Slashdot Mirror
Justice Department Seizes Reporter's Phone, Email Records In Leak Probe (thehill.com)
According to The New York Times, the Department of Justice seized a New York Times reporter's phone and email records this year in an effort to probe the leaking of classified information, the first known instance of the DOJ going after a journalist's data under President Trump. The Hill reports: The Times reported Thursday that the DOJ seized years' worth of records from journalist Ali Watkins's time as a reporter at BuzzFeed News and Politico before she joined The Times in 2017 as a federal law enforcement reporter, according to the report Thursday. Watkins was alerted by a prosecutor in February that the DOJ had years of records and subscriber information from telecommunications companies such as Google and Verizon for two email accounts and a phone number belonging to her. Investigators did not receive the content of the records, according to The Times. The newspaper reported that it learned of the letter on Thursday.
So, if you're going to leak material which might be in the public interest you have to be extremely careful,
Precautions like:
1) Buy a cheap used laptop for cash and keep if for a few months so there's little chance the seller will be able to identify you. Never connect this laptop to your home network.
2) Leave your mobile phone at home (cell records could show you were at a particular location)
2) Wear a hat, walk to a coffee shop in a city (your license plate might appear on CCTV if you drive). Use their free wi-fi from outside the building. (you might appear on CCTV if you enter the building)
3) Install TOR browser on your disposable laptop
4) Create a disposable e-mail account
5) Walk to a different coffee shop, use the disposable e-mail account to communicate with journalist(s).
6) After you have shared 'confidential' material take a boat trip and discreetly drop the laptop into deep water
What other precautions would the Slashdot community recommend??
so finally will the press wake up and tell the public that metadata not necessarily the content is important ?
As a side note this would not have been such a problem if the journalist Ali Watkins had actually run their own email server like ms clinton had...
so lesson learnt dont depend on a third party like gmail/office365 if you want privacy and certainly do not depend on something like signal not to leak your metadata
Metadata is of course important, and can be easier to correlate than the actual data. Trusted a third party with your data is always risky, one way or another, though it can be managed with encryption.
It is interesting that if you dig into the story the guy arrested was arrested for lying to the FBI. I didn't see any allegations about releasing classified information.
Trump's people have stated multiple times that lying is fine, as long as they can't prove the original crime, so of course Trump will pardon this guy, right?
More importantly, press freedoms are key and may not be trampled easily, less we lose their protections. Apparently Obama was bad about that too. If you can't prove a leak of classified information that was correctly and appropriately classified, then I don't think there is any legal action that should be taken to punish a leaker, other than, well dismissing him or her. By appropriately classified, I mean not classified primarily for political reasons, but for legitimate national security reasons.
Basically to get a warrant to search a reporter you should have to have probable cause of classified information leaks, and to use the information from that warrant, you have to have found evidence of them. Anything else should be hands off, unless it falls outside of the bounds of reporting and gets into committing actual crimes.
It's spelled moron you idjut.
I wonder who leaked the Spygate Revelations about Stefan Halper? How can we prevent another Operation Crossfire Hurricane so Democrats can't rig elections? These are the questions that need much debate.
Pretty much. I'd hope that on Slashdot, of all places, people do not think Trump is being held to a different standard here, there was regular outrage about the Obama administration's treatment of whistleblowing and journalism built upon whistleblowing. That Trump, who has shown no signs of being more liberal than his predecessor, is continuing the policy shouldn't be a surprised, but like a lot of things, it would have been nice if the previous administration hadn't built the framework for a lot of government abuse to rest upon.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
He and Sessions are on the same page when it comes to freedom of the press, and the right to free speech in general. They hate it. Anyone who questions or opposes them in public becomes their personal enemy, and they'll try to crush them. That's what the raving over "fake news" is really about. Destruction of a free society.
Unlike the court supervised vetting of Cohen's documents to determine what is relevant and admissible, all this information will go into secret databases and be used without reviewing if it was legally obtained. Just like the Facebook data leaked to Cambridge Analytica is now in the hands of Russian intelligence. Putin and Trump follow the same playbook.
Why is Snark Required?
Canary trap
About leaked documents, the intel guys always ask "Could we just see an inch up your skirt, little girl, so that we know it's real?"
Only under this system, an inch is all it takes.
I suspect the canary car-wash maneuver is pretty darn hard to pull off, though you might onion-route it through Google translate, and then back to English again. But don't forget to sort every sentence in the resulting document into alphabetically order, or they'll nail you on a sequence canary.
The result at this point might seemingly be reduced to Lucky's monologue, but if you subscribe to the Russia House doctrine, questions are almost as revealing as answers, anyway.
Thus our canary-lite topic salad would be almost as revealing as the original document, modulo a ready supply of Brits in bow ties, hemming and humming and hawing and long-stroking a dusty chalkboard (this was my favourite scene in the movie, actually: the tea-sipping Rainmen of MI6 spook-kindergarten confabulation; later, when they cut to America, it's vast arrays of industrially air-conditioned beige MHz and short-stroked disk drives).
Moral of the story: baskets of bucks shorten your stroke length.
In canary world, sometimes even a fractional inch is all it takes. Proceed carefully, and leave no feather behind.