and fighting terrorism for the sake of the children, who could have predicted most of what is going on these days besides the likes of Grisham & Clancy?

1) George Orwell
2) Aldous Huxley
do we really need to list the rest?

Re:She's..

[gtall]

Uh-oh, I think they are onto us. I think we better come clean with some of the secret documents:

1. Steve_Ballmer.pdf - reveals that he starches his shorts
2. Zune - details the dastardly scheme to make Americans hate music
3. Word - shows insanity producing psychological warfare

I'm sure you all know some more. Tell her now before it is too late!! She's quite important.

Re:She's..

[lgw]

Ah, so it sounds like there would be an interesting story there then, although it's a bit late for it to be "news" I guess. I'd sure like to read a non-sensationalized report on where the ball was actually dropped, given how embarrassing the outcome was for the US.

Re: She's..

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course she's not. The way she described the data being wiped is EXACTLY how it happens when Michael Weston inserts a flash drive in a computer. Definitely government black ops going on here. No doubt.

Re:She's..

[bugs2squash]

The control key stuck down on my keyboard a while back. There was a "d" in my password. Fucking gubmint kept shutting down my session every time I tried to enter credentials.

Re:She's..

[squidflakes]

"commercial, nonattributable spyware that's proprietary to a government agency"

You can't parse that and have it make sense.

Commercial spyware that's somehow unable to be attributed to a person or organization? That defies the whole point of a commercial software product.

Commercial yet proprietary to a small group of government agencies? Again, that's not really the definition of commercial.

I can believe she had some sort of breach on her machine, most likely malware. Hell, I'd even be willing to believe there was some sort of spearphishing attack against her by someone who wanted data off a well-known reporter's computer but the rest of it just reads like a bad movie about the internet.

Re:She's..

[K. S. Kyosuke]

She's a loony alright.

Re:She's..

[Applehu Akbar]

On a MacBook Pro, the first symptom of a failing battery is sometimes that the Q key stops working. Apparently it's right over the most common first place for the battery to start bulging.

Re:She's..

[Anonymous Coward]

Your spin is no more likely than another. In fact, having the public exposure (and opportunity to explain how she was allowed to quit) lends more credibility to her story.

Re:She's..

[Jack9]

> "deep in the operating system"... yeah, right.

DLLs in the system32 folder (why system32, am I one of 32 people being spied on?!?!) are seen as precisely that by the majority of people. So yeah, probably.

Re:She's..

[Anonymous Coward]

Not how someone with remote control over a computer would wipe data. Not deleting it in the fucking editor.

It was a demonstration of power, if you had actually read the next sentence.

It was described to me by the computer experts I consulted with afterwards that that was purely an attempt to let me know that they could do that, that they were watching, that they were in my computer.

Re:She's..

[Anonymous Coward]

Not how someone with remote control over a computer would wipe data. Not deleting it in the fucking editor. A quick console deltree "My Documents/Bengazi" while the computer is idle is easier and less obvious to the user.

She almost certainly held down control and backspace by accident and blamed it on the government. Classic paranoid ideation.

So in other words, you're saying not only did someone delete the data, they did it with her watching, causing alarm.... And in a way that when she recounted the incident, would sound literally in-credible?
Yeah, I can't imagine who would want it to go that way...

Re:She's..

[mbkennel]

| If I were a government spook and I was trying to crack a reporter's computer, I would use an off-the-shelf exploit, not something that pointed straight back at the government. I presume that computer spooks know where the black-hat marketplaces are, and thus where to buy new cracks as they go up for sale.

They weren't interested in exfiltrating information off her computer.

If you were a apparatchik and wanted to Send A Message, you'd use whatever you had conveniently available and was ready to use, and not something which could be dismissed as an accidental hack.

Why did Putin have that defector assassinated in London with polonium of all things? Why not an auto accident or a "robbery"? To make it absolutely clear who did it.

Note that this malware may be something 'off the shelf' for certain agencies (e.g. FBI/DHS). The government is large and heterogenous, with distinctly different motives and management. The people who really get into the nitty gritty of the black hat malware and know how to use it. (e.g. NSA) could be distinct from the ones who get "weaponized" malware ready to use in a package, "For Official Use Only".

Re:She's..

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably less a prank, more an intentional sabotage by someone at CBS. They're rabidly blue at that network. Someone in IT was probably given the task of harassing her until she dropped the story.

Re:She's..

[khallow]

While I don't disagree with what you wrote, I think there's other reasons for why things happened.

Not deleting it in the fucking editor.

If you're sniffing key strokes, then it's not that much additional effort to insert your own key strokes in. I'd also look at the "computer experts" and "sources" that she consulted as the potential originators of the problem.

She almost certainly held down control and backspace by accident and blamed it on the government.

Or a keyboard or software malfunction. It need not be an ID10T problem in order to be innocuous. I think this story would be far less frivolous if we actually were told what spyware was allegedly installed on the computer. Merely saying that experts looked at the computer and found stuff is not terribly relevant.

All in all, this is a boxing-at-shadows story. There's nothing material here to tell us whether something actually happened or not.

Re:She's..

[Anonymous Coward]

0) Yevgeny Zamyatin, whom both #1 and #2 ripped off.

Re:She's..

[dbIII]

If I were a government spook and I was trying to crack a reporter's computer, I would use an off-the-shelf exploit, not something that pointed straight back at the government

See Polonium poisoning as the least subtle current way of a government (Russian government obviously) deliberately doing something that points back to them as a fear tactic. This could be a more subtle way of "sending a message".

Re:She's..

[Anonymous Coward]

Not how someone with remote control over a computer would wipe data. Not deleting it in the fucking editor.

Unless the someone was a CBS middle manager who demanded access to screen control software and wanted to guide (quash) the Benghazi story. I could see a pointy haired boss using the tool this way.

Re:She's..

[ChrisMaple]

Here's a summary: For months before the attack, Hillary Clinton refused requests to make the embassy safer. On the day of the attack, Obama said "Take care of it," and probably went to bed. Underlings rejected urgent requests for help and urgent offers of help.

Whether malice or mere incompetence were in effect will probably never be known. Details of how high up the minute-by-minute policy decisions were made are actively hidden.

Re:She's..

[tibit]

It's really simple. There are commercial products (both hardware and software) that are offered for sale only to government agencies. You literally can't buy them if you don't work for some government entity, or if you don't have a direct and explicit authorization from a government entity. They are nonattributable to any particular government agency, but everyone in the know knows what company makes the product. The fact that you know the manufacturer doesn't make it attributable.

Re: She's..

[Bartles]

The IRS deletes data at warp speed. As does the DOJ and the EPA. Why so you think this is so far fetched?

Re:She's..

[rahvin112]

Christ the "expert" could be her 12 year old son for all we know.

Re:She's..

[DigiShaman]

Now to be fair, you did "possess" it.

Re:She's..

[ayesnymous]

Poof gone, and happens to all over us.

Only happens to computer noobs.

Re:She's..

[Anonymous Coward]

In a mind boggling twist, years later we find out the Soviets did have a doomsday device, and they did keep it secret. Apparently it was created to prevent paranoid generals from launching a "preemptive retaliation" by making retaliation inevitable. But they thought the US might find a way to disable it if they knew about it, so they kept it secret, completely defeating the original purpose of a doomsday device. Supposedly, the device might even still be active.

Re:She's..

[BackwardEngineer]

Yeah, except that Republicans had cut the security budget to the State department for years, which meant that the likelihood of an event like this increased. I mean, you don't hear people screaming out about how it was a conspiracy when all of these embassies were attacked under Obama's predecessor. It's almost like certain people have an animus against him. Hm...

Re:She's..

[newcastlejon]

On the MBP the battery is under the trackpad, so that's the first thing to go if the battery starts bulging (you might find that clicks don't register when you press down on the pad).

I can't speak for all of the models but I think the logic board is usually, if not always, near the hinge side and the battery is front-right with the HDD front-left. This would make sense since the vent for the CPU fan is in the hinge.

Re:She's..

[Anonymous Coward]

> happens to all over us (sic)

Sure, and the spontaneous appearance of an extra fiber connection to the house, that happens to all of us too.

http://www.foxnews.com/politic...

Re: She's..

[Anonymous Coward]

The embassy wasn't attacked in the first place...

Re:She's..

[Anonymous Coward]

Some jackasses put fake DLLs in the %appdata% directory and call it "copy protection."

Re:She's..

[ruir]

It is not like that she could not write it ON PAPER. Often in a while I also had that happening to me on my Macbook Pro, keys getting stuck, and had to close the lid to fix it quickly, though with newer versions of OS/X, that has not happened for a long while. However I was not paranoid enough that was the gov after me.

Re:She's..

[ruir]

I think the so called computer experts saw an opportunity to get some money out of someone gullible enough.

Re:She's..

[Yakasha]

No doubt. Point being, like sci-fi authors getting kudos for predicting technology advances, political/law thriller authors should start getting the same for predicting what the government is doing today.

Re:She's..

[Gr8Apes]

These authors did both parts, and more, as have quite a few others.

Re:She's..

