Nearly 4,000 Ring Credentials Leaked, Including Users' Time Zones And Device Names

from the Ring-PR-team-looking-to-expand:-masochism/sociopathy-a-plus! dept

The eternal flame that is Ring's dumpster fire of an existence continues to burn. In the past few months, the market leader in home surveillance products has partnered with over 600 law enforcement agencies to:

• Engage in law enforcement stings that don't sting anyone
• Teach cops how to bypass warrant requirements
• Sign up a bunch of people for its snitch app
• Use said snitch app to generate "suspicious person" alerts
• Blame users for not securing their cameras properly
• Admit the company places no restrictions on sharing of subpoenaed footage by law enforcement agencies
• Let everyone know it's collecting images of children

The latest bad news for Ring -- via Caroline Haskins of BuzzFeed -- is another PR black eye inflicted on a company whose face that still hasn't healed from the last half-dozen black eyes.

The log-in credentials for 3,672 Ring camera owners were compromised this week, exposing log-in emails, passwords, time zones, and the names people give to specific Ring cameras, which are often the same as camera locations, such as “bedroom” or “front door.”

The compromised data plays right into the hands of the assholes who hang out in certain online forums solely for the purpose of hijacking people's Ring devices to hassle individuals who thought their homes would be more secure with the addition of an internet-connected camera.

Ring says this leak of personal data isn't its fault. The company claims there's been no breach. Maybe so, but the information is out there and presumably being exploited.

And it's kind of hard to take Ring's word for it. The company has been doing nothing but putting out PR fires ever since its law enforcement partnerships came to light earlier this year. And its explanation for where the sensitive data came from makes very little sense.

“Ring has not had a data breach. Our security team has investigated these incidents and we have no evidence of an unauthorized intrusion or compromise of Ring’s systems or network,” the spokesperson said. “It is not uncommon for bad actors to harvest data from other company's data breaches and create lists like this so that other bad actors can attempt to gain access to other services.”

Ring's spokesperson did not specify which other "companies" it suspected of carelessly handling device names given to Ring devices by Ring users. The spokesperson also failed to explain why Ring took no interest in this sensitive Ring user info until after the security researcher who discovered the compromised credentials discussed his findings on Reddit. "Unable to assist" is not a proper response to notification of a possible breach, but that's exactly what Ring reps told the researcher when he first informed them of what he had found.

Ring may have been quick to blame users for the commandeering of their cameras by a forum full of shitbirds, but the company does almost nothing to ensure users are protected from malicious activity. The only thing Ring does is recommend users utilize two-factor authentication and "strong passwords" (whatever that means). It does not alert users of attempted logins from unknown IP addresses or inform users how many users are logged in at any given time. Ring is doing less than the minimum to protect users but still seems to feel device hijackings are solely the fault of end users.

This is a garbage company. There's no way around it. Ring has prioritized market growth and law enforcement partnerships over the millions of citizens/customers who own its products. Rather than provide a secure product that makes people safer, it's selling a domestic surveillance product that comes with law enforcement strings attached. It has shown it will bend over backwards for the government but is only willing to deliver the most hollow of "we care about our customers" statements in response to news cycle after news cycle showing it absolutely gives zero fucks about its end users.

Filed Under: credentials, data breach, doorbells, leaks, ring, security
Companies: amazon, ring

The Afghanistan Papers v. The Pentagon Papers: How A Whistleblower Worked Much Better Than Endless FOIA Litigation

from the people-are-dying dept

On Monday morning, the Washington Post released The Afghanistan Papers, an incredible (though, tragically, not surprising) collection of unpublished notes and interview transcripts revealing that the past three administrations -- Trump, Obama, and Bush -- all lied consistently and repeatedly about how bad things were going in Afghanistan, pretending that various actions were succeeding, while the reality was they knew it was an unwinnable war.

