She pretty much outed herself though by using her own computer to mail the document to the intercept. That the intercept then went and tried to verify the veracity of the documents does not give them much credit either, they didn't have to forward the actual scans, there would have been other ways of verifying that the documents were real.<p>Finally, this was clearly careless on the part of the Intercept, no proof has ever been given that this was malicious, and I'm not seeing any here.
Don't feed conspiracists by shutting down legitimate reporting, don't protect the powerful from inquiry, just because they are on 'your side,' don't feel the need to de-platform those with a record of truth-telling, when they go after those you admire. Let the muckrakers muck as much as they can and we'll all get closer to the truth, however uncomfortable it may be.
For context: this follow the departure of the other co-founder of the The Intercept, Glenn Greenwald. <a href="https://greenwald.substack.com/p/my-resignation-from-the-intercept" rel="nofollow">https://greenwald.substack.com/p/my-resignation-from-the-int...</a>
She should never have been put in jail and each day she remains increases the injustice.<p>US society is absolutely unhinged with its extremely assertive willingness to punish the most vulnerable while simultaneously bending over backwards to avoid accountability for anyone with money or belonging to the correct political clubs ...
From the NYTimes article that Poitras links to, this really sounds to me like a perfect conjunction of mutual screwups on both sides. Winner didn't know that the documents had a stegonographic ID embedded into them, and the people at the Intercept who hastily published high-resolution raster scans of them didn't know or care either. Really seems like there's equal blame to go around on both sides.<p>Just my opinion: Winner was either very naive or very ignorant to assume that any classified level document didn't have tracking IDs embedded into it. It's been a known thing for mole hunts for 70+ years... There's tons of declassified information that can be found in cold war era books on intelligence related matters about how false information is fed to known agents, and such.<p>nytimes:<p>"Ms. Winner, then 25, had been listening to the site’s podcast. She printed out a secret report on Russian cyberattacks on American voting software that seemed to address some of Mr. Greenwald’s doubts about Russian interference in the 2016 campaign and mailed it to The Intercept’s Washington, D.C., post office box in early May.<p>The Intercept scrambled to publish a story on the report, ignoring the most basic security precautions. The lead reporter on the story sent a copy of the document, which contained a crease showing it had been printed out, to the N.S.A. media affairs office, all but identifying Ms. Winner as the leaker."
Ah, this is one of those that can only make me think of how news outlets, especially since in Brazil they're even more tightly controlled and aligned and oligarchic, report on governments from other countries, of political prisoners and messed up stuff going elsewhere(specially if it's in 'countries we dont like' of course), and how it is when it's an 'us' story(and of course put Assange in here too).. And that then it drips down to partially informed ppl that are basically tamed into whatever position interests oligarchs and that it becomes useless to try to discuss anything because information is just not reaching the overwhelming majority of people. That's how you end up with a Bolsonaro.<p>Yeah, sure, democratic/western ideals and blah blah, how about when it's time to put them into practice? I think sadly we all know what happens, and we mostly just look away. To be clear, I'm not talking about any single case in particular, it's more of an essence thing.
I just don't think that enough people are paying attention to the disappearing freedom of information and expression in America.<p>I believe that it has reached a point of no return and that you should expect what you saw in China to be a precusor to what will come to America now.<p>Congratulations! You've played yourself America.
> The Intercept’s claim that an independent investigation was conducted is false. The so-called “independent” review was done by the same lawyer who worked on the NSA/Winner story. The Intercept should correct the record and apologize to its readers.<p>At this point, plus Greenwald's resignation, should we have any respect of the Intercept, or should it always be regarded with some suspicion like Bloomberg and the supermicro fiasco?
I'm sorry, but I'm a real conspiracy theorist on this. Winner was a woman tricked into leaking a story that supported the Russiagate yarn, and part of the team on the Intercept side is clearly a federal agent/independent contractor: <a href="https://thegrayzone.com/2020/05/20/the-intercept-reality-winner-richard-esposito-nypd/" rel="nofollow">https://thegrayzone.com/2020/05/20/the-intercept-reality-win...</a><p>IMO they would have found her no matter what; the reasons they gave for finding her could well be a parallel construction, and they had Esposito as an insider who could "accidentally" out her if all else failed. This was a media operation to leak the standard Russiagate stuff through a Bernie-supporting (biased against Russiagate) peripheral insider and to make a great show of prosecuting her to give the leak more credibility than it would normally be given, from an audience (lefties) that was normally very critical.<p>It didn't work.
Meanwhile, Barton Gellman, who also worked with Snowden, has kept churning out great reporting [0], while Greenwald and Poitras kept trying to ride on the coattails of Snowden long past the point of relevance.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/11/what-if-trump-refuses-concede/616424/" rel="nofollow">https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/11/what-if...</a>