[Gr8Apes]

-1) Jerome K. Jerome, whom we'll politely state Zamyatin was at least inspired by.

Re:She's..

[TWX]

I don't think that it's a cut and dried as the article makes it out to be. My guess is that it still required human control to activate it, it just might not have required high-ranking military personnel or politburo officials to make the call.

Re:She's..

[Anonymous Coward]

And you know via your magic psychic powers that it's all a giant cover up and the government is totally ( Totally) hunting down anyone who disagrees, so they can... delete their documents as they type them.

No, it couldn't possibly be the simplest explanation. /s

I'd be useful if the forensics were released

[Anonymous Coward]

Just to validate the claims.

Re:I'd be useful if the forensics were released

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd be useful if the forensics were released

So in the meantime, you are completely useless?

Re:I'd be useful if the forensics were released

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd be useful if the forensics were released

So in the meantime, you are completely useless?

Not completely, but since I am a forensics expert, I am less useful than I could be.

Re:I'd be useful if the forensics were released

[im_thatoneguy]

Considering Sharyl Attkisson is an Anti-vaxxer and a conspiracy theorist who quit CBS because it was full of too many liberals I doubt that forensic evidence will ever come.

Just another conservative who thinks the government A) cares about them in the slightest B) is trying to stop them from uncovering their secret evil communist plots!

Re:I'd be useful if the forensics were released

[tibit]

Hypocrites can still be right, you know.

Re:I'd be useful if the forensics were released

[dgatwood]

"Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they aren't after you."

—Joseph Heller

Journalist Runs Malwarebytes - Slashdot Front Page

[Anonymous Coward]

It says SPYware right there in the search results. Obviously made by spies.

Honestly.

[Anonymous Coward]

"And as I was typing and working on questions for a Benghazi-related story, the data started wiping kind of at hyperspeed"

Look, this isn't what hacking looks like, unless it's being done by a 14yo who installed VNC on your machine and is just fucking with you. Why would a super seekrit Obummer conspiracy go to the effort to plant spyware on her computer and then use it by PRESSING BACKSPACE? While she was editing? That's beyond nutty.

Re:Honestly.

[jbmartin6]

I was once called in for a similar-sounding incident. It turned out to be the guy at the next desk who had the same make/model of wireless keyboard. But to answer your question, the article already answered it.

It was described to me by the computer experts I consulted with afterwards that that was purely an attempt to let me know that they could do that, that they were watching, that they were in my computer.

But it seems like you would have to read the book to get more details on who these experts were.

Re:Honestly.

[Andy Dodd]

"unless it's being done by a 14yo who installed VNC on your machine and is just fucking with you"

Which is probably what it was. My guess is: Some 14yo didn't like her political views and decided to fuck with her, and used some social engineering tricks to make her think it was the big bad gubmint.

Betcha the classified documents came from Wikileaks or were forgeries.

Re:Honestly.

[i kan reed]

No 14 year old gives that much of a shit. The symptoms she describes sound more like user error than someone "fucking with her".

Re:Honestly.

[Enry]

That seems kinda stupid. Why announce that they're 'watching you' and give you evidence that they're doing so?

"Hey Agent P, I got a great idea. Let's h4xx0r her laptop, wipe out data, and let her know we're watching her. A member of the press would take that as a warning and not report on it, right?"
"Cool. *type type type*"

If you look at any person's laptop you'll find it absolutely coated with spyware. I run PC cleaning workshops for my church. Some of the stuff that comes in should really be nuked from orbit they're so bad. I'm starting to advocate people just start getting Chromebooks because there's not much of an OS to hack and 90% of what people do can be done from a web browser.

Re:Honestly.

[krakelohm]

But it seems like you would have to read the book to get more details on who these experts were.

Geek Squad strikes again!

Re:Honestly.

[SoOverIt]

I was a bit concerned to see a Slashdot post based on a NY Post fluff piece (yes, this is the Post's idea of a fluff piece) to begin with, but that aside... "purely an attempt to let me know that they could do that, that they were watching, that they were in my computer." Ri-i-i-ght. Because then she couldn't just wipe her hard drive or go out and buy another computer and learn how to secure it better. If "the government", or at least the parts that spy on people, were that incompetent, none of use would have anything to worry about.

Re:Honestly.

[Anonymous Coward]

You're right. That's what fucking with people looks like. RATs have tons of functions to spook users. Sometimes knowing that you're being watched does all the required damage.

Re:Honestly.

[Swave An deBwoner]

I'm telling you Commander, that if we make it look like some pre-teen script kiddie, nobody will believe that it was NSA that erased her story.

Now she'll have to type it in all over again.

Next time let's encrypt the file and demand that she ransom it with her credit card, OK?

Re:Honestly.

[slashmydots]

Actually a keylogger that detects keyword density in a string and then wails on the backspace button isn't all that unrealistic or uncreative. It's sort of dumb but sort of smart. I wouldn't rule out that her keyboard was damaged by moisture or her car walked over the keyboard though. She sounds a little paranoid.

Re:Honestly.

[AmiMoJo]

It's a good way to scare someone into stopping what they are doing, and appears to have worked. If they just deleted a few files now and then or edited the odd story she would soon figure it out anyway, so might as well just scare her into giving up.

It reminds me of the goons from GCHQ/MI5 who visited the Guardian to watch them destroy some hard drives. Completely pointless, didn't do anything to stop the leaks, but it certainly made their position clear to the journalists.

Re:Honestly.

[Anonymous Coward]

Do realize that Apple Remote Desktop IS VNC. There is no indication that VNC is logged in to the machine. In fact simply allowing VNC to connect won't get them past the user login. The USER on the machine has to unlock it. The VNC user has to know both the VNC password and the user password to get into it.

If a separate VNC server is running on the machine, that's an entirely different process, but still comes back to the "having to know the password" anyway. If the user was already logged into the machine, then the VNC user only needed to know the VNC password.

There's far more nefarious things that can be done bySSH'ing into the Mac. Most of it invisible to the user.

Re:Honestly.

[Anonymous Coward]

In doing computer work for over 30 years, the only time I have come across malware just for an individual was an estranged wife whose husband put something on her computer in efforts to locate her.

I have come across malware targeted at companies in the early 2000s... a stack of "free MP3" CDs was left near the entrance of a startup I worked at... and the autorun.inf (which was automatically run by XP and ME) would add some "value-added" functionality when inserted, which did a scan for Office documents and threw them via FTP to a server overseas.

Realistically, I give a one in ten billion chance that her machine was black-bagged specifically, and far less odds in the manner that she described. Her description sounds great for a suspense novel or a Hollywood flick, but realistically, she most likely got malware due to a vulnerable Web browser [1] or some un-updated add-on.

[1]: I've found that AdBlock and click-to-play functionality goes further in keeping machines clean than any amount of antivirus software. Sandboxes and VMs help, but having machines not allowed to dump their attacks in the first place is critical.

Re:Honestly.

[hondo77]

It's a good way to scare someone into stopping what they are doing, and appears to have worked.

How did it stop her when she is writing a whole book about it?

Re:Honestly.

[gtall]

So...she was fucking with herself....the implications are mind boggling...sort of like Zaphod Beeblebrox isolating part of his brain from himself.

Re:Honestly.

[squidflakes]

Her description of the location of the classified documents sounds like something my computer illiterate grandmother would say trying to relate the plot of "War Games" or "The Net."

What IT person do you know in this world that says shit like that?

Re:Honestly.

[tnk1]

Of course, the obvious solution is she got spyware on her laptop the normal way.

On the other hand, she was probably on a first name basis with some White House types that very well could make that happen.

So, it's not really right to use a probability for this scenario. Your chances of being murdered are probably 10,000 to 1 in general, but if you personally pissed off the mob enough, your probabilities start getting a lot more... probable.

I really don't know what to think about this story. I have to admit that I am thinking "crackpot" or "mistaken". Still, the government certainly has those capabilities, and it was certainly aware of her at the White House level. At that level, you get people who have the power, the ruthlessness, and just enough entitlement that it could happen. I can't entirely dismiss it. Not with the stuff that we're getting about certain other less-than-savory recent government actions.

Re:Honestly.

[Anonymous Coward]

> Realistically, I give a one in ten billion chance that her machine was black-bagged specifically

As someone who wasn't squeamish about criticizing the administration, who was working for CBS (which goes out to the public) in an office, working on such copy as Benghazi bits....I give it a lot higher chance than that. Maybe 1 in a couple thousand. There's probably fewer journalists, working for major network news in that capacity, that fit that profile. 1/10 billion is showing a bias on your end so I can't expect you to agree. Just to think about it.

Re:Honestly.

[khallow]

Realistically, I give a one in ten billion chance that her machine was black-bagged specifically, and far less odds in the manner that she described.

I give even odds that her "source" is the one responsible (since they actually had access to the machine). The source may have done so for the federal government (for which I give a lot more than 1 in 10 billion odds) or to exploit a gullible reporter for personal gain.

Re:Honestly.

[rahvin112]

If they want to scare her they wake her up in the middle of the night with 4 people in her bedroom and quietly tell her that if she keeps it up bad things might happen. Then they proceed to make themselves visible at times, for example show up and do the same thing to their mother, let her see them talking to someone she cares about, etc.. It's far more intimidating, far more effective and completely deniable. She doesn't listen and she ends up in a "car accident" or commits "suicide".