“We were devoid of a fundamental understanding of Afghanistan — we didn’t know what we were doing,” Douglas Lute, a three-star Army general who served as the White House’s Afghan war czar during the Bush and Obama administrations, told government interviewers in 2015. He added: “What are we trying to do here? We didn’t have the foggiest notion of what we were undertaking.”

“If the American people knew the magnitude of this dysfunction . . . 2,400 lives lost,” Lute added, blaming the deaths of U.S. military personnel on bureaucratic breakdowns among Congress, the Pentagon and the State Department. “Who will say this was in vain?”

And, as part of that, there was the concerted effort to hide this reality from the American public:

Several of those interviewed described explicit and sustained efforts by the U.S. government to deliberately mislead the public. They said it was common at military headquarters in Kabul — and at the White House — to distort statistics to make it appear the United States was winning the war when that was not the case.

“Every data point was altered to present the best picture possible,” Bob Crowley, an Army colonel who served as a senior counterinsurgency adviser to U.S. military commanders in 2013 and 2014, told government interviewers. “Surveys, for instance, were totally unreliable but reinforced that everything we were doing was right and we became a self-licking ice cream cone.”

John Sopko, the head of the federal agency that conducted the interviews, acknowledged to The Post that the documents show “the American people have constantly been lied to.”

For fairly obvious reasons, this release is being compared to the Pentagon Papers, a similar trove of documents that revealed how officials knew the Vietnam war was a lost cause and deliberately misled the American public about it for years.

There is one stark contrast between the two, however: how they came out. The Pentagon Papers came out because whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg leaked them to the press (for which President Nixon then tried to destroy his life in a bunch of different ways). The Afghanistan Papers, on the other hand, are coming out because of a years long FOIA battle by the Washington Post to get these documents released, against the wishes of the US government (who still was able to black out a bunch of information):

For all the talk about how whistleblowers and leakers should "use the proper channels," every time we see the "proper channels" in action, they seem to only open up opportunities for the government to delay, hide things, and continue whatever destructive (but embarrassing) policy they have in place. There is a place for whistleblowers to call out this kind of misconduct, and as Ellsberg himself has been saying for years, the growing attacks (by each administration) against whistleblowers and leakers has much more to do with government embarrassment, rather than any legitimate attempt to "protect national security."

Filed Under: afghanistan papers, daniel ellsberg, dod, doj, foia, forever war, leaks, pentagon papers, transparency, whistleblowing

Report: Devin Nunes' Aide Going Around Leaking Ukraine Call Whistleblower's Name

from the proper-channels dept

We've been highlighting lately how the situation with the whistleblower, who first tried to ring the alarm bells about President Trump's now confirmed quid pro quo call with Ukraine to dig up dirt on a political opponent, showed why the "official channels" are useless for whistleblowers. Some suggested that we were premature in making that claim. However, since then, we've seen the President himself repeatedly try to attack the whistleblower while repeatedly demanding that the whistleblower be revealed. Now come reports that a staffer for Rep. Devin Nunes is going around revealing the name of the whistleblower:

A top aide to Rep. Devin Nunes has been providing conservative politicians and journalists with information—and misinformation—about the anonymous whistleblower who triggered the biggest crisis of Donald Trump’s presidency, two knowledgeable sources tell The Daily Beast.

Derek Harvey, who works for Nunes, the ranking Republican on the House intelligence committee, has provided notes for House Republicans identifying the whistleblower’s name ahead of the high-profile depositions of Trump administration appointees and civil servants in the impeachment inquiry. The purpose of the notes, one source said, is to get the whistleblower’s name into the record of the proceedings, which committee chairman Adam Schiff has pledged to eventually release. In other words: it’s an attempt to out the anonymous official who helped trigger the impeachment inquiry.

Nunes, of course, has a bit of a history pushing mis- and dis-information in support of President Trump, so this seems par for the course. In the Daily Beast link above, one of the lawyers for the whistleblower, Mark Zaid, notes that revealing the name only serves to put the whistleblower in danger and seems to aim to "deter future whistleblowers from coming forward."

