from Hacker News

Why did journalists help the Justice Department identify a leaker?

by james_pm on 4/14/23, 4:33 PM with 32 comments

• by mint2 on 4/14/23, 6:56 PM

  Bellingcat isn’t a news org. Most of what I saw was rehashes of their analysis.

  Second, journalists use their own judgement or what to publish. Had the kid given it to a news org the reporting would have been redacted.

  I object to the new definition of “leaking” that tries to make all cases of it unquestionably good. People can die due to info.

• by adfgadfhionio on 4/14/23, 7:55 PM

  >A duty of care arguably extends beyond one’s immediate source: You don’t have to assist an individual in publicizing the workings of government, but at the very least, you should not intentionally compromise them.

  This is, as far as I can tell, the only real substance in this article, and it is completely undefended. If journalists have an obligation to avoid exposing leakers, then the actions of these organizations were inappropriate. But the author does absolutely nothing to establish that journalists have such an obligation.

  There are leaks of classified material that are, I think, plainly harmful. This is one of them. None of the information I have seen revealed is useful to the public, but may be useful to the Kremlin. No responsible journalist would have published this information had it been provided to them. I see no reason to want to encourage this kind of "transparency".

  >NPR recently decried being labeled by Twitter as state-affiliated media, writing that this is a label Twitter uses “to designate official state mouthpieces and propaganda outlets.” That unrelated controversy is notable given that an NPR staffer seems to have deputized himself to act as a government investigator by posting image analyses on Twitter. (While NPR has announced that its official organizational accounts have quit Twitter, individual staff accounts still appear to be active.)

  "Unrelated" is right. Why bring in conspiracy theories?

• by ttctciyf on 4/14/23, 6:46 PM

  Maybe it was a case where "practices fell short of the standards to which we hold ourselves” as in the events recounted in [1].

  1: https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/real...

• by exbotanical on 4/14/23, 7:13 PM

  That this happened the way it did is deeply concerning and should anger you. The media worked with a rare diligence to help the government apprehend someone who made information about which we've been repeatedly lied to available to the public. Let's not forget both the media and the government have spent the last couple of weeks on a gaslighting tour telling us the leak was Russian propaganda, etc. The tenacity with which they pursued and arrested the leaker is astounding considering we still don't know who leaked the Supreme Court draft decision, or who was on the Epstein client list.

  This is just gross. It doesn't matter where you align politically, the degree to which the media has been working with the government against the interest of the public is unprecedented. We have US troops on the ground presumably fighting Russia - who is, contrary to what we were told, winning the war - and there was no formal declaration of war, nor was the public informed of it. And not a single journalist in the recent WH press conferences has asked about it. Instead, we got questions such as "How do we prevent leaks like this in the future [so we can keep lying to the public]"?

  Perhaps Elon was being a troll by labeling some of these outfits "state-sponsored", but they sure as hell have earned the moniker.

• by firstlink on 4/14/23, 6:55 PM

  Primary sources are the biggest threat to Narrative-based media. This is why they never ever link to court documents for example, and also claimed that accessing WikiLeaks was illegal for non-"journalists" (a word they used to mean employees of Narrative media).

• by pessimizer on 4/14/23, 7:00 PM

  Because that's where we live now. In Uganda the newspaper publishes lists of homosexuals.

• by rocket_surgeron on 4/14/23, 7:01 PM

  Working to identify the source of a damaging disclosure of classified information about an ongoing war where an ally is suffering at the hands of a massive invasion force is prime, grade A, investigative journalism.

• by petertodd on 4/14/23, 7:45 PM

  The guy was a leaker, not a whistleblower. He had no intention of giving the information he leaked to the general public. That just happened by accident. And of course, helping Ukraine defend itself from a genocidal invasion is a very popular cause; this leaker was doing serious harm to that cause. He was no Snowden.

  In that circumstance, why wouldn't journalists chase clicks and show off their investigational skills like any other news story?

• by stefantalpalaru on 4/14/23, 6:55 PM

  > Why is the media so eager to help the Justice Department by supplying potentially viable leads?

  Because journalist-activists are now part of the military-industrial complex and are fully aligned with the intelligence apparatus.

  > Bellingcat, meanwhile, went further and virtually handed over the potential origin point of the leak by specifying the exact name of the chatroom where the documents appear to have first been shared.

  Bellingcat is notoriously a CIA operation, with a long history of covert activity: https://thegrayzone.com/2021/02/20/reuters-bbc-uk-foreign-of...