The people that would do such things would be far subtler and wouldn't be leaving traces that could be traced back. The warnings would come in situations they completely controlled where they could be sure there was no recording device present. My god Obama has claimed the President has the right to kill American citizens without even a court order. If he was as evil as she claims she'd be dead already.

Her ramblings are a sign of insanity. On the plus side she'll fit right in at Infowars and probably has a bright future over there.

Re:Honestly.

[dbIII]

Look, this isn't what hacking looks like, unless it's being done by a 14yo who installed VNC on your machine and is just fucking with you

From what Snowden released that seems to be the mentality of parts of the sprawling outsourced clusterfuck that is the NSA, right up to the top with an operations room based on a fucking TV show and laid out by a Hollywood set designer.

Re:Honestly.

[dbIII]

If they want to scare her they wake her up in the middle of the night with 4 people in her bedroom

That sort of thing leads to amusing (or tragic) tangles with armed professional law enforcement, and the toy soldiers do not cope well with such situations.

Re:Honestly.

[Anonymous Coward]

What happened to the tried and true "rearranging of the furniture"?

You're out. You come home to no sign of break in, but all of your furniture has been rearranged (but not damaged).

A very unsubtle, but still polite, message.

Re:Honestly.

[Anonymous Coward]

You're reading to many spy novels. "Showing up" en masse in someone's apartment is dangerous business, and liable to get someone shot. Even a scuffle will leave DNA. No, they'd be better off regularly talking to the family and leaning on her car. But that can invite investigation with photos. The computer way is effectively untraceable.

Re:Honestly.

[Anonymous Coward]

So...she was fucking with herself....the implications are mind boggling.

Indeed. We have verified that she must be a slashdot user.

Re:Honestly.

[ToasterMonkey]

"unless it's being done by a 14yo who installed VNC on your machine and is just fucking with you"

Which is probably what it was. My guess is: Some 14yo didn't like her political views and decided to fuck with her, and used some social engineering tricks to make her think it was the big bad gubmint.

Betcha the classified documents came from Wikileaks or were forgeries.

Teenagers don't give a crap about political views, they'd do it just for fun.

Re:Honestly.

[tibit]

Think of what it takes to drive someone nuts. It takes precisely that: too nutty to be believeable, yet technically rather trivial.

Re:Honestly.

[rahvin112]

Do you actually believe they couldn't simply have the police guarding their exit? That they couldn't taint some food so she would be sure to be sound asleep? The people we're talking about have unlimited resources, the ability to silence any witnesses and even the ability to have law enforcement protect them while they do it.

She's attributing cartoonish technical prowess (a stuck key for gods sake) and ignoring the simple fact that if they actually wanted her out of the way she would be out of the way. Putting files on her laptop is the behavior or a 14 year old, a bored neighbor and poor wireless security or malware available from about half the internet. Given what Snowden has revealed, if they had actually wanted to gain access to her computer it would have been trivially easy (less than 5 minutes of access) and absolutely undetectable. Remember the security camera images (I can't recall the mans name that recorded it with a hidden camera) of the guys that used a key to open the guys door and just long enough to boot the computer, insert a USB stick then turn the computer off during the 10 minutes it took for the guy to go buy some groceries?

That's what the NSA does, they can write malware directly into the firmware of the chips that can't be removed. And as I said if they wanted to warn her off something it would have been far more direct and far easier to deny. And if they wanted her out of the way she would have had a tragic "accident". Not one person in this country would question a car accident that appeared genuine because almost 50k people per year die in collisions. It's so common we all know someone that died in one. This doesn't even take into account something like planting cash and drugs in her car/home then calling in an anonymous tip along with supplying some "witnesses". The war on drugs has given the government almost endless ability to destroy people they don't like and the laws are written in such a way that you lose almost all ability to defend yourself.

My entire point on this is that the government wouldn't engage in script kiddie/malware level stupidity if they were intent on shutting her up.They would be much more direct and far more dangerous. Hoover was an amateur compared to what they can do today and he was capable of shutting up the most powerful people in America.

Re:Honestly.

[dbIII]

Do you actually believe they couldn't simply have the police guarding their exit

Do you really think spooks want professional law enforcement to watch while they carry out extralegal operations? Many Police actually think laws are worth enforcing and don't want to see a "might makes right" system such as in China or Soviet Russian - they demand "inconvenient" things like due process.

The truly amusing thing here is you are being critical of someone's suspicions of a conspiracy but suggesting a Pinochet style system in it's place - we're not yet anywhere near the stage of setting off car bombs in Washington to silence inconvenient people. You've accused someone of having a wild fantasy and suggested something far wilder.

Re:Honestly.

[rtb61]

This is of course exactly what it looks like in the movies hence the use in the oh so obvious promotion of a book by a third rate journalist. Really the worst kind of lame shit imaginable. Seriously, the US government has out and out raided and arrested journalists it did not like. Put them on no fly lists so they would be searched, molested and interrogated at airports. Targeted journalists for direct physical attacks at public rallies and threatening them with far worse.

This lame arsed writer hack is making light out of the real attacks on countless journalists across the globe so the drama queen can pump the sales of her book. Oh yeah, we believe, classified US government documents where "buried in your operating system", seriously how stupid a story can an uninformed boob come up with. OK for any idiot seeking to pimp the sales of your book, claim the "number one" security expert found hidden files on a secret partition on your hard disk drive, not bloody buried in the operating system, that is just to seriously lame arsed stupid.

Seriously, Ben-fucking-ghazi is the best this journo can come up with. Whose fault, easy, the CIA for helping to arm bad people and the Ambassador's fault the person in charge at that location. Just because they died, does not detract from their errors in judgement that got them and the people with them into that predicament. OH NO not that Liberal media all owned by Conservative corporations, seriously, I mean fucking seriously.

Now who paid the publisher to waste money on that book, that is the real question and let me guess the government never raided and searched her house because they were scared of her.

Re:Honestly.

[silfen]

That seems kinda stupid. Why announce that they're 'watching you' and give you evidence that they're doing so?

Presumably they didn't want to spy on her (why should they? they already knew what she was likely to find), they wanted to intimidate her.

"Hey Agent P, I got a great idea. Let's h4xx0r her laptop, wipe out data, and let her know we're watching her. A member of the press would take that as a warning and not report on it, right?"

I'm sure many would. But apparently reporting on it isn't doing her much good since you don't actually believe her.

Re:Honestly.

[rtb61]

Oh seriously are you kidding. The US government has been raiding journalists houses and trashing them, targeting and arresting them at rallies and even out and out killed them overseas. Now because, what, the US government is afraid, they are all of a sudden afraid they are playing script kidded games. Let me fucking guess an election is coming up in the US and the publisher was paid to produce this 'er' book. Publicly tearing it to pieces is going to be so easy and this journa will likely end up finding themselves upon the not so funny real cyber attack and not from any government but because of the belittling of all those journalists who have suffered under real government abuses.

Re:Honestly.

[silfen]

I should add that I don't necessarily believe her. But your argument isn't valid, which makes the question of whether your argument is sound moot.

Re:Honestly.

[Anonymous Coward]

Police use targeted spyware regularly and widely, both here in the US and in Europe.

Re:Honestly.

[Enry]

I don't believe her for a number of reasons I consider valid:

1) little evidence to back up her statements, with the promise of more evidence if you apparently buy the book
2) the evidence she did provide doesn't match with what those of us that know technology would consider credible (i.e. wiping out text by touching the trackpad)
2a) if she knew she was being targeted, why continue using technology that she knew could be tracked? Why not go with a laptop with wifi disabled or a plain 'ol typewriter?
3) why hasn't this happened to other reporters? There are others that have done similar reporting yet weren't targeted.
4) the press usually don't accept covert warnings like that (c.f. Woodward and Bernstein)
5) and it goes back to my comment on 'why would the government target her laptop in such a manner that they'd tell her they were watching then do nothing else'. Was she audited by the IRS? Was she followed by the FBI? Was her phone tapped?

Lacking answers to those points, I'm forced to go with a rather time-honored method of selling books: the older form of clickbait. "You won't believe what happened when this reporter tried to investigate Benghazi!"

Re:Honestly.

[cellocgw]

If they want to scare her they wake her up in the middle of the night with 4 people in her bedroom

That sort of thing leads to amusing (or tragic) tangles with armed professional law enforcement, and the toy soldiers do not cope well with such situations.

and here I thought it was the lead-in to a video about a woman and four pizza-delivery boys...

Re:Honestly.

[micahraleigh]

Remember how the EPA decided to "crucify" certain entities so everyone would fall in line?

In other words make a big display of someone's pain to scare people into submission.

And what is the qualitative difference between that and terrorism?

Re:Honestly.

[Rakarra]

If they want to scare her they wake her up in the middle of the night with 4 people in her bedroom and quietly tell her that if she keeps it up bad things might happen. Then they proceed to make themselves visible at times, for example show up and do the same thing to their mother, let her see them talking to someone she cares about, etc.. It's far more intimidating, far more effective and completely deniable. She doesn't listen and she ends up in a "car accident" or commits "suicide".

