Seth Abramson sure is someone to talk about poor journalism and analysis. Really: HN doesn't need to be the first to break out stories like this. If someone important has been found here, someone will cover it seriously outside of tweets. HN should start penalizing tweet stories.

Why would HN penalize tweet links!? Hacker news is a perfect place for stories that intersect technical and journalistic expertise to be explored more in depth with a focus on truth. In journalism tweets are how evidence of a story evolves. Taking away twitter linking from journalistic minded HN users would be like taking away the ability for a coder to link to github...

please don't retweet Seth Abramson, he is a manipulative conspiracy theorist which is not something that helps the liberal cause:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2017/12...

https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2017/04/stop-listenin...

https://thinkprogress.org/blue-detectives-collapse-trump-rus...

Yet he has been cited [1] by and contacted by congress for his research on pro-Trump FBI agents leaking to True Pundit.

It seems that the media can't make up their mind about him either: At times, discrediting him; other times, recommending his work. [2]

[1] https://democrats-judiciary.house.gov/sites/democrats.judici...

[2] https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/status/971909060294561792

It looks like they cite him because he happened to have a screenshot of some comments on another conspiracy website that may refer to actual information about something. So they are in fact poking at what they themselves call a "fringe conspiracy website" in that letter. This doesn't really indicate he's suddenly a serious journalist, just that they saw something in the conspiracy community that interested them.

That's a surprisingly dismissive reading. The first external source cited is Abramson. Every other source cited in the letter was also cited by Abramson in his original thread [1].

The letter summarizes Abramson's allegations: "The facts point to a coordinated effort by some in the FBI to change the course of the Clinton investigation by leaking sensitive information to the public, and by threatening to leak additional information after the investigation was closed."

There are no two ways about it: Either Abramson is onto a huge story that hasn't been reported elsewhere -or- sitting members of congress take investigative actions based on the ramblings of an irresponsible conspiracy theorist. Both are concerning.

[1] https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/939432544008921088.html

Rebuttal by one of the reporters: https://twitter.com/dellcam/status/978345305635770368

He discounts the importance of figuring out how modern election data shops work (and what tools they use/build) with regards to elections, which may be important for us to fight these firms down the road and build laws against unscrupulous data collection. The mechanical details definitely matter here, and that can be found by looking at source code.

I don't necessarily agree that gizmodo should have led with tying this open repository of code to AIQ/SCL/CA to Bannon/Trump/Russia. Finding the tools and explaining what they do was more important given this was found today.

It's not like they can't write follow-up articles which explain the larger issues.

Thanks for that; that was a much more comprehensible summary.