The real story in the NSA scandal is the collapse of journalism

http://www.zdnet.com/the-real-story-in-the-nsa-scandal-is-the-collapse-of-journalism-7000016570/

by daigoba66 • 13 years ago

201 45 13 years ago

waterphone• 13 years ago

Not really, no. It's not clear what's happening yet. The Washington Post has backed down somewhat, but additional information from other sources, as well as the initial document which was only partially leaked previously, is still coming out which appears to further contradict the denials.

zwieback• 13 years ago

I wouldn't call it the collapse of journalism. Over time the big brands will learn how to wait out the initial twitter storm and then do what journalists are supposed to do. Either that or they will become irrelevant.

trevelyan2• 13 years ago

Just saw the "Page One" documentary about the NYT and came to the same conclusion. While the NYT staff spent most of their time talking about how technology is affecting their "interests" there were only two people in the documentary who mentioned the importance of a free press for promoting justice and disseminating truth: Julian Assange and Markos Moulitsas.

So we see shots of NYT reporters checking Google News and talking about twitter. And then the most appalling bit of the film where Judith Miller justifies her behavior by trying to pass the buck to the government, as if anti-war sources (like the FAS) who were actively debunking the crap she was publishing and clamoring for attention did not actually exist.

gwright• 13 years ago

Not sure if you really mean 'social justice' or the less controversial good-old-fashioned 'justice'.

The overreach by various government agencies has been an injustice that needs to be addressed but the issue doesn't have to be clouded by pulling in the complicated disputes about 'social justice'

trevelyan2• 13 years ago

You're right. Assange uses the term "justice" in the documentary. It just surprised me that he and Markos were the only two people quoted in the documentary who actually referenced moral values when talking about why society needs a free press.

scribu• 13 years ago

Besides the usual damage caused by false allegations, the PRISM story also confuses people into thinking that the other recent NSA-related story [1] isn't true either, but it is.

[1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/06/confirmed-nsa-spying-m...

kunai• 13 years ago

PRISM and the Verizon scandal are two completely different fiascoes. PRISM was a supposed program that archived and collected data of American citizens in a widespread data mining project. The Verizon scandal was one where Verizon agreed to the NSA allowing tapping of phones in specific areas.

Both are equally suspicious and egregious in their own rights. What is important is the investigation of both of these programs and the final conclusion. Until that conclusion is met, I think it's best for everybody to shut up and get on with their lives.

It was bad, and I, like many others, was angry. But now is the time to wait, and be careful about which services we decide to use.

pfortuny2• 13 years ago

It has become a topic but once again, Orwell to the rescue: "the past is alterable." 1984.

How true, in this case.

But it has been the Post, not the Government, who altered it. Sad, shameful and pathetic.

ommunist2• 13 years ago

In the US conditions censorship does not come from outer pressure, but from inner servility. To add: it is not a cage for what you call free speech, it is its skeleton.

kllrnohj3• 13 years ago

Correcting your mistakes is not shameful or pathetic.

pfortuny2• 13 years ago

Rewriting an article is. You can add a list of errata or write a new one.

AnthonyMouse4• 13 years ago

I don't know about the collapse of journalism. What it seems to me is the collapse of credibility.

Here we have major publications publishing something and then major corporations denying it. Then the publications step back from it, but not entirely.

At the same time, this is an issue about which the parties involved may be under a legal obligation to lie. If there is a room at Facebook that does the same thing as the room at AT&T, would Facebook be allowed to tell you about it? Of course not.

So now we have media outlets contradicting each other and genuine sources legally prohibited from providing true answers, which means we'll never know what actually happened. This is what you get when you pass laws that prohibit the public from knowing the truth and wage a campaign against leakers.

So now the media looks incompetent, the corporations look like government shills and the government looks like an authoritarian nightmare -- and this even though they maybe haven't actually done anything. All because they attacked our method of finding the truth and destroyed its credibility.

res0nat0r3• 13 years ago

If the story was 100% correct then they wouldn't have to alter it, even if said companies were somehow forced to lie to the public. It would stand up on its own merits.

mtgx• 13 years ago

It says right there in the slides PRISM has direct access to their servers. How the media and the public interpret that, that's different. Maybe if the government was more transparent, this wouldn't happen.

kllrnohj3• 13 years ago

Being under a gag order is VERY different from being under a "legal obligation to lie". There is no such thing as a legal obligation to lie. You can be under a legal obligation to not disclose it, or to not talk about it, yes, but to lie about it? No, absolutely not.

Maybe these companies have VOLUNTARILY lied, that's possible, but that's also rather unlikely as that would suggest they are friendly with the NSA for some reason.

jivatmanx• 13 years ago

As FISA court rulings are secret, you cannot know this for certain.

AnthonyMouse4• 13 years ago

There is no such thing as a legal obligation to lie.

So what are you supposed to do if you're not allowed to disclose something and someone directly asks you about it? An obvious evasion is clearly going to be a de facto admission, and you're not allowed to admit it, so you either have to lie or mislead. I'm not sure the distinction between a lie and a misleading statement is particularly meaningful in this context.

jlgreco2• 13 years ago

There is no such thing as a legal obligation to lie. You can be under a legal obligation to not disclose it, or to not talk about it, yes, but to lie about it? No, absolutely not.

That is the logic behind the idea of a warrant canary, but my understanding is that they have never actually been tested.

The frequency with which rsync.net representatives bring up their warrant canary in community conversations (such as those on HN) suggests to me that their canary is still legitimately alive (one would expect them to be less proud of it, where it coerced), but do we really know that is the case? The very nature of these things prevents us from saying things like that with certainty.

