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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.
I assume we're supposed to be outraged at this because Trump.
Except they're going after someone leaking classified information to a reporter during a "three year relationship" with her. So basically they caught someone sending her secrets, got a warrant, and are now going after the leaker using that evidence. With due process. Like they're supposed to.
Apparently we're supposed to be outraged because she's a reporter. Except this type of stuff happened all the time under Obama and no one in the media cared then. So the sudden outrage is a bit... weird.
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
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??
Good ol' Eric Holder obtained the records for more than 20 telephone lines of [the AP's] offices and journalists, including their home phones and cellphones. It said the records were seized without notice sometime this year. And this issue is hardly new.
Slashdot is way too liberal with shitposters. Why can't we just cancel obvious troll accounts - terminate them and permban the IP? Clutch Nixon 5434978 is an obvious troll and spamming whole threads with off-topic "poems", these shitposts are of no use to anyone. If you want political topics (I don't), then at least kick out the obvious trolls and shitposters.
Or even better, permanently IP ban or shadow ban all off-topic commentators. You can start with my own account because of this comment, I don't care, as long as you do it with every off-topic troll poster out there so Slashdot becomes readable again.
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...
Well, fundamentally : NO it won't have been *that* much different.
In theory :
- The justice could have just as well gotten a warrant to search her private sever.
- She could have argued that as a reporter, she should protect her source
- She would have been sued in turn for obstruction of justice.
In practice :
- Securing a mail server is hard.
- The court could "accidentally find" the needed information in one of the inevitable hack that the server is going to sustain.
(Whether the government would have anything to do with that specific hack is left to the reader's imagination)
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
The best way would be to combine 2 things :
- use end-to-end encryption (for the specific case of e-mail: that would be using GPG or S/MIME, either as a mail client plugin, or as a browser plugin if you're using webmail. For chats that would be using something like OTR or Openwhisper protocols). That would prevent the content being visible during transit at the servers.
- use something that can hide the connection between the users. .onion addresses. (Several newspapers have setup such)
For e-mail the point is moot, because even if you encrypt the mail body as stated before, due to the way the mailing protocol works the headers are going to be kept accessible for message routing, and any server relaying the messages along the way will know that the 2 persons have communicated(*).
Instead you should go for something that can successfully leverage onion routing (like TOR or I2P) :
- Chat system working over Tor (i think Tox can work over it ?)
- Plain simple drop boxes that are accessible through
etc.
---
(*) .onion addresses and have both the journalist and the source use local accounts on that server (thus never routing them outside the server).
you could rig something by using a single private server, that can be accessed over tor as a
basically, you're setting up a glorified drop box that uses SSMTP and IMAPS instead of HTTPS/FTPS/SFTP
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
He has been in regular e-mail contact with Ahmed Y. who is not a terrorist. How long will it be before Ahmed Y. finds himself on a on a no-fly list??
Come on, the correct question would be :
- How long before Ahmed Y. finds himself waterboarded at some black site, just in case he could be having something interesting to say ?
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
I think it quite revealing that "the story" here is about the media being investigated, and not about the fact that a highly-placed Senate staffer on the Intelligence Committee has been charged with lying to the FBI.
That's how you shape the news. These aren't the droids you're looking for. Look, a squirrel.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/politics/ct-ex-senate-staffer-charged-leak-investigation-20180607-story,amp.html
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
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?
As in Daniel Keys Moran? He's one of my favorite authors!
Just the first time it's happened under this Administration.
This is why it's critically important to make sure you use secure and encrypted communication channels, especially when it comes to email and phone messages.
You can only milk the "whataboutism" defense for so much. USSR's approach to it was "but what about Negroes beaten in the US"? That was the pure "whataboutism" fallacy, because a) the racial strife in America had nothing — zilch — to do with the invasion of Czechoslovakia, their reckless experimentations in Chernobyl, or their prevention of immigration; b) the US actually was and remains concerned about the remnants of racism in itself.
But your attempts to portray GP's argument as "whataboutism" are bogus. Because — whatever it is — you can not object to X doing it any louder, than you did, when Y was doing it. And anyone calling you out on it is not a "whataboutist".
BTW, the principle works in the other temporal direction too. For example, whoever objected to Bush's incarcerating suspected terrorists, have exposed themselves as hypocrites, when they ignored Obama's flat-out killing the same suspects.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
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.