So, once again, it highlights exactly what we've been saying. Even in this case, where the whistleblower tried to use the "proper channels," everything is designed to go against the whistleblower, starting with the failure to turn over the complaint to Congress, as required by the law. The fact that a Nunes staffer is now apparently putting that whistleblower "at risk of harm" (according to Zaid) highlights just how ill-prepared our government is to deal with whistleblowers at a time when we need more, not fewer, whistleblowers.

Filed Under: cia, derek harvey, devin nunes, leaks, proper channels, ukraine, whistleblower

DOJ And DNI's Attempt To Bury Whistleblower Report Yet Another Indication Of The Official Channels' Uselessness

from the when-in-doubt-leak-it-out dept

The official channels don't work. That's the message Snowden sent -- one that was countered by multiple high-level government officials who'd never had the whistle blown on them.

Government entities protect their own. Whistleblowers who attempt to bring things through the proper channels are deterred almost every step of the way. The few times they manage to get their reports to someone who might actually be able to do something about it -- like Congressional oversight or the various Inspector General offices -- those affected by the report will do everything they can to silence it.

The New York Times discusses what happened when the whistleblower report about President Trump's phone call to the president of Ukraine was routed through the official channels. The whistleblower (who the NYT questionably outed as a CIA officer) used a third party to bring the complaint to the CIA's counsel. The CIA's top lawyer needed to find out whether the allegations about the content of the phone call were accurate. So, she called the White House to get the transcript of the call.

You can see where this is going. The New York Times fills in the details, showing why doing things the way the government wants you to do them seldom results in blown whistles. (This is taken from the NYT's podcast transcript, which is why it doesn't read like a NYT article.)

[I]t turns out that the lawyers in the White House have apparently also heard rumblings about the July 25 call. They don’t know how serious it is, but there are a series of calls on the week of August 5 between the C.I.A.‘s lawyers and the White House lawyers. And they’re trying to figure out what’s going on. And very quickly, they learn that a number of people within the White House have concerns about this July 25 call.

The White House took it seriously as well. Seriously enough to start trying to track down the whistleblower. The whistleblower decided to take his complaint directly to the Intelligence Community's Inspector General since it appeared the White House was more interested in silencing the whistleblower than addressing the complaint.

The IG's office started questioning people, alerting even more members of the administration about the severity of the complaint. And once the CIA's counsel arrived at the conclusion that this was a serious allegation, the CIA's legal office informed the Director of National Intelligence. The DNI then decided to contact the DOJ, since the normal process involves bringing it directly to the President -- something that's not really an option when the complaint involves the president.

[B]ecause the Department of Justice has gotten a heads up about this through the C.I.A. complaint, when this official more formal, supposedly independent whistle-blower complaint arrives, the people inside the Department of Justice, they know what they’re going to do. And what they’re going to do is basically say, there’s nothing to see here, this ends here.

If the CIA officer had solely utilized the proper channels, the CIA's office would have brought it to the administration's attention and the administration would have buried it. Utilizing the Inspector General helped prevent this burial from happening, but even the DNI's office stood in the way of the report being brought to Congress, at least temporarily.

Nothing about this works well, if at all, if there's enough people in power interested in making a report disappear. This one managed to make its way to the public due to actions taken by the House Oversight Committee. Without the public being informed a whistleblower report containing serious allegations was being hidden from it by the DNI, the DNI and DOJ would have swept it under the rug. And then the administration would have gone after the whistleblower, much like Trump has threatened to do already.

Just because this report ultimately ended up being made public does not mean the official channels work. That the House Intelligence Committee decided to do something rather than nothing when approached by the IC Inspector General is an anomaly, not the usual course of action. If the entity committing the alleged misconduct has enough power, the whole thing can be made to go away, along with the whistleblower and their career. And, in this case, there's still the question of whether it would have been done at all (Rep. Adam Schiff's decision to call public attention to the report) if it wasn't politically expedient. Stopped clocks are right twice a day. The official channels for whistleblowing need to be right a lot more often before they'll even approach that rhetorical low bar.

