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.

Comments

And?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

they got the metadata

[johnjones]

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

       

Re:they got the metadata

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:they got the metadata

[Anonymous Coward]

Mike Pence used a private server while governor of Indiana which is
legal in Indiana , it isn't legal at the federal level and he didn't do so exclusively as Hillary did. He doesn't do so as VP.

Regarding Kushner, from NPR, that noted right wing organization:

"Mr. Kushner uses his White House email address to conduct White House business. Fewer than a hundred emails from January through August were either sent to or returned by Mr. Kushner to colleagues in the White House from his personal email account. These usually forwarded news articles or political commentary and most often occurred when someone initiated the exchange by sending an email to his personal, rather than his White House, address. All non-personal emails were forwarded to his official address and all have been preserved in any event."

So some people have his personal account and he gets emails there but he forwards them to his official account so they are properly tracked and recorded. I just started a new job and folks here still have my personal email address as the first one to popup in their Outllook when they send me an email so I've received a couple of sensitive documents outside the company. Every time it happens I let the sender know so they correct it. Does that mean I'm doing company business on a personal email address?

You really need to try harder if you're going to try to find hypocrisy, your arguments are too easily knocked. Here, let me help you:

Donald Trump was attacked relentless for not denouncing David Duke, a man he never met, and someone he and Pence did denounce, yet the same media and Democrats haven't demanded that any of these 7 Democrats denounce their actual ties with Louis Farrakhan. They even buried the photo of Obama standing with him so it wouldn't come out while Obama was in office. Now that is a proper example of hypocrisy.

If you're going to leak....

[Anonymous Coward]

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??

Re:If you're going to leak....

[burtosis]

Classified data is secretly marked with small changes to the material depending on who accessed it. It could be a few revealing pixels, or some minor phrasing, spelling, and/or punctuation. Making a lower fidelity copy of images and adding some noise to it can remove most of the identifying information. Rephrasing and summarizing text would erase most all of the identifying information as well. Or you could access it through another persons credentials without their knowledge and throw them under the bus. Without knowing the exact methods used it's still risky in any case.

so just like previous administrations then?

[ooloorie]

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.

Re:so just like previous administrations then?

[terrycarlino]

Coming from a military background I have no trouble realizing that there is a lot of information that should not be made public for perfectly reasonable and legal reasons. Not every piece of classified data is classified for bad reasons. As a matter of fact most of them are classified for very valid reasons.

The Senate Intelligence Committee is tasked with oversight of the TLA. If they can't keep information that is necessary and important to U.S. security secret then the TLA just won't keep them in the loop. That is not a better situation for the country, the citizenry or freedom.

Reporters do not have some kind of magic get out of jail card when they solicit or receive classified information they are not cleared to know. Public officials, employees and contractors have no legal right to release classified material because they disagree with policy or don't like specific elected officials.

The liberal fantasy that people who break the law should be immune from legal consequences because of their politics or which side their on is irrational. Henry David Thoreau understood that, which is why he went to jail instead of paying a tax in support of a war with which he did not agree. He did not expect to escape consequences for his actions. He expected to take the consequences because the stand he was taking was, to him, right and important.

if you believe something is important enough to break the law to take a stand you should be willing to accept the consequences of taking that stand.

Offtopic: Slashdot is too liberal

[butzwonker]

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.

Re:Offtopic: Slashdot is too liberal

[narcc]

You'll get over it. This isn't the first time we've seen Slashdot rendered unreadable by nonsense like this. It'll stop when Nixon gets bored, or his karma drops to the point that he can only post at -1, and we can get back to the ordinary sort of shitposting that passes for discussion these days.

Further, expecting the editorial staff to do anything seems absurd to me. We can't even get them to pay enough attention to the headlines to avoid front page dups, what makes you think they're interested enough notice and ban a specific user?

Re:Offtopic: Slashdot is too liberal

[Bearhouse]

Liberalism is the price/cost of free speech. You have to put up with a few idiots or you risk silencing everyone.
I get your point, but why reduce the current (welcome) level of transparency when we don't really have to?
People like me have no problem burning a few mod points to whack those sick/stupid posts down to -1, and at least we know that (hopefully) some valid posts are not getting "shadow banned" due to someone's personal agenda.
I've personally modded back up some -1 posts that were certainly controversial, but yet interesting and not "wrong".

TLDR; /. mod system is far from perfect, but it works better than most others...

Re:Offtopic: Slashdot is too liberal

[khandom08]

Why can't we just cancel obvious troll accounts - terminate them and permban the IP?

Because one of them might be the president?

Guilty by association.

[DrYak]

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 ?

Re:Cryptography + Tor, etc.

[Cytotoxic]

Interestingly, the FBI is currently alleging that the use of communications platforms with encryption such as WhatsApp amounts to obstruction of justice and evidence of criminal intent when used to communicate with people who might eventually become witnesses - even if they are witnesses for the defense.

So all of you folks who poo-poo the slippery slope argument... well, there you go. They are also all over companies like Apple for building encryption into their phones and have used the fact that devices are encrypted as evidence of criminal intent.

England is currently living out the argumentum ad absurdum from the gun control debate - having outlawed guns and the sorts of knives used for hunting or defense and finding that people are still violent, they are now talking about banning kitchen knives with pointed ends.

Give the government and inch, and they'll use that inch against you.

Notice it's not the first time ever.

[sabbede]

Just the first time it's happened under this Administration.

Re:This is Sessions/Trump payback

[Mashiki]

So what does that mean when Obama did the same thing? That he's a petty tyrant that is lashing out? I guess so. Good thing he was the one to put this framework into place and abuse the fuck out of it isn't it.

canary car wash

[epine]

Canary trap

Each summary paragraph has six different versions, and the mixture of those paragraphs is unique to each numbered copy of the paper. There are over a thousand possible permutations, but only ninety-six numbered copies of the actual document. The reason the summary paragraphs are so lurid is to entice a reporter to quote them verbatim in the public media. If he quotes something from two or three of those paragraphs, we know which copy he saw and, therefore, who leaked it.

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.