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Sunday Times 'Snowden' Propaganda Reporter, Admits That He's Just Writing What UK Gov't Told Him To

posted by n1 on Tuesday June 16 2015, @08:21AM   
from the following-orders dept.

AnonTechie writes with an article from TechDirt:

Techdirt has already written about the massive problems with the Sunday Times' big report claiming that the Russians and Chinese had "cracked" the encryption on the Snowden files (or possibly just been handed those files by Snowden) and that he had "blood on his hands" even though no one has come to any harm. It also argued that David Miranda was detained after he got documents from Snowden in Moscow, despite the fact that he was neither in Moscow, nor had met Snowden (a claim the article quietly deleted). That same report also claimed that UK intelligence agency MI6 had to remove "agents" from Moscow because of this leak, despite the fact that they're not called "agents" and there's no evidence of any actual risk. So far, the only official response from News Corp. the publisher of The Sunday Times (through a variety of subsidiaries) was to try to censor the criticism of the story with a DMCA takedown request.

Either way, one of the journalists who wrote the story, Tom Harper, gave an interview to CNN which is quite incredible to watch. Harper just keeps repeating that he doesn't know what's actually true, and that he was just saying what the government told him -- more or less admitting that his role here was not as a reporter, but as a propagandist or a stenographer.

[Video]: http://edition.cnn.com/videos/us/2015/06/14/tom-harper-nsa-files-snowden-howell-intv-nr.cnn/video/playlists/intl-latest-world-videos/

[Also Covered By]: The Intercept

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Original Submission

• UPDATE: The Sunday Times sends DMCA notice ... (Score: 5, Interesting) by AnonTechie on Tuesday June 16 2015, @01:43PM

  by AnonTechie (2275) on Tuesday June 16 2015, @01:43PM (#196846) Journal

  The Sunday Times sends DMCA notice to critics of Snowden hacking story:

  The Sunday Times dropped a bombshell [thesundaytimes.co.uk] this weekend, reporting that the top secret files leaked by Edward Snowden have been obtained by the Russian and Chinese governments. The story claimed Western intelligence agencies were "forced into rescue operations" to mitigate the damage, and one UK government source claimed that Snowden had "blood on his hands."

  It would be a major blow to Snowden and the journalists who worked with him—if it were true. But the bold claims started falling apart shortly after it was published this weekend. The story is behind a paywall but available elsewhere. It's based entirely on anonymous British officials and contains some glaring inaccuracies.

  http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/06/sunday-times-sends-dmca-notice-to-critics-of-snowden-hacking-story/ [arstechnica.com]

  --
  Albert Einstein - "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former."

  Starting Score:	1		point
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