Oh dude, like the Dark Crusaders did to Dave Chappelle to make him quit his show!
Dave Chappelle Conspiracy Theory

Might be my favorite conspiracy theory of all time.

Re:Honestly.

[david_thornley]

The other question is, if her machine were specifically attacked, how likely is it that it was (a) the US government, or (b) somebody who hasn't yet completed puberty? I'd bet on (b).

Re:Honestly.

[Enry]

Uhm. No?

Re:Honestly.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think you're a bit naive about both what presidents are up to and how complicit the press usually is with it.

But, then, at this point, what difference does it make, right? We already know that both Obama and Clinton have been lying through their teeth anyway. Anybody who doesn't understand that isn't going to be convinced by journalists anyway.

Re:Honestly.

[rahvin112]

Personally, I've met very few police that believed in rights and due process beyond what's necessary to get "the bad guy". The law is what they say it is. Given our government has kidnapped people on the streets of foreign nations, flown them in captivity to other countries where they tortured people and not only that but blown up American citizens with missiles from remotely controlled aircraft over foreign countries I don't actually put much weight that they wouldn't commit murder if they thought it was the right thing to do. There is nothing scarier than someone that will commit evil acts because they think they are doing the right thing and our government is full of those people right now.

But after all there is a big step between a car bomb and a car accident. If you don't understand that difference there is little reason to discuss it because you rely on straw men and lying about what other people said which makes you a very small person.

Re:Honestly.

[dbIII]

Personally, I've met very few police that believed in

Since this has been going on for far too long with little sign of a clue, I'm sorry but since you escalated to very childish insults I do have to suggest getting out a bit more, talking to a few people, growing up a bit mentally and maybe reading a fucking non-fiction book instead of watching science fiction videos. There's no "strawman" required when the things you've written have so little connection with the current situation and appear to be right out of a movie instead.

But after all there is a big step between a car bomb and a car accident

Assassination is assassination. The example I gave was of a Chilean agent carrying out an assassination in Washington D.C. a few years ago - if you hadn't even heard of that then why are you bothering to discuss governments arranging assassinations whether overt or covert?

Re:Honestly.

[micahraleigh]

http://www.cnn.com/2012/04/30/...

Far Right Wing Journalist

[Anonymous Coward]

She was being tracked because of her extremist and non-sensical views.

Re:Far Right Wing Journalist

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually she was a 'lifer' at CBS and the legacy media. She just never got the memo that speaking truth to power is not done when the administration has a D after the name.

The last six years has been a never ending string of Pulitzer Prize level scandals that have not just been ignored by the Party PR shops the low info crowd calls 'the media' or 'the press' but have been actively covered up. At least a dozen scandals that meet the 'far worse than Nixon even discussed' are out there waiting for anyone with a large enough megaphone to break them into the public conservation.

And no, she won't be the one, that was why they sacked her butt, so she would not have access to the CBS megaphone.

Re:Far Right Wing Journalist

[Anonymous Coward]

>She just never got the memo that speaking truth to power is not done when the administration has a D after the name.

Or Rs, for that matter. Speaking truth to power is always dangerous; plan your escape carefully and early in the process.

Lame claim to fame

[Anonymous Coward]

Colonel Mustard: Why is J. Edgar Hoover on your phone?
Wadsworth: I don't know, he's on everybody else's, why shouldn't he be on mine?

What are you talking about Willis?

[fahrbot-bot]

A former CBS News reporter who quit the network over claims it kills stories that put President Obama in a bad light ...

There are News organizations that manipulate, encourage or suppress stories that may make a President look good or bad? When did this happen?

Re:What are you talking about Willis?

[__aaclcg7560]

When did this happen?

Post-9/11 America. If you weren't with the United States, you were with the terrorists. No reporter wanted an exclusive jailhouse interview from Gitmo.

Re:What are you talking about Willis?

[i kan reed]

Yeah, let's turn gitmo from a civil rights tragedy into a conspiracist boogeyman which you pretend is used for the elimination of the free press. It's a prison. It's a prison where horrible things have happened. It's a prison where horrible things have happened circumventing due process. But that's all. That's the end. That's bad enough, and you don't need to bake in conspiracy theories to make it worse.

Re:What are you talking about Willis?

[roc97007]

A former CBS News reporter who quit the network over claims it kills stories that put President Obama in a bad light ...

There are News organizations that manipulate, encourage or suppress stories that may make a President look good or bad? When did this happen?

I think back in the Grant administration.

Re:What are you talking about Willis?

[Anonymous Coward]

... horrible things have happened circumventing due process ...

Yet in a land which holds the idea of free speech above all others, these victims of horrible things have never had their story on the news. Who is demanding due process for the prisoners of Git-mo? For certain; it isn't you. The dramas about Git-mo are coming from Great Britain, not the USA. See:
      'The road to Guantánamo',
      'Outside the law: Stories from Guantánamo',
      'Torture: The Guantánamo Guidebook'.

Canada gets a mention with:
      'The Guantánamo Trap'.

From the USA are fluff pieces like:
        'Guantánamo circus',
        'Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantánamo Bay'.

Re:What are you talking about Willis?

[JDAustin]

It's a prison where horrible things had to happen to prevent ever more horrible things from happening.

Re:What are you talking about Willis?

[rahvin112]

You forgot the sarcasm tag and there are lots of people that don't get sarcasm. Expect lots of serious replies.

Re:What are you talking about Willis?

[Mr. Slippery]

It's a prison where horrible things had to happen to prevent ever more horrible things from happening.

It's a prison where people did horrible things and tried to excuse them by saying they had to, in order to prevent ever more horrible things from happening, but in reality prompted yet more horrible things. See political martyr, and please stop believing that you put out a fire by pouring more fuel on it, or stop horrors by committing more horrors.

Re:What are you talking about Willis?

[fahrbot-bot]

You forgot the sarcasm tag and there are lots of people that don't get sarcasm. Expect lots of serious replies.

Either way, it beats mentioning any specific "News" organizations and getting labeled "troll". :-)

Re:What are you talking about Willis?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a prison where horrible things had to happen to prevent ever more horrible things from happening.

Thank you. I try to tell people that there are individuals that think this way and they don't believe me. Now I have proof.

Re:What are you talking about Willis?

[Anonymous Coward]

Thought bubble: I can only remember one time in my life when a reporter on a major news service made a similar claim against their own employer (Australian 60 minutes, 1980s from memory). They washed it over with perfect, Hollywood-style CoIntelPro: they created two versions of an interview, one cut differently in order to show "how they could have cut it to damage someone's reputation".

Of course, most people missed the idea that the "clean" interview was already cut to damage reputations, and so the second one was accepted as "proof" of what they "could have done".

The complainer was derided, reputation tarnished, then the world moved on.

Both are bad but not comparable.

[gurps_npc]

Honestly, I think that Nixon's stuff is worse. Spying on a journalist is bad - but not personal.

In addition, Nixon's crimes were both for his personal gain and hit democracy at it's heart - elections. Those make it incredibly evil crime.

The CBS reporter's incident, assuming it is entirely true, does not have these issues. There is no evidence that it was for any one's personal game, nor was it an attempt to circumnavigate political system.

As such, Nixon's crimes are far worse.

Re:Both are bad but not comparable.

[Anonymous Coward]

In addition, Nixon's crimes were both for his personal gain and hit democracy at it's heart - elections. Those make it incredibly evil crime.

Hey, it happened in New Zealand and slightly more than a third of the people lapped it up happily. Of the remainder, but bulk didn't vote because they were sick of it.

So, in another New Zealand first, we re-elected someone who learned from Nixon, got caught, and didn't care.

Re:Both are bad but not comparable.

[neonv]

Whether the motive is political or personal does not justify crime. This is suppression of information for the purpose of affecting an election. Nixon was stealing information for the purpose of affecting an election. The difference is minor.

Journalism based on political gain is propaganda, and all over in the news. It's hard to believe any one news source these days, they're all biased one direction or another. Get your news from as many sources as possible, get the facts, and make an educated assessment. It's the best way to remove the journalists' biases.

Re:Both are bad but not comparable.

[gurps_npc]

I am not talking justify, I am discussing what crime was committed. Intent is a major part of crime, particularly when done by a government agency.

If it's done for personal gain, it's always a crime, but that is not always the case for other kinds of intents. A prime example: f a cop kills a man because he hated him it's a lot different than when a cop kills a man because he was kidnapping a little boy.

Even when a random person kill someone by accident, is a different and lesser crime than killing someone on purpose.

Re:Both are bad but not comparable.

[rolfwind]

What are you talking about? Nixon could only have wet dreams over what the US Government can and does do now.

The only two extenuating circumstances is that Obama certainly didn't build all this up on his own, nor was the first president to do so, but was in the building for many decades. The second being that the entire government is in on it.

Nixon is a great big boogie man to hold up, but his crimes pale against modern day government.