Filed Under: cia, inspector general, intelligence community, leaks, oversight, proper channels, whistleblowers

Current Whistleblower Scandal Shows (Again) That The Official Channels Are Useless

from the no-sense-fixing-what-no-one-really-wants-fixed dept

The official channels for whistleblowing are meant to deter whistleblowers. Just look at what has happened to the whistleblower currently at the center of accusations against President Trump. Despite raising concerns urgent enough the IC's Inspector General felt compelled to notify Congress, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence decided the allegations were too sensitive to be shared with its oversight.

Ed Snowden saw how useless the official channels were. That's why he and a ton of sensitive documents headed to Russia via Hong Kong. The United States government has no time for whistleblowers. Hunting down and punishing whistleblowers is the national pastime -- one that Barack Obama particularly enjoyed.

The Trump Administration isn't any better. Obama may have passed some mostly-worthless protections for IC whistleblowers before he left office, but the current administration is engaging in a demonstration of just how worthless those protections are.

Nick Baumann's detailed examination of the flawed whistleblower procedures is worth a read. It shows exactly why Snowden chose the path he did, and why the whistleblower behind this latest report is probably headed towards a premature exit from public service.

This system, in which even those who follow the rules are persecuted for talking out of turn, is not new, [former DOJ legal ethics advisor Jesselyn] Radack noted. “Thomas Drake — an NSA surveillance whistleblower pre-Snowden — was prosecuted under the Espionage Act after following the procedures in the Intelligence Community Whistleblower Protection Act,” she said. Seeing what happened to Drake, she added, led “Snowden to correctly conclude that using the same channels that entrapped Drake to make his disclosures ... would be an exercise in futility.”

Snowden’s government critics should have known this better than anyone. Obama’s administration used the Espionage Act against more alleged leakers than any administration before or since. An interagency review panel later found that Ellard, the NSA inspector general who said Snowden should’ve come to him, had himself retaliated against a whistleblower. The panel, composed of inspectors general from outside the Defense Department, recommended Ellard be fired; the Defense Department later overruled that decision.

The basic problem with government whistleblowing, as Snowden noted in October 2013, is that “you have to report wrongdoing to those most responsible for it.”

In this case, the person involved in the alleged wrongdoing is none other than the President himself. The person making the allegations comes from the same governmental branch they're making accusations against. It's little surprise the ODNI -- an executive agency -- is in no hurry to allow Congressional oversight to examine the report or speak to the whistleblower. The ODNI may not be directly involved in the alleged wrongdoing, but it made a decision to protect the alleged violator, rather than the person utilizing the proper channels to have their concerns addressed.

The only thing going for the whistleblower now is that the publicity surrounding this report will likely prevent direct retaliation from the President and the administration. But that still leaves the agency the whistleblower works for, as well as the ODNI itself. Both of these could engage in direct retaliation without it being noticed (at least not immediately) by anyone outside of these entities. By the time anyone gets around to addressing these violations, the whistleblower will likely be out of a job and informally blacklisted by the federal government. In the United States, whistleblower protections are just another way to ensure no good deeds go unpunished.

Filed Under: ed snowden, espionage act, intelligence community, leaks, proper channels, prosecution, whisteblowers, whistleblowing

Indian Counseling Company Files Criminal Complaint Against Blogger Who Informed It About A Sensitive Data Leak

from the thanks-for-the-help!-they-sued dept

For doing the company the favor of informing it about a leaky AWS bucket exposing sensitive counseling records of 300,000 Indian employees, the company -- 1to1Help -- has filed a criminal complaint against the person who brought the situation to its attention.

