Blame the Press, Not Snowden, for Redaction Blunders in NSA Documents

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As you’ve probably heard, the National Security Agency and its British sidekick GCHQ are able to extract private data—such as geographical information, your address book, and phone logs—via seemingly innocuous apps on your smartphone. The app highlighted as an example in recently-published NSA slides was, bizarrely, Angry Birds (there was no mention of Fruit Ninja, perhaps to David Cameron’s relief). 

Rovio, the company behind the phenomenally popular time waster, flat out denied any cavorting with the NSA to allow the leaking of customers’ info, but suggested the surveillance could be conducted through third-party advertising networks—effectively admitting their app is just an insecure blackhole for privacy instead. It’s definitely not the only one.

The details of the abuses were revealed in a coordinated release by ProPublica, The New York Times, and the Guardian. But it turns out that the presentation slides published by the Times weren’t up to the usually high standard of journalistic rigor, as the PDF inadvertently exposed the name of an agent who put together the presentation, along with the description of a network that had been targeted. While these details were redacted, it was possible to highlight the three redactions, and copy and paste the text that was supposed to be obscured.

Reported by Tech Dirt, these errors were apparently originally highlighted by Cryptome, who now seem to have deleted their tweets on the matter.

The errors—which appear to be honest mistakes and not carried out with any malice—don’t just mean that we get to point out [REDACTED]’s terrible grammar (it’s “its”, not “it’s”). They’ve also added fuel to the fire that these Snowden documents are somehow intrinsically dangerous, and reignited the idea among some that they shouldn’t be released at all, despite their overwhelming public interest. 

Bob Cesca from the Daily Banter took this approach, opening with, “It’s finally happened. The name of an NSA agent has been accidentally leaked to the public via an NSA document stolen by Edward Snowden.”

He continued, “The identity of an NSA agent is out there in public view within the same document in which a target of this program is named. All of this is due to the incompetence of whoever failed to properly redact the PDF before publishing it for the world to see.”

This is fair enough. It is difficult to deny that this is a huge failure on the part of the Times, and some may even argue criminal. The redactions on the Times document cloud are now in place, but the damage has already been done.

But Cesca then attempts to blame Snowden for the error: “To add to the irresponsibility of how Snowden went about this operation…”

Woah there, Cesca. Slow down. As mentioned repeatedly ever since his original Hong Kong hotel room interview for the Guardian (and most recently in his interview with German television channel ARD), Snowden has relinquished all publishing privileges—and along with them, responsibilities—to the journalists in possession of the NSA documents. It is only they who get to decide what gets published; not just which programmes, but also which particular slides.

Throughout the entire Snowden saga, media outlets have been incredibly careful not to release any information that could harm individuals working within the intelligence agencies, or jeopardise any ongoing investigations that use the surveillance methods outlined in their stories. That’s because that is their job, as professional journalists: to practice the delicate balancing act of releasing what is in the public interest while maintaining integrity and security for those involved. If this method is irresponsible as Cesca wishes to claim, then any leak of national security information—no matter how pertinent to the public—is just as foolish, which is obviously not the case. 

This screw up, albeit a big one, does not mean that these documents should cease to be published; perhaps the journalist(s) in question should not be allowed to work on them any longer, but the brakes shouldn’t be slammed on the NSA revelations. Too much is at stake. 

While some have taken this as a sign that the Snowden leaks are dangerous, that doesn’t have to be the case. This was a journalistic error made by a group of professional journalists. Direct your response to The New York Times, not Snowden.