Patterico's Pontifications

5/25/2017

NYT Reporter Lifts Material from Local Reporter then Plays Dumb When Caught

Filed under: General — JVW @ 3:59 pm



[guest post by JVW]

As a follow-up to the story last night about GOP House candidate Greg Gianforte of Montana “body-slamming” Guardian reporter Guardian reporter Ben Jacobs during what Gianoforte characterizes as an unwelcome intrusion into a private interview last night, comes some typically douchy behavior from a New York Times reporter. Whitney Bermes of the Daily Chronicle newspaper in Bozeman tweeted out a picture that she took this morning when the citation issued to Gianforte. The link to the tweet is in the proceeding sentence, and I’ll attach an image here in case the tweet has trouble embedding:

Bermes tweet

And then, a mere 44 minutes later, Jonathan Martin of the NYT sent out this tweet:

Martin tweet

Note the tone of accomplishment in Martin’s tweet: “I’ve obtained a copy. . . ” He makes it sound as if he was doing good old-fashioned shoe-leather journalism and hanging out at the police station asking all the right questions and uncovering every lead. But don’t the two photos there look awfully similar, and by “similar” I mean one and the same? Note how the redacted information is the same as well as the shadow on the document from the person who snapped the photo. This coincidence was not lost on Ms. Bermes who had the following exchange with Martin:

Bermes-Martin exhange

Twitter reaction is overwhelmingly critical of Martin and supportive of Ms. Bermes, and it would appear that all of the big poo-bah media watchers have been alerted to this. I don’t think I would want to be in Jonathan Martin’s shoes right now. It will be interesting to see what if any censure he might face from his employer.

But just another reason to distrust Big Media.

[Cross-posted at the Jury Talks Back.]

– JVW

Under President Obama, NSA Routinely Violated American Privacy Protections

Filed under: General — Dana @ 9:03 am



[guest post by Dana]

You would think this would be a big deal, but when a quick Google search doesn’t pull up any reporting from major media outlets about it, maybe we’re not supposed to believe that the violation of Americans’ civil liberties is that big of a deal.

The National Security Agency under former President Barack Obama routinely violated American privacy protections while scouring through overseas intercepts and failed to disclose the extent of the problems until the final days before Donald Trump was elected president last fall, according to once top-secret documents that chronicle some of the most serious constitutional abuses to date by the U.S. intelligence community.

More than 5 percent, or one out of every 20 searches seeking upstream Internet data on Americans inside the NSA’s so-called Section 702 database violated the safeguards Obama and his intelligence chiefs vowed to follow in 2011, according to one classified internal report reviewed by Circa.

The Obama administration self-disclosed the problems at a closed-door hearing Oct. 26 before the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that set off alarm. Trump was elected less than two weeks later.

The normally supportive court censured administration officials, saying the failure to disclose the extent of the violations earlier amounted to an “institutional lack of candor” and that the improper searches constituted a “very serious Fourth Amendment issue,” according to a recently unsealed court document dated April 26, 2017.

The admitted violations undercut one of the primary defenses that the intelligence community and Obama officials have used in recent weeks to justify their snooping into incidental NSA intercepts about Americans.

Circa has reported that there was a three-fold increase in NSA data searches about Americans and a rise in the unmasking of U.S. person’s identities in intelligence reports after Obama loosened the privacy rules in 2011.

Officials like former National Security Adviser Susan Rice have argued their activities were legal under the so-called minimization rule changes Obama made, and that the intelligence agencies were strictly monitored to avoid abuses.

The intelligence court and the NSA’s own internal watchdog found that not to be true.

(Imagine Susan Rice’s claims being deemed untrue.)

And from the ACLU:

The American Civil Liberties Union said the newly disclosed violations are some of the most serious to ever be documented and strongly call into question the U.S. intelligence community’s ability to police itself and safeguard American’s privacy as guaranteed by the Constitution’s Fourth Amendment protections against unlawful search and seizure.

“I think what this emphasizes is the shocking lack of oversight of these programs,” said Neema Singh Guliani, the ACLU’s legislative counsel in Washington.

P.S. This report claims that the three major networks did not report on this during their evening broadcasts when the report was released.

(Cross-posted at The Jury Talks Back.)

–Dana


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