In the middle of May, a researcher came across the exposed data and informed Dissent Doe of DataBreaches.net about their findings. After verifying the leak, Dissent Doe began trying to contact 1to1Help to inform it of the leak. No response was received until over a month later, possibly prompted by Dissent Doe contacting a large American company that was a customer of 1to1Help.

The slow response was blamed on internal email routing. Here's some of what was seen in the exposed bucket:

In looking at the plaintext counseling logs, I saw counseling logs for employees of Cognizant, IBM, HP, Capgemini, Dell, Oracle, and Microsoft.

[...]

There was more than 280,000 records in the users’ table, and more than 300,000 records, total, in the exposed bucket. As of the time of this posting, we have not been told for how long the bucket was exposed. Nor do we yet know how many unique IP addresses may have accessed and/or downloaded the data. What we do know is that contact information for employees of business and financial sector firms was freely available — as was sensitive information for some of them that might be used by miscreants for spearphishing or even extortion.

Data on employees included their first and last names, their username, their email address, their password (in plaintext in some tables), their telephone number, IP address, gender, and their relationship status.

Keep in mind that 1to1Help is a counseling firm that provides mental and physical health services to customers. That gives you some idea just how sensitive this information is, especially when bundled with the usual PII and personal email addresses.

The contact person at 1to1Help sent an email detailing the steps the company had taken, as well as preventative measures deployed to prevent further leaks in the future. Unfortunately, 1to1Help's Anil Bisht also tried to talk Dissent Doe out of writing about this leak.

As a small India based business (where there is no 911 support for threats and suicides, and where until recently suicide was criminalized) it has been an uphill battle to popularize and gain acceptance for counselling. By publishing specifics, this would bring about a general mistrust and discourage employees from reaching out to counselling firms such as ourselves. This in turn would be detrimental to the users and may even lead to loss of life. We cannot emphasize the impact of this enough.

[...]

We once again thank you for your time in interacting with us and respect that your interest is in safeguarding the users. May we once again request you to desist from publishing & securely delete any user data that you may have.

Doe refused, stating that she would not be covering up the leak. Nor would she delete the data until full disclosure was made by 1to1Help.

Because of this refusal to cover up 1to1Help's screw-up, the company has decided to take legal action against Doe and her site by filing a criminal complaint in India. It has already managed to secure an injunction against the site forbidding it from publishing… an article that has already been published.

The injunction was issued by a civil court in Bangaluru on August 6th — five days after I published my report on the leak. The plaintiffs are seeking a permanent injunction that would bar me and my site:

- from disclosing, publishing or broadcasting the schedule data or any part thereof; and

- from publishing or broadcasting any report or article on the breach of the schedule data as threatened (sic) in their emails dated 11/06/2019, 14/07/2019 and 30/07/2019 addressed to the plaintiff;

The suit also seeks to direct Domain People to block the website of DataBreaches.net.

As Doe notes, it appears 1to1Help's lawyers made a number of self-serving omissions when filing this complaint. First, they failed to point out the article had already been published, which would have allowed the court to review the content and see if it actually violated the law.

Second, the lawyers claimed Doe's site was "rogue," due to it containing no contact information for Doe. They were either wrong or lying, as Doe's site does contain a contact number and she is reachable via social media and other venues, having spent more than a decade covering security breaches.

Finally, 1to1Help claimed in its filing that Doe tried to blackmail it by giving Anil Bisht deadlines to respond for comment before publication. That's called journalism, not blackmail, and either its lawyers can't comprehend that or willfully misportrayed this extremely common process to the court.

The problem isn't the person reporting the leak. The problem is the leak and the company that took its time responding to the problem and then decided to take legal action when the person reporting the leak refused to cover it up.

This leak was not the fault of databreaches.net or the researcher who found it and provided data to this site. This leak was the responsibility of the entity responsible for securing the data properly but who did not encrypt it, who failed to detect their own error, and who then ignored multiple attempts to notify them that they had a leak.

