Tag: Journalism

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Police Using Journalists’ Metadata to Hunt Down Whistleblowers

Police Using Journalists’ Metadata to Hunt Down Whistleblowers:

In the past year, the Australian Federal Police has been asked to investigate a piece in The Australian about the Government’s’ leaked Draft Defence White Paper, and a Fairfax Media story on a proposal to reform to citizenship laws.

Just last week, police raided Parliament House in an attempt to track down the source of an embarrassing leak about the National Broadband Network. It’s feared that these investigations, along with increased penalties for whistleblowers, are hindering the ability of journalists to hold policymakers to account.

It was with this in mind that the Opposition eventually voted for the amendments that created the Journalist Information Warrant scheme, and allowed the Data Retention laws to pass last year. In a last minute effort to shore up support for the legislation, the Government agreed to add provisions for ‘safeguards’ that would, in theory, prevent the scheme being used to target journalists’ sources. However, a closer look at the scheme reveals its flaws.

When a democracy creates warranting schemes solely to determine who is willing to speak with journalists, the democracy is demonstrably in danger of slipping free of the grasp of the citizenry.

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Roger Ailes Got Us To Mistrust Everyone—Including Himself

Roger Ailes Got Us To Mistrust Everyone—Including Himself:

The best evidence that Ailes no longer wields the power he once did? If reports are to be believed, Ailes himself is about to step down from the network he defined. On its surface, the reasons have nothing to do with Fox News’ diminishing political influence. Gretchen Carlson, a former anchor, has accused Ailes of harassment, and apparently a number of other women—including Kelly—have come forward with their own accusations. James and Lachlan Murdoch, Rupert’s sons, have long looked to boot Ailes, and now they seem to have found the opportunity to do so. Still, it’s hard to imagine that Ailes would be so vulnerable if his role as GOP kingmaker were still secure.

He wouldn’t be ‘vulnerable’ to being fired for sexual misconduct if he still was influential in, or with, the Republican Party. This is the definition of casual sexism in journalism.

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The Case for Encryption | CJFE

The Case for Encryption:

Forgive me for sounding a little paranoid, but I’ve had the rainbows ripped from my eyes. Last fall, I signed up to work on a CBC investigation into Canada’s electronic spying programs, relying on the CBC’s exclusive access to the Edward Snowden/NSA leaks. It has been shocking to learn the capabilities of our intelligence agencies. But it has also been a surprising crash course in new technology, privacy and vital questions facing the future of journalism.

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But surveillance risks go beyond reporters covering foreign conflicts, terrorism or spies, notes Christopher Parsons of the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs, who has helped the CBC dissect the Canadian Snowden documents. “Sports reporters might be less interesting to signals intelligence organizations but might still be very interesting to other sporting organizations, criminal betting organizations and so forth.”

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“Malware and spyware infect computers across Canada on a regular basis; what do you do when your work computer, holding audio or text files pursuant to a sensitive story, has been compromised?” asks Parsons. “Do you want to notify sources? Do you want to have an ‘air gapped’ computer, which is disconnected from the Internet, where you store source materials, and another computer or device for writing your stories?”

These are awkward questions. No news organization wants to publicly admit its electronic communications are vulnerable. Frankly, I’ve never had a single conversation with the CBC’s IT people about whether we’ve been hacked or compromised, let alone been told what we do specifically to protect sensitive information. And it’s vital, because so much of our email and work these days lives in the cloud.

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Homeownership in America Has Collapsed—Don’t Blame Millennials – The Atlantic

The economy has a Gen-X problem. It’s a small cohort with a much-smaller-than-usual homeownership rate. And people wonder why the housing market is sluggish.

To quote a friend… “ah, it feels good to be blamed for something once again.” :p Damn us GenXers for ruining the economy.

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Nicky Hager’s house raided by police

Nicky Hager’s house raided by police:

While working on the book, Mr Hager said he was prepared for a raid-type situation, but did not believe the police would conduct one on his property.

This is exactly the kind of thing that political reporters shouldn’t have to prepare and defend against is democratic states. But more and more are because of overzealous state secrecy laws combined with bullying policing tactics.

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The colossal arrogance of Newsweek’s Bitcoin “scoop”

Talking with Salmon, Goodman said she has an “enormous amount of evidence, including evidence which is not public,” persuading her Dorian Nakamoto is the right guy. “Goodman has not decided whether or how she might publish that evidence… What’s more, she has also made it clear that she was in possession of evidence which other journalists could not obtain,” Salmon wrote.

And that’s a problem, because many aspects of the story already look like a caricature of journalism gone awry. The man Goodman fingered as being worth $400 million or more is just as modest as his house suggests. He’s had a stroke and struggles with other health issues. Unemployed since 2001, he strives to take care of basic needs for himself and his 93-year-old mother, according to a reddit post by his brother Arthur Nakamoto (whom Goodman quoted as calling his brother an “asshole”).

