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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.
[Also Covered By]: The Intercept
Original Submission
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 16 2015, @04:24PM
What has The Intercept got wrong?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Non Sequor on Tuesday June 16 2015, @05:09PM
What has The Intercept got wrong?
No one knows what they have wrong. You have a mixture of anonymous sources and expert opinion which different reporters assign different levels of credibility which either align with or differ from your personal assessments of credibility.
Look back at the Cold War. The right was correct in that Soviet documents have corroborated the assertion that Soviet espionage and influence in western left wing politics were extensive. The left was correct that the case for an aggressive stance against the USSR was substantially overstated since they were as afraid of direct conflict as we were. Russian communism collapsed and Chinese communism mutated and ultimately being right about either of these things had little impact on world events.
The same clash along polarized responses to a threat has migrated to other fronts. Everyone thinks history is on their side and that their opponents are completely deluded. The truth is, everyone is partially deluded.
Write your congressman. Tell him he sucks.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 16 2015, @05:27PM
The truth is, everyone is partially deluded.
What scientific evidence of this do you have? Are you claiming it is logically impossible for someone to be correct?
(Score: 2) by arslan on Wednesday June 17 2015, @02:24AM
I read it as it is logically impossible for someone to be entirely correct. Which kind of makes sense. It is hard to trivialize complicated matters down to a binary right vs. wrong. It is often various shades and depending on which viewpoint you're standing in it changes as well.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday June 16 2015, @05:29PM
No one knows what they have wrong.
The articles point out a few specifics that are wrong. It's just a coincidence that every independently verifiable fact included in the story is false, I'm sure.
(Score: 2) by Non Sequor on Wednesday June 17 2015, @03:39AM
What makes disassembling a narrative a more reliable procedure than assembling a narrative? You have a mass of assertions from different parties. One group of journalists sorts through the pile and puts the ones that sort of fit together in a row and says "there, this shows what happened" while other journalists line up the ones that don't fit together and says "that can't be right".
You can't uncover the truth or reveal lies through these kinds of processes. Consistency isn't a proof of truth and inconsistency isn't a proof of lying. Witnesses are unreliable. Experts have personal allegiances. Stories shift over time organically or are deliberately massaged to be more consistent with an emerging narrative. The news isn't a logic puzzle where you win if you use deductive reasoning to construct a consistent set of axioms. Contradictions can coexist due to incomplete explanations and consistency may be an illusory byproduct of artificially filling in incomplete explanations.
Write your congressman. Tell him he sucks.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 16 2015, @06:16PM
The right was correct in that Soviet documents have corroborated the assertion that Soviet espionage and influence in western left wing politics were extensive.
What? I will agree that they tried but hell no did they succeed on any significant level.
That's like saying the CIA funding of much modern art contributed to the downfall of the USSR when all it really did was pay for a bunch of artsy-fartsy types to enjoy a bohemian life-style.