Did the Intercept bungle the NSA leak?

Re:Did the Intercept bungle the NSA leak? by ajross on Tuesday June 06, 2017 @03:00PM (#14500098)

I'm not sure I understand. There's a woman actually in jail awaiting charges over this. You're saying the NSA has a sacrificial agent to take the fall? That they're faking the whole judicial process? That they somehow induced a contractor to steal a real document and leak it to the paper they wanted it leaked to?

I'm all for a good conspiracy theory, but you're going to have to spell this one out better.

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Re:Did the Intercept bungle the NSA leak? by yohui on Tuesday June 06, 2017 @03:13PM (#14500237)

I think tanderson92 is claiming that the source was actually identified via other methods, so the material provided by the Intercept played no role in identifying the source. Hence the Intercept did not accidentally reveal their source but is being portrayed as such in order to discourage people from leaking to them.

Personally, while that scenario doesn't sound impossible I think the likelihood is being overstated due to motivated cognition: if you like the Intercept you would like to believe they did nothing wrong, but in reality people do make mistakes.

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Re:Did the Intercept bungle the NSA leak? by tanderson92 on Tuesday June 06, 2017 @03:27PM (#14500394)

I don't make any particular claim about how the government identified the source. They also have access logs and apparently only 6 people accessed the document.

I do think that The Intercept bungled this in not stripping the watermarks; I don't shield them from criticism even though I value their reporting. But I do not necessarily accept the government's version of events. Parallel construction is not unheard-of.

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Re:Did the Intercept bungle the NSA leak? by yohui on Tuesday June 06, 2017 @03:52PM (#14500663)

> I don't make any particular claim about how the government identified the source. They also have access logs and apparently only 6 people accessed the document.

Thanks for pointing that out. I've edited it to simply say "via other methods", especially since other comments say the source did not directly send the info via her work email.

> I do think that The Intercept bungled this in not stripping the watermarks; I don't shield them from criticism even though I value their reporting. But I do not necessarily accept the government's version of events. Parallel construction is not unheard-of.

If the Intercept did make the mistakes they apparently made (if not they're free to deny it), does it matter whether or not the parallel construction theory is true?

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Re:Did the Intercept bungle the NSA leak? by joe_the_user on Tuesday June 06, 2017 @03:08PM (#14500182)

Not that I have any idea what actually happened but hiring someone at a low level, who seems kind of unreliable, allowing them access to something who's leakage you might not care about, letting everything play out the way it did, seems like something a spy agency would be reasonably adept it.

The women was a contractor, not an agent, so they aren't sacrificing someone they've invested in. etc

Again, what actually happened, who knows?

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Re:Did the Intercept bungle the NSA leak? by ajross on Tuesday June 06, 2017 @04:33PM (#14501044)

> Again, what actually happened, who knows?

So given the choice between "News Site Messed Up Protecting a Source" and "The Whole Thing Was Orchestrated By The Spymasters", you're refusing to make a call because... "who knows?"

I mean, if that's the level of detachment and rationality you're going to apply here... why stop at a mere egg-on-face moment for The Intercept? Surely the NSA could be applying those powers for something more juicy.

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