This is a pretty embarrassing piece; it reads like something you'd find on a conspiracy forum.<p>1. Keyboards don't beep.<p>2. There are <i>lots</i> of more reasonable explanations for text getting deleted than "state agency wanted to play a juvenile prank on me and be glaringly obvious about it". A stuck key, an intermittent short across some of the leads caused by the coffee he spilled all over his keyboard (conjecture on my part), a glitchy keyboard controller -- we've seen all of these in our shop.<p>3. In Rio, "a tall American" immediately meets a fellow Westerner and "accosts" him -- by suggesting they go out and see the city? He's a spook because he dressed neatly and was in good shape? Hell, that makes me a spook too.<p>4. Choose one of the two following explanations for the iPhone behavior: one, a well-funded and resourceful state agency is hiring people to track a journalist writing a book about the biggest intelligence leak in recent history, and the people they're hiring are juvenile enough to use methods straight out of Hollywood to play a prank on their target's iPhone when he sends a text with possibly the most milquetoast insult about their methods in the history of ever; or, two, the iPhone crashed. (Your answer might be used to gauge your sanity.)<p>5. The hotel safe -- if it weren't for everything else he'd written, I might be willing to buy that this was a botched job. But in the context of the rest of the article, I think the more reasonable explanation is that it was a crappy safe, it never did work correctly, and he only noticed that part way through his stay in the room.
Is it now a sign of times that where previously most ppl (including me) would have dismissed this piece as<p>1) Does not understand technology so is committing some basic error leading to this<p>2) Making this sh$t up<p>3) Has a prankster who is close by.<p>Instead now I am almost betting that it was the NSA/GCHQ/Five Eyes/CIA who is behind these shenanigans?<p>Thank you Edward Snowden (for the hundredth time) for giving us hard evidence of the illegal and ineffective behavior on the Govt's part.
You have also (unfortunately) fundamentally raised the bar on tin-foil hat debunking.
<i>The cursor moved rapidly from the left, gobbling text. I watched my words vanish. When I tried to close my OpenOffice file the keyboard began flashing and bleeping.</i><p>To me and Occams razor that sounds more like a stuck key than the NSA openly deleting stuff in a manuscript while you're writing it.
Just because you are paranoid doesn't mean 'they' are not out to get you!!<p>If the events happened as described 'they' were trying to spook him or 'psych' him out.
I completely understand all the criticism toward this piece, and I don't think I would ever publish anything like this without at least some hard evidence, but I also wouldn't be surprised if he were completely right about his assumptions. Thinking skeptically about everything is a good habit, but sometimes the consequence of thinking like an intelligent reasonable person is that you forget how bafflingly stupid the world can really be.<p>Are all of the author's suspicions totally unfounded? Yeah, probably, because he has no good evidence to back them up. Do they lead to a narrative that is completely unreasonable and absurd? Absolutely. But it's also possible that the people who are spying on him are behaving in a way that is completely unreasonable and absurd, and are just competent enough to cover their tracks so a layperson won't have any evidence on them.<p>I don't have a ton of confidence in what I'm saying right now, but uh... I just don't blame him too much, is all. I definitely wouldn't dismiss him as a bad journalist or anything.
The article is 99% full of BS. I believe that too, however it made an impact: didn't knew there was a book[1]. I will read it and post a review. The amazon reviews look promising...<p><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Snowden-Files-Inside-Worlds-Wanted-ebook/dp/B00HU8Z3Z2/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1393803014&sr=1-1&keywords=the+snowden+files" rel="nofollow">http://www.amazon.com/Snowden-Files-Inside-Worlds-Wanted-ebo...</a>
The paragraph began to self-delete..<p>BOFH excuse #114:<p>electro-magnetic pulses from French above ground nuke testing.<p>at least it makes as much sense as the 'Russian hacker' assertion they made.
So a 'professional journalist' with an iPhone didn't think to make a video of the self deleting, or take a photo of the tall American?<p>I call BS.
Why on earth would a malicious party manually delete characters while the author is watching? If you don't care about being observed - as the author suggests - then in order to destroy his work, you'd just delete the truecrypt partition.
Wow. Yeah, generally that's the US people's image of the US government in a nutshell. Conspiracy theories are getting old, old, old. Being overly suspicious is not productive in any way. Wake up and help your country be successful.
What he doesn't say is that the keyboard stopped flashing and beeping after he threw a biscuit at his cat.<p>I saw this a couple days ago. I thought it was rather silly.