What if I hadn’t persisted in trying to notify them? Their filing notes that they were contacted by a client on June 27. Whom do you think notified that client? It was this blogger and this site — still trying to get 1to1Help.net to address the leak. Not to toot our own horn, but if it wasn’t for this site’s persistence, they’d still be exposing sensitive data that the whole world could be downloading. And yet the company wants me charged criminally and got an injunction to try to censor me from reporting on their security incident?

This is far too common a response and it's certainly not limited to India, where the legal system is often used to target speech complainants don't like. Doe resides in the United States, so the First Amendment protects everything she's written, even from a company halfway around the world that doesn't like its lax security discussed in public.

Filed Under: breaches, criminal complaint, dissent doe, india, leaks, reporting
Companies: 1to1help

Government Prosecutor Caught Sending Emails With Tracking Software To Reporters And Defense Attorneys

from the Mark-Harmon-must-be-rolling-over-in-his-grave dept

Well, this is a new twist on prosecutorial misconduct. Why play fair when you can play with Network Investigative Techniques?

A Navy prosecutor last week sent an email to the editor of Navy Times that was embedded with a secret digital tracking device. The tracking device came at a time when the Naval Criminal Investigative Service is mounting an investigation into media leaks surrounding the high-profile court-martial of a Navy SEAL accused of war crimes.

That email, from Navy prosecutor Cmdr. Christopher Czaplak to Navy Times editor Carl Prine, came after several months of Navy Times reporting that raised serious questions about the Navy lawyers’ handling of the prosecution in the war crimes case.

The NCIS claims this is all above-board, which is obviously the case because no one was surprised by the presence of trackers and no one had to issue a statement defending the use of emails containing tracking software. Oh wait. The other thing.

The reporter was more than surprised the prosecutor decided to engage in his own leak investigation to track the source of information covered by a protective order. The prosecutor's employer, the US fucking government, explained via a spokesman that this tracking software was not "malware" or a "virus" and does nothing more than send IP addresses back to the NCIS home base. This is apparently supposed to make this OK.

But how OK is it really? Not very, it would appear. Not only does the use of this NIT violate a handful of laws, it also plays havoc with a handful of protections, Constitutional and otherwise.

The Navy email to Navy Times contained hidden computer coding designed to extract the IP address of the Navy Times computer network and to send that information back to a server located in San Diego. Under U.S. criminal law, authorities normally have to obtain a subpoena or court order to acquire IP addresses or other metadata. Not using one could be a violation of existing privacy laws, including the Electronic Communications Privacy Act.

Defense attorneys involved in the SEALs’ war crimes cases have said that 13 lawyers and paralegals on their team also received emails with a similar tracking device, according to court documents filed by the defense attorneys.

Sure, there's not much to be gleaned from scraped IP addresses, but it's possible that's not all that was picked up by the NCIS's NIT. It could have gathered email metadata as well, which can be almost as revealing as the content of the emails, especially when prosecutors are looking for sources of leaks.

This is problematic for a number of reasons. Targeting journalists to reveal sources does damage to First Amendment protections. Targeting defense attorneys puts attorney-client confidentiality at risk and strongly suggests the government isn't interested in a fair trial.

NCIS insists its prosecutor is in the right, despite all this potential collateral damage. The attorney representing a Navy SEAL accused of war crimes begs to differ.

“The conduct of the prosecution is egregious,” said Tim Parlatore, a New York-based attorney, who is among several, including Marc Mukasey, a member of President Donald Trump’s legal team, defending the 39-year-old Gallagher. “(Cmdr.) Chris Czaplak should lose his law license and face criminal charges. He illegally spied on the defense attorneys and the media. The prosecutor needs his own defense attorney.”

The US government continues to downplay this as just a normal thing done in leak investigations. But it isn't. It targeted journalists and defense attorneys -- two parties that definitely shouldn't be on the receiving end of anything even mildly nefarious originating from government prosecutors. This prosecutor decided the most important thing here wasn't respecting rights or focusing on the suspect on trial, but rather sniffing out the source of a leak. This doesn't reflect well on the NCIS and it's quite possible there's a benchslap awaiting this prosecutor, if not sanctions and a dismissal.

