Yes, or maybe no. It doesn't really matter, because this is just one of many battles being waged in the current cyber-war gripping our lives.
I mean, we have to just see it in the larger context: there is very definitely a war going on among various, nefarious, otherwise, or indeterminate, hostile parties.
It seems that if we must dismantle the military-industrial state, it is going to be through info-wars. The key targets are all secrets. (Curious that both sides seem to want the same thing though, i.e. "the info wants to be free", isn't it?)
I'm curious: If there is a war going on, did this leak help or hinder? Which side did it help or hinder? Who benefits from this leak, and who is harmed?
I have a sinking suspicion that the average American, for example, isn't benefited by this leak.
I dunno how we can quantify "Americans being benefited" in light of what these leaks are revealing in the global context, but I sure don't like it, living as I do, under either a velvet glove, or an iron one, depending on which side of the wall I happen to decide to visit.
But, I do think that these leaks are good for everyone, not just Americans, and that is why they need to happen.
But practically, what would you do given the information divulged. Hackers gonna hack, that's known. Does knowing Russian agents attempted a hack cast them in worse light? No; we already know Russia isn't a close political ally of the US. What details of the hack do is tip off the Russians to burn their channels and methods and complicate the NSA's work in protecting American digital assets from further attack (as well as, depending on what secondary information can be gleaned from the hack based on what the Russians know, compromise the NSA's own back-channels and espionage approaches to understanding what Russia's spy operations are doing).
There's a difference between the leaks Deep Throat provided ("Your President is a criminal") and the leaks allegedly executed by Reality Winner ("Russian spies are spying, as Russian spies do"). A failure to distinguish qualitative nature of dumped information weakens both the future security of leakers and the overall philosophy that more transparency is a good thing.
This story has the danger of cyber-fatigue'ing the general public, but it has the potential to forward a number of positive aspects in the war against warfare-criminality-because-secrecy, on either side of the argument: Pro "Pease with Russia, At All Costs", or Con "Send Russkie Hacker UP The Bomb(s)".
These leaks have value, because they continue to forward the narrative in the general public, and the centres of true power, though weakening: mainstream/middle-class/entitled-/privileged- consumers who can Do Stuff™ to change the power structures behind this big military-industrial mess.
If we hold one thing in place: Pease with Russia, we must assume that there are parties who want this, and parties who don't. Oh, sorry, I mean "War With Russia", which is what this is all really about.
I'm curious: If there is a war going on, did this leak help or hinder? Which side did it help or hinder? Who benefits from this leak, and who is harmed?
Do the answers to these questions matter if the war continues regardless?
Yeah I think it's basically guaranteed that this is what we would hear regardless of how they found the leaker. Maybe this method was used, maybe they looked at printer looks, maybe they looked at access logs to the document, etc. Regardless, they _say_ that the problem was The Intercept's handling because there is no way to verify it and it makes them look bad. Really this news should be taken with a grain of salt.
That said, the important thing for any leaker to do is to try as much as possible to obscure any links they have to the documents before handing them off to third parties even if those third parties are supposedly trusted (because once you hand the documents off, you are no longer in control).
>Really this news should be taken with a grain of salt.
Something I think is valuable in this leak is the fact that the general public will be better educated that in fact their printers are capable of tracking every single thing they print, and there is no really, truly, anonymous personal printing any more.
I hope the blahgosphere will pick up on this and that we see Stories targeted to the normals that explains these sorts of things to them. Grandma may not care too much about her phone being listened to (after all, it was always so, to her at least..), but if you explain to Grandpa that there is a secret code that will tie every single printed sheet back to his house-hold, well, that may raise a few shingles ..
I mean, we have to just see it in the larger context: there is very definitely a war going on among various, nefarious, otherwise, or indeterminate, hostile parties.
It seems that if we must dismantle the military-industrial state, it is going to be through info-wars. The key targets are all secrets. (Curious that both sides seem to want the same thing though, i.e. "the info wants to be free", isn't it?)