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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: 1) by andersjm on Tuesday June 16 2015, @05:05PM
Lets just assume that the original story was true for the sake of argument. Nobody would come out and admit that, no analyst or employee within the British intelligence community would go out with name and confirm the story, unless instructed to do so.
And why wouldn't they be instructed thusly? The agents are already exposed, and the "enemies" already know that we know, so there's really nothing more to hide. Given how eager the UK and US governments are to paint Snowden a traitor, there must be immense political pressure to present whatever damning evidence can be found; so even if it does go against the grain of how the intelligence agencies like to work, the information would find a way out, leaked if necessary.
At the very least, if any of this were true, high-ranking officials would say so off the record to their news media contacts, and other media would jump at the story.