On 07/23/2017 02:13 PM, Razer wrote:
On 07/23/2017 11:07 AM, Marina Brown wrote:
I don't think the gov even needed to compromise networks or sites to catch her.
I agree with that. I thought the government figured her out due to a steganographic watermark in the dox along with the short list of people who had accessed them, but I wasn't following carefully.
Rr
Yes, that. First, Reality Winner outed herself by printing documents destined for leaking at the very office where she found them, unaware that digital printers watermark documents with a time stamp, the machine's serial number, etc. Then, The Intercept outed Reality Winner by publishing images including the said watermarks. Technically ignorant source > incompetent or malicious publisher > bad outcome. The Reality Winner affair reinforces my estimate that The Intercept was capitalized and promoted to fill the role of a controlled opposition propaganda outlet: A well funded shop whose claim to fame is publishing leaked documents has NO excuse for failing to sanitize watermarked documents before public release. Staff at the Intercept do not just hand off submitted docs to all comers - they select pages to publish, redact whatever bits of them they deem unfit for public consumption, and write articles telling their readers what they want them to believe. If one believes a word Glenn Greenwald says, The Intercept has denied the public access to something like 90% of the documents Ed Snowden handed off. The most important leaks attributed to Snowden by mainstream journalists apparently originated in Germany; they were handed to Spiegel for publication, not "Intercepted" by Greenwald's outfit. When I looked into the background of the Reality Winner story, it seemed that she was an unlikely candidate for State Security employment. Her apparently routine clearance and job placement made the most sense in the context of an entrapment exercise. The practical realities of the Information Age present problems to Secret Keepers that they can partly solve by creating their own leakers and high profile market outlets to publish "leaked" documents. This enables them to counter-balance the destructive impact of leaks by promoting their own faux-dissident narratives, and sweeping up many incautious would-be leakers and their documents. If State sponsored black propaganda outlets publishing "leaked" documents do not already exist, it will be necessary to create them: By definition this shall be done in plain sight of the whole world - that's what "propaganda" means. The Intercept has locked down leaked documents and outed leakers in plain sight. On the covert side, we have no idea how many people who have contacted The Intercept in an effort to hand off dangerous documents are presently detained at CIA black sites. Maybe none at all. :o/