If the government was truly of the people, and concern with the 4th amendment - it would have decades ago ensured secure protocols and encryptions instead of backdoors into everything. But the concentrated shouts of law enforcement and the planners in power is typically louder than the diffused power of the majority. And instead of doing the right thing, it always choosing the lesser of 2 evils at that very moment (and there is always some "crisis), guess what? It still went bad.

The only point of your post is to act as an apologist. Sure, in the days of Nixon, when the government had its shoes covered in shit, and Nixon ankle deep in it appeared to be the worst guy out there. But now that the government is knee high in it, that point is long moot and gone.

And I say this all because we already experienced a guy who had the reach in his day somewhat comparable to today. Hoover. That guy had info on everyone and stayed in power so long because of it. I can't even guess at all the behind-the-scenes crimes he committed but since he wasn't a figurehead president and doesn't appear to have a party badge affixed to him, no one brings him up or attack him for shortterm gain.

Now the NSA is in the same position. And they have way more power to affect elections or politicians than Nixon ever had. Some Senator wants to defund the agency? Slip a brown envelope under her door full of her browsing history with a note saying "No $ Already?" and she'll get the message.

All it needs is the wrong director.

Re:Both are bad but not comparable.

[swb]

I just read a book about Watergate and it mostly makes you think Nixon was a rank amateur. Bungled, dirt-digging expeditions that were mostly designed to dig up embassing, low-rent scandals, conducted by second-tier political operatives outside of Nixon's actual control or direction.

It seems like just an evolution of the usual political chicanery employed up to this day.

The rest of the Nixon mystique just seems like hysteria. You can't tell me every administration since hasn't had a poitical enemies list or attempted to obfuscate their scandals and errors and suppress leaks. Nixon just happened to be caught in the tide of poltical and social upheavel of his time. It's winner's history.

Today's political skullduggery seems much scarier given the technology and powers the government has it didn't then, from the Patriot Act, National Security Letters to civil forfeiture.

Re:Both are bad but not comparable.

[Anonymous Coward]

The first article of Impeachment against Nixon was for attempting (but failing) to use the IRS as a weapon against his powerful political enemies. Obama DID use the IRS as a political weapon, but not against the powerful who could fight back but the small and innocent, who only committed the sin of opposing a lightworker. Not plotted, not consipred, all sides admit Lois Lerner DID use the IRS against enemies of the administration, Lerner was a high Party offficial with frequent access to the White House.

Re:Both are bad but not comparable.

[Opportunist]

What's scary is that what got Nixon on the brink of impeachment would today easily be squelched in a few days citing national security and the rest is swept aside with the reporters being labeled terrorists.

Re:Both are bad but not comparable.

[Anonymous Coward]

Honestly, I think that Nixon's stuff is worse. Spying on a journalist is bad - but not personal.

In addition, Nixon's crimes were both for his personal gain and hit democracy at it's heart - elections. Those make it incredibly evil crime.

The CBS reporter's incident, assuming it is entirely true, does not have these issues. There is no evidence that it was for any one's personal game, nor was it an attempt to circumnavigate political system.

As such, Nixon's crimes are far worse.

Yeah, right. Because Nixon politicized the IRS and set it against his enemies.

No, wait. He didn't. That was Obama.

Sorry, there's not much more fundamentally corrupt than politicizing the tax collector - that can and does take all your assets for no reason at all.

Is there anything Obama does that you wouldn't apologize for?

In the words of SNL's skewering of Obama's entire record of failure:

“Some people want to criticize the way our administration has handled this crisis, and it’s true we made a few mistakes early on. But I assure you, that was nowhere near as bad as how we handled the ISIS situation, our varied Secret Service mishaps, or the scandals of the IRS and the NSA,” he said. “And I don’t know if you guys remember, but the Obamacare website had some pretty serious problems too.”

He said that considering the rest of the second term, “this whole Ebola thing is probably one of my greatest accomplishments.”

Re:Both are bad but not comparable.

[neonv]

Both of these crimes are malicious actions for political gain, not accidents or a cop defending an innocent. Neither are justified by motive or by result.

Re:Both are bad but not comparable.

[roc97007]

> Nixon could only have wet dreams over what the US Government can and does do now.

And probably does, in whatever hell he resides.

Re:Both are bad but not comparable.

[Teancum]

what got Nixon on the brink of impeachment

Note that articles of impeachment were drafted in the U.S. House of Representatives and a committee meeting held to draft the legislation needed to bring the issue in front of the entire U.S. House of Representatives. That was far more than simply being on the brink.... it most certainly would have happened. The only thing that kept Nixon from being impeached was his resignation that made such an effort moot.

Re:Both are bad but not comparable.

[Anonymous Coward]

Per tape recordings of Lyndon Johnson released two or three years ago, Johnson had North and South Vietnam ready to end their war when Nixon stepped in and told South Vietnam if you wait until the election is over, I'll get you a better deal.

So, 58,000 US soldiers dead, 2 to 4 million dead Vietnamese, and countless others maimed, would disagree with this idiot about this alleged hacking being worse than anything Nixon did.

Re:Both are bad but not comparable.

[Anonymous Coward]

it's means it is.

Re:Both are bad but not comparable.

[Anonymous Coward]

all sides admit Lois Lerner DID use the IRS against enemies of the administration

Tea party groups forming non-political 501(c)s (despite the obvious problem of forming a non-political political group) constitutes enemies of the administration? Do you have any proof of this?

Re:Both are bad but not comparable.

[Anonymous Coward]

Honestly, I think that Nixon's stuff is worse. Spying on a journalist is bad - but not personal.

In addition, Nixon's crimes were both for his personal gain and hit democracy at it's heart - elections. Those make it incredibly evil crime.

The CBS reporter's incident, assuming it is entirely true, does not have these issues. There is no evidence that it was for any one's personal game, nor was it an attempt to circumnavigate political system.

As such, Nixon's crimes are far worse.

Yeah, right. Because Nixon politicized the IRS and set it against his enemies.

No, wait. He didn't. That was Obama.

Sorry, there's not much more fundamentally corrupt than politicizing the tax collector - that can and does take all your assets for no reason at all.

Is there anything Obama does that you wouldn't apologize for?

In the words of SNL's skewering of Obama's entire record of failure:

“Some people want to criticize the way our administration has handled this crisis, and it’s true we made a few mistakes early on. But I assure you, that was nowhere near as bad as how we handled the ISIS situation, our varied Secret Service mishaps, or the scandals of the IRS and the NSA,” he said. “And I don’t know if you guys remember, but the Obamacare website had some pretty serious problems too.”

He said that considering the rest of the second term, “this whole Ebola thing is probably one of my greatest accomplishments.”

To be fair, the IRS is supposed to go after tax cheats.

Re:Both are bad but not comparable.

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's not kid ourselves. The Vietnam War wasn't going to end with anything other than the South or North finishing the job, and the South was so corrupt and inept at the top that it had little chance anyway.

The North in no way could be trusted to maintain a peace agreement. Especially with no US troops here. The end was always the North in Saigon, and no silly peace accord was going to change that.

And, of course, this is exactly what happened in 1975.

I don't blame the North. They knew that they were going to win, so why bother with anything other than a tactical peace while they watched the South-US relationship go further down the toilet, while they themselves re-equipped for the final push.

Re:Both are bad but not comparable.

[mbkennel]

Ever talk to a "Tea party group"? They would certainly describe themselves as rabid enemies of the administration.

Re:Both are bad but not comparable.

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow. You are uninformed, aren't you?

Re:Both are bad but not comparable.

[Miguelito]

501(c)4 is different and you can engage in political stuff (apparently) as long as it's not the primary focus.

Moveon.org is an example of an existing 501(c)4.

Re:Both are bad but not comparable.

[Anonymous Coward]

Whether the motive is political or personal does not justify crime. This is suppression of information for the purpose of affecting an election. Nixon was stealing information for the purpose of affecting an election. The difference is minor.

Journalism based on political gain is propaganda, and all over in the news. It's hard to believe any one news source these days, they're all biased one direction or another. Get your news from as many sources as possible, get the facts, and make an educated assessment. It's the best way to remove the journalists' biases.

Corporations are now legally 'people'(yet don't go to jail), there is no limit to the source of amount of funding for a given political party. Corps/people are allowed to show favoritism for the candidate that they wish to support. ie: They are allowed to kill stories...
Then consider that large corporations hedge their bet and support both parties, just favoring one more than another dpending on their goals. Some might say it doesn't matter who you vote for, they are all bought by the same people...

So imagine google" supporting an issue/candidate, they are allowed to fix results to show say users they have identified as likely democrats, news that may change or enforce their beliefs.

Re: Both are bad but not comparable.

[Bartles]

Pardon me if I'm misremembering. Was there actually any evidence ever presented that linked Nixon to the Watergate break in? I don't think so.

Re: Both are bad but not comparable.

[Bartles]

Show me the relevant statutes that say 501(c)3's are required to be nonpolitical.

Re:Both are bad but not comparable.

[__aaltlg1547]

This is the same unnameable spy agency that simultaneously ignored Fox News's daily Benghazi drumbeat, right?

Re:Both are bad but not comparable.

