Maddow’s “Scoop” About Fake NSA Document Raises Several Key Questions
theintercept.com
theintercept.com
The important take-away here seems to be that news outlets should expect to receive more purportedly "leaked" documents which are actually forgeries, created for the purposes of discrediting news teams that are less diligent about checking their sources, and to muddy the waters about certain stories.
In other words, "fake leaks" to create "fake news".
It seems that a fake leak might also damage a country. I wonder if fake leaks are illegal? It sounds vaguely like espionage to me. The Russians have been accused of planting fake stories to influence elections, for example. How is this different?
Politicians leak things deliberately all the time. They get to call their leaks things like "trial balloons". The process is almost entirely sanctioned by the press, which refers to them with phrases like "an unnamed source close to the president".
Staff leak things too, including by accident. At the bar, "Did you hear the great fishing story Senator X told Senator Y in the meeting today?" could be a leak that X and Y had a meeting.
Improper disclosing of classified information is illegal. I think that's what you meant to say.
A fake leak could be an example of black propaganda. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_propaganda . It may or may not be illegal, depending on what it contains. Slanderous fake leaks like http://www.snopes.com/mcnatt-racist-memo/ could result in civil prosecution.
In almost all cases it's likely covered under the 1st amendment. For example, Jessup's description of the purported Philadelphia Experiment is a false leak about a secret military project, but clearly covered under freedom of speech.
Releasing a leak by an entity not under the jurisdiction of the law of the affected party is not illegal.
That said you might be prosecuted for possessing illegally obtained material in any case since the information is technically a property of the affected party.
Espionage laws are tricky you it's not easy to prosecute a foreign agent unless they are a citizen or a lawful resident of your own country. Things are more complex when dealing with real world agents since every country brings them in under a diplomatic cover so at best you can deport them or illegally detain them.
Still, I don't totally understand how the metadata would have come to be the same, surely they weren't just opening the PDF in photoshop and modifying it- if they had, all of the stenographic dots would still be present.
Though most of the alt-right is focusing on CNN right now there was a fairly sophisticated fake MSNBC "special report" video going around a few days ago so it's not like they're ignoring other outlets.
The news media, especially cable news, has completely lost the trust of the public, and it's because they no longer even pretend to care about the facts.
Edit: Referring specifically to this: "She suggested, without stating, that this may have been what caused CNN and other outlets recently to publish reports about Trump and/or Russia that ended up being retracted."
You're responding to a story about a major cable news outlet outing a juicy story as untrue.