protocol for high-profile dissenters to leak without being deaded/murdered/killed/eliminated/shot/heart-attacked etc

[Steve Kinney]

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/


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