[laird]

Nope, it turns out that the whole "IRS Scandal" consisted of a conservative Republican IRS administrator who put in place a consistent rule for identifying groups that had political terms in their names and thus were inspected more closely for trying to illegally apply for tax-exempt status as a non-political social welfare group, as required by Congress. The list had many more non-conservative than conservative terms in it, and many more non-conservative than conservative groups were looked into because of the system. And it wasn't done by Obama or the White House, or even approved of by them. Using an explicit list instead of inspector judgement was an attempt to be more fair and consistent. It was politically stupid, because some politicians took the list and manipulated it, ignoring 70% of the terms on the list to try to spin it as an anti-conservative attack. If that was "using the IRS against enemies of the white house" it was also, twice as often, using the IRS against friends of the white house, so it wasn't much of a political weapon.

Needs better proof

[MetalliQaZ]

I don't doubt this kind of thing is happening. The government has been moving itself into ever darker shadows of secrecy to avoid oversight, while at the same time has been violating privacy rights of its citizens ever more egregiously. This is not a problem with any particular party or political viewpoint. This is just the nature of power. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The powerful elite will always consolidate and expand. In this country, the One Ring of Power is the law system, and the magic is provided by technology. I believe Ms. Attkisson.

Having said that, she is going to need much better proof than she has or nothing will come of this. There has to be a smoking gun in the had of an actual federal agent. In this case that would be an actual order to spy, provably given by someone who is high enough to be responsible for their decisions. She will never have that.

Re:Needs better proof

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

To be honest. I'm not sure what to make of this. CBS had the issue with Bush and the National Guard. They got creamed on it. It pretty much caused Dan Rather to have to retire in a bit of shame. It's entirely possible that CBS heads are "unless we have 100% proof, spike it, we got burned before".

There may be censorship, but may be more self-censorship. Rather "self" as in "corporate head censorship".

Re:Needs better proof

[Frosty Piss]

I don't doubt this kind of thing is happening.

Nor do I, but the mere existence of spyware on someone's computer even a "journalist" is not evidence of Three Letter Agency spying. I'm *not* saying it didn't happen, but both stories referenced in the write-up sound very paranoid without a lot of (any?) hard evidence of government involvement.

Re:Needs better proof

[Anonymous Coward]

Nah. This kind of shit has been the very substance of governance since the beginning of time. The very moment the 3rd ape started walking on two legs, a conspiracy was hatched against one of them.

All governments have to deal with a lot of unsavory and unwinnable situations. Everyone has to make deals with the devil. A lot of bad things happen. Every great leader has to step on a lot of of toes and marginalize a lot of good but less important causes. Every hero is a villian in the eyes of the loser.

Today we're just better informed and more connected. Its becoming impossible to hide the day-to-day treachery that's involved with the dirty profession politics and running a government.

That said, this woman is just a nut. More likely, she's a hack that got fired for being a hack and is now playing the right-wing-press nuttery game because that's the only place left for her career.

Re:Needs better proof

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't doubt this kind of thing is happening. The government has been moving itself into ever darker shadows of secrecy to avoid oversight, while at the same time has been violating privacy rights of its citizens ever more egregiously. This is not a problem with any particular party or political viewpoint. This is just the nature of power. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The powerful elite will always consolidate and expand. In this country, the One Ring of Power is the law system, and the magic is provided by technology. I believe Ms. Attkisson.

Having said that, she is going to need much better proof than she has or nothing will come of this. There has to be a smoking gun in the had of an actual federal agent. In this case that would be an actual order to spy, provably given by someone who is high enough to be responsible for their decisions. She will never have that.

Ah, wouldn't the simple fact that she will "never have that" be evidence enough here when everything else is covered in secrecy?

The whole damn operation is top secret, and yet what you're asking for is the glowing neon sign advertising the operation, and then questioning whether we have enough proof to show that it's a secret operation...give me a fucking break. THIS is the reason they get away with this fucking shit.

Re:Needs better proof

[JDAustin]

Of course, figuring that the head of CBS News is the brother to one of the Obama admins National Security Advisors also plays into things.

Re:Needs better proof

[Anonymous Coward]

That is a staggering bit of info that I only just found out about in the last few days. It should run as a disclaimer across the bottom of the screen of any CBS news show.

Re:Needs better proof

[biptoe]

*Place tin foil hat upon head* *Sarcasm* I forgot, what Broadcast Network just put on " Madam Secretary"?

Re:Needs better proof

[RyoShin]

she is going to need much better proof than she has or nothing will come of this

President Obama could personally admit that everything she claims is true, live, during the Superbowl half-time show, after ripping off part of some singer's costume and revealing a nipple pasty, while the Secret Service passes out copies of damning and irrefutable evidence to every person in attendance, and not a damn thing would happen.

Congress has shown it is unwilling to take even symbolic action against any political individual who breaks the law in any manner. Sure, you hear a lot of Republicans talk about actions, and there's even that lawsuit against the President, but none of it is actually intended to change anything--they're just ways of grandstanding to their own party. (The conspiracy theorist in me says that the Democrats support these efforts, because they can use the same actions with a different spin to secure their own constituents.) They will not take action against any abuse of power, real or imagined, because they all hope to one day be sitting in that Oval Office and want to have at least that much power at their disposal.

And tomorrow, Nov 4th, 90% of those running for re-election will retain their seat. The people don't understand this and will vote on relatively small issues like abortion, gay marriage, and whether someone will or will not repeal Obamacare.

Partisan bickering

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't wait to see the partisan reactions. Fox News and the Glenn Beck empire will crow about how this is worst presidential act in history, MSNBC will dismiss it as a looney conspiracy theory, and people will approach the story with their biases.

Re:Partisan bickering

[Crashmarik]

I can't wait to see the partisan reactions. Fox News and the Glenn Beck empire will crow about how this is worst presidential act in history, MSNBC will dismiss it as a looney conspiracy theory, and people will approach the story with their biases.

Here's the rub. I don't believe for one second she had her computer second, but I don't doubt for one second that CBS s**tcanned negative stories about Obama.

Re:Partisan bickering

[Anonymous Coward]

Of courses news organization suppress negative stories. Even FOX News suppresses negative stories about Obama, just not to the same extent. Neither CBS nor FOX are in the business of giving all their air time to Andrew Breitbart and people like him. And viewers become tired by incessant bashing.

The question is, to what extent are the decisions politically motivated? More importantly, to what extent are the decisions deliberately and knowingly politically motivated?

Now, through leaked memos and employee leaks we know for a fact that FOX News managers coordinate with the GOP. I've never seen such substantial evidence regarding other major news organizations and the DNC.

The reason the ABC and CBS news organizations are withering is precisely because they're trying to stick to the mid-century format of unbiased and disinterested journalism. (Obviously is was neither in an absolute sense, but compared to today that's a decent approximation.) But now we're returning to an age where that format isn't very profitable anymore. People don't want facts--facts are boring and tedious and unhelpful. They want conspiracies and innuendo, and more importantly fodder to bolster their pre-existing prejudices.

Re:Partisan bickering

[Crashmarik]

I've never seen such substantial evidence regarding other major news organizations and the DNC.

You need to check your biases. Because you must have been closing your eyes when Dan Rather tried to singlehandedly wage a war on both Bush presidents.

Sure it was Obama?

[Black Copter Control]

How do you know it was the US govt. bs some Romanian hackers.. or the Chinese? There doesn't seem to be a whole lot of evidence here.

Re:Sure it was Obama?

[Black Copter Control]

From the 'evidence' in the article, she might have just accidentally rested a book on her keyboard's 'delete' key.

Re:Sure it was Obama?

[neonv]

The presence US classified documents implies US government. It's not proof, but that's probably what she's thinking. It may be other news agencies, competitive journalists, people she's pissed off, foreign governments, all just checking up on what's she's doing and ready to set her up for arrest.

Re:Sure it was Obama?

[misexistentialist]

There are only "accidents" if you are ignorant of the CIA's development of mind control technology, or rather if the CIA wiped that knowledge from your brain

Re:Sure it was Obama?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well if it were 2004, I guaran-damn-tee you that everyone here would agree it really did happen and Bush ordered it.

Re:Sure it was Obama?

[Anonymous Coward]

I went outside this morning only to discover that my garbage had been knocked over. Some people said it was probably the wind, but I know better. I know the Obama administration is unfairly targeting me because of my Nobama bumper sticker, and this attempted detriticide is just to show that they can get to me.

Re:Sure it was Obama?

[__aaltlg1547]

Or your boss? Or that coworker you pissed off in the lunchroom? There's more than one way to get rid of an annoying person in the office.

Re:Sure it was Obama?

[laird]

Or, of course, she received some files that she felt needed explaining.

Re:Sure it was Obama?

[Anonymous Coward]

The presence US classified documents implies US government

No it doesn't.

If someone had access to her machine and wanted to set her up for arrest, they wouldn't plant documents like that. Despite what the Government wants you to think, especially if you're Press it's not actually illegal for a civilian to possess classified material. Assuming you weren't engaged in anything illegal to obtain it, that is.
If they wanted to set her up, she'd have child porn or the DEA would show up looking for illegal drugs and would "find" them.

