> The lack of specificity made cybersecurity expert Robert David Graham dubious that the plot NSA claimed to discover matched the one it described on TV. “All they are doing is repeating what Wikipedia says about BIOS,” Graham blogged, “acting as techie talk layered onto the discussion to make it believable, much like how Star Trek episodes talk about warp cores and Jeffries Tubes.”
Nah, just basic incompetence and lack of journalistic integrity, and it ain't recent. Remember "Unintended Acceleration" from the 80ies? Complete and utter BS, yet they not just ran with it, but stuck with it after the BS was "exposed" (in quotes because it was obvious beforehand).
(Unintended Acceleration was the claim in the 80ies that Audis, when in reverse, would accelerate when the driver was stepping on the brake pedal without touching the gas pedal. Mechanically completely impossible and never actually happened. http://www.manhattan-institute.org/html/cjm_18.htm)
There has to be a better explanation of why Dan Rather was fired and Lara Logan just got a promotion. Now, as far as incompetence, I have a question of whether I'm putting the cart before the horse, particularly whether the NSA/Bezos/etc. used 60min because they knew they could get their message out predictably, because CBS News is a dead horse.
I have no idea how accurate the 60 Minutes story was, but this article is woefully unconvincing. Calling your rebuttal "the definitive facts" is childish.
My favorite line is: "There are as many red flags surrounding the BIOS Plot as there are in all of China." Who writes this?
I didn't find the article poorly written on an absolute scale, at least the first couple of sections (I haven't finished reading the whole thing). Are there specific sentences or paragraphs that bother you?
A nice summery of how to read NSA PR.