If Goodman has mystery evidence supporting the Dorian Nakamoto theory, it should have been revealed days ago. Otherwise, Newsweek and Goodman are delaying an inevitable comeuppance and doubling down on past mistakes. Nakamoto’s multiple denials on the record have changed the dynamic of the story. Standing by the story, at this point, is an attack on him and his credibility.

Ars Technica has written one of the better critiques of the Newsweek story which (likely incorrectly) identified the man believed to have invented Bitcoin. It’s worth the read, if only to have the current state of debate over Newsweek’s story nicely summarized.

Source: The colossal arrogance of Newsweek’s Bitcoin “scoop”

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Media sometimes try, fail to keep NSA’s secrets

LONDON (AP) — News organizations publishing leaked National Security Agency documents have inadvertently disclosed the names of at least six intelligence officers.

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The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s nightly news program, “The National,” revealed the names of three NSA employees when its cameras panned across NSA documents during voice-overs.

“They were scrolling through it and I thought, ‘Hold on, that’s an unredacted, classified document,’” said Christopher Parsons, who noticed the mistake. “It was kind of nuts. I couldn’t believe that they were so cavalierly showing it on national television.”

Parsons, a privacy expert at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs, was able to read the employees’ names by pausing, rewinding and replaying the video.

Source: Media sometimes try, fail to keep NSA’s secrets

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How to Publish A  Story That Explains How to Use Social Media to Juice Your Story’s Popularity

emptyage:

I paid to have my latest Wired story promoted on social networks, like Twitter and Facebook, to try to show that a lot of the metrics* we use to measure a story’s success are bullshit. It worked. When the story went live today, the page appeared with more than 15,500 links on Twitter, and 6,500 likes on Facebook. The story is a part of Wired’s Cheats package for the latest issue of the magazine. It needed to go live online at the same time readers encountered it in print, and it needed to have all those social shares set up in advance. 

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The entire package was going live at once. I could publish my story a little bit early, but the timing needed to be very close. I wanted all the public-facing stats (like the 15 thousand links and Twitter and 6,000 Facebook shares) to be live by the time the text appeared. Certainly, if someone found it in print or on the tablet, it needed those metrics to already be there. To make that happen, we cheated. 

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This morning (or last night) at a little after 1 am, I added the story text, set it to the current time, and hit update. Now it showed up in RSS readers and I could openly tweet it form my main account. (I had originally used a secondary Twitter account I have for testing 3rd party stuff to link to it and score retweets.)

So now, the story goes “live” and as if by magic it has tens of thousands of social shares listed on it the instant real people start to encounter it. It worked. 

*As is site traffic, to a very large extent. My original idea was to use a botnet to throw traffic at it, but Wired’s lawyers said “no, no. Don’t do that.“ 

And, of course, people tend to associate lots of shares with an article’s significance or influence. Consequently, by ‘cheating’ ahead of time a content owner can add a false gravitas to the content in question. I’m curious to know how search companies that, in part, use social signals to surface content deal with this kind of ‘hacking the social.’

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Freelancers are second-class journalists—even if there are only freelancers here, in Syria, because this is a dirty war, a war of the last century; it’s trench warfare between rebels and loyalists who are so close that they scream at each other while they shoot each other. The first time on the frontline, you can’t believe it, with these bayonets you have seen only in history books. Today’s wars are drone wars, but here they fight meter by meter, street by street, and it’s fucking scary. Yet the editors back in Italy treat you like a kid; you get a front-page photo, and they say you were just lucky, in the right place at the right time. You get an exclusive story, like the one I wrote last September on Aleppo’s old city, a UNESCO World Heritage site, burning as the rebels and Syrian army battled for control. I was the first foreign reporter to enter, and the editors say: “How can I justify that my staff writer wasn’t able to enter and you were?” I got this email from an editor about that story: “I’ll buy it, but I will publish it under my staff writer’s name.”

FJP: A fast-paced, fiercely heartfelt essay on the downsides to freelance work abroad and the madness of war.

(via futurejournalismproject)

This speaks volumes about contemporary war reporting: not only are ‘dirty wars’ outsourced to freelancers, but the credibility linked to successfully covering them is either denigrated or obviated to the public.

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2013.5.21

In 2010 and 2011, many discounted and differentiated Julian Assange from mainstream journalists by comparing him to a spy or foreign agent, despite the fact that he was just doing what every major US journalism organization does: publishing leaked classified information in the public interest.

Well, the government alleges in Rosen’s case that he acted “much like an intelligence officer would run a clandestine intelligence source” and communicated his “clandestine communications plan.” This is reminiscent of a disturbing House Judiciary hearing last year where the committee’s lead witness compared the New York Times’ David Sanger to a spy, saying he “systematically penetrating the Obama White House as effectively as any foreign agent.”

By that language, the government is arguing journalism is now akin to spying, no matter if its WikiLeaks or the mainstream press.

Trevor Timm, “Virtually Everything the Government Did to WikiLeaks is Now Being Done to Mainstream US Reporters”