She's either an idiot, was victim of someone who was just fucking with her, or was simply trying to drum up publicity for her book and did a shit job of getting the technical details right. Personally I tend to believe the latter, but considering most normal people are dipshits it'll all sound super-legit, and anybody pointing out the flaws in her story will simply appear as 'evidence' of 3-letter Agency Denials.

And this quote.

[khasim]

... "a sophisticated entity that used commercial, nonattributable spyware thatâ(TM)s proprietary to a government agency: either the CIA, FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency or the National Security Agency."

So the software is "commercial" but also "proprietary to a government agency" that cannot be identified.

I think that she does not understand the meaning of the words she is using.

But I also think that our government probably was spying on her. And lots of other people. Just not in the way she describes it.

Re:And this quote.

[Anonymous Coward]

I think that she does not understand the meaning of the words she is using.

Well that proves she's a journalist at least

All Hail Dear Leader

[gelfling]

Leave your baggage on the platform it will catch up with you after you are relocated to the east.

Its CBS the network that gave us Dan Rather

[Crashmarik]

Aka Mr. Whats the frequency kevin ?
Aka Mr. I don't need the documents authenticated I know they are real.
Aka Mr. Why don't I turn my news network into a complete partisan embarrassment ?

Seeing as he was de facto running the news network there for quite a bit, it wouldn't surprise me at all if their culture had taken a turn into lala land.

As to being shocked at the spyware on her computer, i'd suggest "Number one" (seriously ?), I am hardly shocked at anything I see in the way of malware, especially if you let kids use a computer.

Re:Its CBS the network that gave us Dan Rather

[porges]

"What is the frequency" refers to Rather getting punched by a loon who several years later murdered an NBC stage hand. How this reflects badly on CBS, I don't know.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...

Re:Its CBS the network that gave us Dan Rather

[jeffmflanagan]

Of course CBS went into Lala land. Didn't you see Lara Logan's fake Benghazi report? Her career imploded just like Rather's, but it was for pandering to people immersed in right-wing propaganda, rather than Democrats. It was exactly the same situation with a partisan hack falling for lies because of confirmation bias. It's a little odd that you'd bring up Rather, instead of the more-recent failure.

Re:Its CBS the network that gave us Dan Rather

[Crashmarik]

I haven't watched CBS news for a very long time. I don't care if you lean left or you lean right, you shouldn't want your news outlet trying to lead you by the nose.

Re:Its CBS the network that gave us Dan Rather

[Crashmarik]

I'd need more than that article, There's nothing there that says the alleged perpetrator was even charged with this crime. Consider D.A. Morgenthau was a bad joke, the kind of prosecutor that has Americans fearing their courts. I'd imagine he would have certainly tacked on the charges if he could actually make a case.

Re:Its CBS the network that gave us Dan Rather

[rahvin112]

More than half the internet is serving malware. If you visit random websites with IE on windows you will be loaded to the gills with malware in less than an hour. The existence of malware does not tie it to the government. It simply means the user doesn't understand the risks and how to avoid those infections.

Re:Its CBS the network that gave us Dan Rather

[sound vision]

With the Windows monoculture being chipped away at, very slowly but surely, you don't even need to be using IE anymore. There have been plenty of exploits for Firefox, iOS, etc.

Re:Its CBS the network that gave us Dan Rather

[Anonymous Coward]

And it's "What's the frequency, Kenneth?"

Sheesh, doesn't anyone listen to REM any more?

Oxymoron spoiler alert ...

[CaptainDork]

" ... a sophisticated entity that used commercial, nonattributable spyware that’s proprietary to a government agency ..."

The government is selling that shit?

She's just doing Chicken Little to sell her book.

Re:Oxymoron spoiler alert ...

[seepho]

Or she just watched "House of Cards" and thinks her Benghazi reporting was just so super important and groundbreaking that the big bad gubbmint had to step in and infect her computer with the same kind of spyware that's bundled with Banzai Buddy. Only time will tell.

She's Also An Anti-Vax Hack

[jratcliffe]

She's well known for her anti-vax "reporting," so she's got more than a smidge of a credibility deficit.

http://www.sciencebasedmedicin...

Re:She's Also An Anti-Vax Hack

[Anonymous Coward]

So perhaps the Anonymous tried to get her? Manipulating the public against common sense and public safety and security surely should put her on the target list.

Re:She's Also An Anti-Vax Hack

[dbIII]

So? The remember that the SCO line in SCO vs IBM on linux was pushed hard by the hack that reported Amityville Horror as fact and she was taken seriously. Entertainment as news is how it is now so autism conspiracy theories would not be enough to remove credibility in the media industry.
In case that wasn't clear enough, we may see some major red flags being raised here but that's not enough to stop a reporter being taken seriously, especially if it can be used to push a political barrow. If she makes enough fuss her next job will probably be in a "Think Tank".

Re:She's Also An Anti-Vax Hack

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this more dox'ing to assassinate the character? Not sure I really care if she's anti-vax or not, if the Government was actively monitoring her computer usage, and potentially saboutaging her career.

Not that I necessarily think they were, but attacking the character doesn't put the /. community in the best light, now does it.

If some bad Obama stories were spiked...

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

...I can't imagine how bad it would have been if not. He's had a lot of bad press recently. When it comes to bad news, some Presidents are Teflon (Reagan), some Presidents are Velcro (Carter). Obama is more on the Velcro side than the Teflon side.

Re:If some bad Obama stories were spiked...

[Bodhammer]

A bear just finished taking a dump in the forest when a rabbit hopped up to he bear and asked, “Does shit ever stick to your fur when you take a dump?” The Bear grabbed the rabbit by the neck, wiped his ass with him and replied, “Nope.”

Re:If some bad Obama stories were spiked...

[rahvin112]

You can't get much more teflon than selling weapons to a country you've loudly proclaimed is an enemy (Iran) to provide funding to insurgents that routinely murder innocent people (Contras) and you get away with it because you tell everyone you don't remember.

Re:If some bad Obama stories were spiked...

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, in defense of St. Ronald the Senile, he DIDN'T remember. That's why his right-wing political, financial, and military handlers wanted him elected in the first place: he was a malleable figurehead.

Read Stockman's book "The Triumph of Politics"; he makes it clear (albeit somewhat between the lines). Read the Tower Commission report that called Reagan's leadership slipshod at best. Read how the Tower commissioners caucused outside the Oval Office after finally clawing past the spinmeisters and handlers to get to Reagan: the commissioners agreed they wouldn't admit to the world that the US president was senile (too dangerous) but then forced the GOP power structure to completely rebuild the Reagan white house staff by threatening to go public with how brain dead Reagan was if they didn't. Read what Donald Regan said to Howard Baker when Baker came aboard as the new Chief of Staff, that Reagan was too impaired to do the job and good luck to you, buddy. Read how Baker screwed up publicly after his first day on the job by saying that he was surprised that Reagan hadn't remembered the discussions they'd had two weeks ago, but "I guess the president has a short half-life for conversations". Baker got stomped on by the GOP powers that be and spent the next several days trying to tamp down that inadvertent release of inconvenient truth.

Reagan was brain dead before he got elected, and it only got worse afterwards. For a real laugh riot, go watch his Iran-Contra press conference and federal trial testimony; talk about a deer caught in the headlights...

And now the RW shills are telling the kiddies that St. Ronald the Senile was a god.

= = =

(Time Magazine, March 16, 1987 "Baker Breaks the Fever" reads in part, "Baker deftly handled sticky questions about remarks he made to a Miami Herald editor on a Miami-to-Washington flight two weeks ago. Baker, whose comments were printed in last Sunday's Herald, told the editor that the President's memory had a short "half-life.")

(LA Times, March 2, 1987 "Muskie Amazed at President's Memory Lapses" reads in part "Former Sen. Edmund S. Muskie (D-Me.) said Sunday that the Tower Commission was astonished by President Reagan's loss of memory concerning important details of the Iran- contra affair and that he questions whether the President "can come to grips with the responsibilities of his office.") [ed. note: Before you start the partisan shrilling, note that the other commissioners were ex-Senator Tower, a GOP powerhouse and Brent Scowcroft, a centrist technocrat Republican, and both agreed with replacing the WH staff.]

In his book Consequences (Little, Brown & Co., 1991, pp. 283-284.), John Tower, the Chairman of the Tower Board, described the Board's shock and suspicion over President Reagan's changed testimony. Tower said when he asked the President clarifying questions, the President at one point "picked up a sheet of paper and . . . said to the board, `This is what I am supposed to say,' and proceeded to read us an answer prepared by Peter Wallison, the White House counsel." Another view of the same event is from Cannon's 1991 Reagan history “Ronald Reagan: the Role of a Lifetime”: On February 2, 1987 President Reagan testified for a second time to the Tower Commission. His testimony was incoherent and confused. Commission investigators note that while the Meese investigation claimed Reagan did not know of the August 1985 shipment of missiles to Iran, Reagan himself claimed in his previous testimony he did know of the shipments. When asked to clarify the inconsistency, Reagan shocks onlookers by picking up a briefing memo he had been given and reading aloud, “If the question comes up at the Tower Board meeting, you might want to say that you were surprised.” White House counsel Peter Wallison is stunned. “I was horrified, just horrified,” he later recalls. “I didn’t expect him to go and get the paper. The purpose of it was just to recall to his mind before he goes into the meeting” what he, Wallison, and Chief of Staff Donald Regan had agreed was the proper chain of events—that Reagan had not known of the shipments beforehand, and had been surprised to learn of them.