Filed Under: 4th amendment, carl pine, christopher czaplak, investigation, leaks, navy, nit, tracking, war crimes
Companies: navy times

US Government Rings Up Another Whistleblower On Espionage Charges

from the criminalizing-government-accountability dept

Because our government enjoys punishing people far more than it enjoys accountability, the DOJ is prosecuting another whistleblower. A former language analyst for the Air Force and NSA has been charged with espionage for leaking documents detailing the government's drone assassination program to The Intercept.

31-year-old David Hale is the whistleblower at the center of the DOJ's latest prosecution. This now puts the Trump Administration at the top of the list for most journalist sources prosecuted for espionage, according to the Freedom of the Press Foundation.

President Trump’s Justice Department has arrested and charged former intelligence analyst Daniel Everette Hale for allegedly sharing classified national security information with a reporter. Hale is at least the sixth alleged journalistic source charged by the Trump administration in just over two years in office. The Justice Department has previously indicated dozens more leak investigations are ongoing.

The documents Hale allegedly handed to The Intercept provided the basis for the site's multi-part "Drone Papers" report. The Drone Papers exposed the breadth of the United States' program for extrajudicial, extraterritorial killings. This included operations in Yemen and Somalia where targeted killings were carried out despite lengthy gaps in intelligence and surveillance. The papers also showed the military referred to collateral damage from drone strikes as "enemies killed in action" without verifying whether or not everyone killed was actually a combatant.

Hale is unusual among prosecuted whistleblowers in that his investigation rolled out in a more public fashion than most. Hale was featured in the drone warfare documentary "National Bird," in which he discussed his reluctant participation in intelligence gathering that enabled drone strikes, as well as the risk he was taking talking about his intelligence work with the documentary crew.

Hale wasn't being overly dramatic. His home was raided by the FBI during the documentary's filming in 2014. According to the indictment [PDF], Hale's printing and removal of top secret documents began in early 2013 -- just a couple of months before the first Snowden leak. The indictment's timeline appears to be correct. In "Citizenfour," the documentary about Snowden's first meetings with Glenn Greenwald, Greenwald discusses another leak source that is most likely Hale.

At the end of the documentary “Citizenfour,” Intercept founder Glenn Greenwald tells NSA leaker Edward Snowden the Intercept has a new source of confidential information on the U.S. drone program.

“That’s really dangerous on the source’s side,” Snowden said, looking at some of the revelations. “That person is in­cred­ibly bold . . . Do they know how to take care of themselves?”

Greenwald reassures him “they’re very careful.”

Not careful enough, apparently. The indictment makes mention of encrypted communications and the possible use of Tor, but it does not seem to have prevented the government from accessing texts and chat messages sent from Hale to others about the leaked documents.

Hale is facing a total of five espionage-related charges, according to the indictment. What's somewhat surprising and/or depressing is how long this indictment took to arrive. The FBI's raid happened nearly five years ago (August 2014), but the indictment wasn't filed until March of this year. That's almost five years Hale was in limbo, waiting for the DOJ's next move.

What Hale exposed was a program that allowed the US to rain death on people around the world based only on gathered intelligence, rather than courtroom prosecutions. The US government has developed a taste for drone killings, which have only continued to escalate with each administration since their introduction during George W. Bush's presidency.

What we saw was information the government never wanted us to have. It wanted to keep these facts secret -- partly for national security reasons, but mainly because it knew the public would not wholeheartedly support point-and-click killings of people halfway around the world. Hale isn't a criminal. He's a whistleblower. But the government only likes whistleblowers it can keep from taking their problems outside its closed loop. Everyone else is just prosecution-bait.

Filed Under: air force, daniel hale, doj, drones, espionage act, leaks, nsa, prosecution, whistleblower
Companies: the intercept