For a time, until USA PATRIOT Act was amended, these letters were allowed to forbid you from consulting a lawyer about the letter. So if the letter included demands that it was not allowed to include (perhaps: "Lie."), how would you even know that those demands were not allowed? For that matter, if you received a letter today that said this amendment to the Act was not relevant in this particular circumstance and you were not allowed to consult a lawyer, what would you do? Call their bluff?

eightyone• 13 years ago

Imagine if the CEOs came out with something vague aluding that PRISM is exactly what we think it is. This would hurt profits and would most likely upset stock holders. I'm really not sure if this would intertwine with any sort of profit maximization laws or what have you, though.

acqq2• 13 years ago

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/08/nsa-prism-server...

The slide with the explicit formulation in published today:

"Collection directly from the servers of these U.S. Service Providers: Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Paltalk, AOL, Skype, YouTube, Apple."

This supports the claims of Glenn Greenwald's article and is exactly what companies claimed not existing.

Sven7• 13 years ago

As the zdnet article says the slides sound more "marketing pitch than briefing".

If it is true, whats worrying is how fast things can escalate to Dr. Stranglove territory.

tensafefrogs• 13 years ago

"Collection directly from the servers of these U.S. Service Providers..." could easily mean "We ask them for the data and they give it to us from their servers."

Especially in the context of that slide where they are contrasting it with their "upstream" collection which would require sorting out the packets (and presumably decrypting them) before analyzing the data.

jdp23• 13 years ago

Talk about click-baiting ...

Based on what we know so far, the stories have at a minimum gotten significant press coverage about the volume of FISA requests and (per the NY Times and Marc Ambinder) the cooperation of many US tech companies (though not Twitter) in building a streamlined approach to surveillance of nonUS persons. With public discussion, it ay be harder to invoke the state secrets clause. And we're not done yet. "Collapse" seems a litte overstated.

eupharis2• 13 years ago

Washington Post did revise the story. And yes, they should have issued an explicit correction. But this is still a major story:

Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Mark Udall (D-Colo.), who had classified knowledge of the program as members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, were unable to speak of it when they warned in a Dec. 27, 2012, floor debate that the FISA Amendments Act had what both of them called a “back-door search loophole” for the content of innocent Americans who were swept up in a search for someone else.
“As it is written, there is nothing to prohibit the intelligence community from searching through a pile of communications, which may have been incidentally or accidentally been collected without a warrant, to deliberately search for the phone calls or e-mails of specific Americans,” Udall said.

US Senators with classified knowledge of the program don't have knowledge of what exactly it entails or how it is being used. I can forgive the Post for getting some of the details wrong.

brown9-22• 13 years ago

They had the knowledge but they could not publicly disclose a classified program. That's what "unable" means here.

eupharis2• 13 years ago

Ah yes, I should've included the next sentence:

Wyden repeatedly asked the NSA to estimate the number of Americans whose communications had been incidentally collected, and the agency’s director, Lt. Gen. Keith B. Alexander, insisted there was no way to find out. Eventually Inspector General I. Charles McCullough III wrote Wyden a letter stating that it would violate the privacy of Americans in NSA data banks to try to estimate their number.

This is what I was referring to when I said the Senators didn't know how exactly it was being used. It is pretty basic knowledge about the program.

Has the NSA incidentally collected data on 300 Americans? On 3,000? On, say, 300 million?

cozeulodorieso• 13 years ago

Yes, journalism truly has collapsed. That's why these scandals were outed by Reddit and Twitter users, not journalists working at more-than-a-century-old newspapers.

</snark>

brown9-22• 13 years ago

As long as we are talking about jumping to conclusions, the author does the same thing here:

Declan McCullagh of CNET examined the Washington Post story independently and concluded that the Post story was wrong.

The Cnet "analysis" depends on the credibility of their unnamed source. The reader is left to decide whose source sounds more believable, Cnet's or the WaPo's, and which version of the story they find likely.

The problem inherent to secrecy (which isn't an argument for abolishing it) is that the public is left to draw conclusions from partial facts and an unverifiable amount of misdirection.

ommunist2• 13 years ago

Welcome to the Web 3.0.1984. It is the read-write-rewrite one.

bcoates• 13 years ago

McCullagh's star named source Stewart Baker is not a credible source on this sort of thing, he's effectively a PR flack.

He's made a career of banging the drum that the cyber-boogeyman apocalypse is going to happen real soon now, and the ACLU and EFF are trying to get everyone killed, since the clipper chip era.

acqq2• 13 years ago

It is a common praxis today to extend the online version of the stories. As far as I see, the changes aren't stepping back from the points already made, and the zdnet article doesn't point to any significant correction that would discredit the authors.

cpleppert• 13 years ago

The media needs to get more credible technology consultants they can turn to. The days when a brief but imprecise description was acceptable are over.

In this case 'direct collection' i.e. a backdoor didn't make sense for a lot of reasons and didn't square with the program was described in other sources that came out after the slides were released.

But the real problem is secrecy. This is a complicated program with many actors and the media can't be expected not to report information clearly contained in leaked NSA slides even if they can't get the context 100% right.

room271• 13 years ago

The collapse of journalism? Isn't this week's news some of the best journalism of recent times?!

There are plenty examples of poor journalism, but I personally feel more encouraged that there is decent investigative and brave journalism going on after this week.

teeja• 13 years ago

None of this was news since William Binney, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Binney_%28U.S._intelli... who estimated "that the NSA (particularly through the Stellar Wind project) had intercepted 20 trillion communications 'transactions' of Americans (such as phone calls, emails, and other forms of data but not including financial data)" in the years following the 2005 James Riser NYTimes story.

IMO both journalism and the American people failed to pay adequate attention to this issue, both have gotten what they paid for, and the faux-surprise act of both is hilarious.

The real story in the NSA scandal is the collapse of journalism

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