Hokey

[Frosty Piss]

What is...

used commercial, nonattributable spyware thatâ(TM)s proprietary to a government agency

There are just so many things that are hokey about this story.

The spyware included programs that Attkisson says monitored her every keystroke and gave the snoops access to all her e-mails and the passwords to her financial accounts.

Happens all the time to people that open random emails and follow unknown linkys.

Attkisson says her source â" identified only as âoeNumber One"...

Good grief. In other news, let's talk about "chemtrails"!

Re:Hokey

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't forget your tinfoil hat, pal.

OK

[Anonymous Coward]

http://fbivirus.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/FBI-Blue-Screen-Virus.png

Does not mean it was a government hack.

Daily KOS

[Anonymous Coward]

It's like the Daily KOS and Democrat Underground simultaneously opened their bowls and shat great turds of comments onto Slashdot. Legions of ignorant and spoiled little fucks who suck the Kool Aid from Obama's teat like a Lamprey sucks the blood from a fish.

Fright Night

[Anonymous Coward]

The only reason to plant classified materials on another person's computer is to set them up for an arrest. This might have been done on a contingency basis in order to arrest her if she crossed some line in the sand.

                    It also endangers our entire legal system in that we now can not know what is evidence and what is not evidence. It is like putting a bag of dope under and enemies car seat or school locker and then placing a phone call to the cops. Perceived possession is not possession. Testimony may be made out of all lies. So how does any judge or jury decide guilt other than by guessing that evidence and testimony is real. That translates into locking up only people you do not like.

Media control is key to a bad government

[Anonymous Coward]

I think its clear that Obama needed to control the people through the media. Whenever you have policies that are not widely accepted your going to need a buffer to convince the people everything is alright. This is not a extreme version of control through the media like say a North Korea or Iran. But
I think we should all be able to see similar paths and objectives.

I wouldn't have believed....

[Anonymous Coward]

" I wouldn't have believed something like this could happen in the United States of America"

ROTFLMAO, which rock has she been living under for the last 20 plus years ?

Evidence

[Anonymous Coward]

nonattributable spyware thatÃ(TM)s proprietary to a government agency

It's either nonattributable or it is prorpietary to government agencies. You can't have it both ways Ms. Eggless Omelet.

The Official Blog of Fox News Channel :)

[lippydude]

Sharyl Attkisson Fox News Her Next Stop?

I R Disappoint

[Anonymous Coward]

I think it's more like, yes we destroyed the Constitution, it's not all that bad (yet), we're nice people. But now that we see you're sort of annoyed by this, and it's a HUGE fuck up, we don't know who to lay it on, so might as well be Steve, err.. Mr Obama, you know since he's a secret Muslim Nigerian terrorist? The whole thing's a shit show. The government is finally all the way up our asses, like deep in there, and surprised we don't think it's good for all of us (Which means, eyes in your everything, from phone to computer, and the power to calculate your habits) Move along data, respect unnecessary. Keep your liberty instead folks, vote carefully this season, assuming it still works fairly.

Expect it and enjoy

[AHuxley]

Expect every email, phone call, fax, web 2.0 interaction, contact to be tracked by the mil and gov.
They just want to know how the gov or mil is trending in real time and ensure no staff are talking to the press in their own time :)
So what can the press do?
If you have a contact meet in a deep underground car park. That stops most look down views tracking top staff as two car pull up next to each other.
Dont bring a phone, even removing a battery before a meeting can be tracked back in time with with all other people in the area.
Two phones are powered off in the same area around the same time, that could be the meeting.
Also expect any car of interest to have a beacon installed.
All digital communications and passwords can be found with keystroke logging over time. So consider a clean laptop for each story.
Then also enjoy the fact you are been tracked. Start looking back over 10 or 20 years of city, local and federal politics. Get creative with pages of fiction surrounding new contacts, list old and new real projects that have new details, banks, patents, new emerging crypto technology, new contacts with interesting real people with new "details".
Pages of 'real' interviews, 'new' contacts, emails that only get worked on in draft from random coffee shops. Set up a few working 24/7 camera systems.
All that is tracking most of press is a complex computer system looking for names, projects and distant hops to people in databases.
Mention the wrong project and the story is flagged. Is that the first mention seen? Does the press have a new informant with first fresh product?
An insider, direct knowledge been handed down, the first fruit from a productive new contact.
Then a human or team is tasked. Ensure they have a lot to read ;)

Right Wing Meme

[Required Snark]

This is in "Black Helicopter" territory. It's the ebil gumment left wing conspiracy to suppress the uber-patriot only real American right wing truthers.

One of the features of this mindset is that they assume that they are the only targets of bad government behavior. Spy on the left wing/Muslims/black people/Occupy Wall Street/anti-war/etc is great. By their lights, we are not doing enough of this, and it is always justified no matter what.

Of course the so called intelligence community is spying on everyone, but they don't care about that. That keeps us safe. Yet somehow they are the only persecuted group in the whole country. Paranoid much?

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Peekaboo

[gmuslera]

Even if was the government (or any of the associated companies, or a low-level new hire, or whatever) doing it, would be not the first time that the government uses the authority meant to fight terrorism with other purposes.

yes

[dbIII]

Looks like I should have read the message above before I used the Polonium analogy as well.

Program

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone forgot to go with the PROGRAM

Nixon...

[plazman30]

The only thing Nixon did differently than anyone else was that he got caught.

Just another so-called "conspiracy" theory.

[rnturn]

First, it's the New York Post which is largely unsuitable for wrapping fish in let alone as a reliable source of "news". Second, she claims that all her work on Benghazi cover-up and Fast-N-Furious gun running scandals was being messed with. So her noble work in helping to promulgate right-wing nut job conspiracy theories was being thwarted. Next we'll be told that Obama himself wrote and installed the malware on her computer.

Classified? Please.

[Anonymous Coward]

She probably ran a malware scan and saw the debug output printing things like "CLSID=whatever", which she read as "classified". Paranoia will do fascinating things to your mind. Sigh...

Look

[ruir]

The Chinese did it. Have we not ran a story about Chinese cyberwars. About the deleting, it is not the first time my keyboard gets stuck, and I have to close the lid. Am I bugged too?

:D

[Anonymous Coward]

Think that's bad? Barack Obama had the US military try to murder me. And I have been tortured now for 6 years. It started right before Barack took office, ok, Bush started it, but Barack continued it.

Details @ http://www.obamasweapon.com/

Not a Good Reporter

[Anonymous Coward]

You are a reporter who does not really know what is going on. You didn't know you live in a fascist state either I suppose.

Joe Biden for 2016

[Anonymous Coward]

Joe Biden is a square shooter. Joe Biden for 2016!

Most Transparent Administration...

[Anonymous Coward]

...in history. One lie after another, with no end to them, all self-serving, all detrimental to freedom. Hope and change.

um

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not just CBS.

Every one of the "big three" broadcast networks has its newsrooms run by people with immediate family members who are in the Obama administration. There has not, to my best knowledge, been any administration in US history with this many blood/marriage ties to the Nation's leading journalistic outlets.... it might explain the huge number of news stories that would be unfavoable to Obama that get spiked from all the broadcast news channels.

Incidentally, no-doubt some here on Slashdot will try to pretend that this particular reporter is some sort of right-wing whacko...... she is NOT. She has a long track record of going after people in the Bush Administration and was the reporter who uncovered the Bush-era gun running program than many left-leaners have successfully used to distract people from Obama's "Fast & Furious" debacle.

Well, YOU are clearly the ignorant one here

[Anonymous Coward]

Look up her stuff. She got her reputation by doggedly pursuing the Bush administration and digging up dirt on them.

Her big carreer mistake is that when a Democrat got into the Whitehouse she stupidly continued to do the neutral journalistic thing and went after them ("speak truth to power!" and all that rot...). She apparently never got the memo that at CBS investigative journalists only investigate Republicans; they write press releases for Democrats.

Her story doesn't make sense

[Anonymous Coward]

Her computer had anomalies for nearly two years before she did something about it? How does she know it was the Obama administration who installed spyware and viruses in her computer?

She saw data being wiped at a rapid pace so she used her phone to photograph it? What, as a string of hexadecimal numbers or 1s and 0s? Why not just immediately hold the power button to shut it off instead? Where were her backups?

CBS kills stories against Obama yet CBS' own "60 Minutes" allowed Lara Logan to run a full piece of bs on Benghazi?!? CBS never even fired Ms. Logan after her bs Benghazi story but CBS did in the past fire Dan Rather for using falsified evidence in a story criticizing George W. Bush.

So much for CBS protecting Obama. Free tin foil hat with every book Sharyl Attkisson sells.

BOOK

[Anonymous Coward]

OK - Not to belabor the obvious, but she has a book coming out. These claims are little more than publisher induced fluff.