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Comment by Steko | Hacker News Reader

An easy way Bloomberg could support their story: allow one or more of their "senior insider" sources at Apple/Amazon to speak with another outlet (AP, NYT, whoever) who agrees to maintain their anonymity.

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One of the interviewees did speak (though he's not apple or amazon), and said that Bloomberg completely misrepresented what he said to support this theory, which he totally disagrees with: https://9to5mac.com/2018/10/09/bloomberg/

The article you linked states, Bloomberg says:

> Joe FitzPatrick was not one of these 17 individual primary sources that included company insiders and government officials,

Oh, he was one of the named sources. Good catch, though that doesn't change the point.

The entire story is an elaboration of a hypothetical example Fitzpatrick gave in consultation. That the final article is an exact match is seriously problematic.

How would that actually support anything though? I don't understand how this entire story has any legs without physical evidence. People can say things to multiple people, but that doesn't make what they're saying more true, right?

It would support two things that are currently in doubt (1) the idea that Bloomberg ran the story with actual information from actual insiders at Apple/Amazon (I've seen upvoted comments in multiple HN threads suggesting fabrication and whether the journalists have a history of it) and (2) that Bloomberg did not confuse or extrapolate the claims in their story from much more minor security incidents, such as the one Apple had previously disclosed re:Supermicro (such confusion/extrapolation seems to be the most likely explanation for everything we've seen imho but many other outcomes wouldn't surprise me).

Who their sources choose to speak to is not up to Bloomberg.

Ok, "encourage and facilitate"

That would be catastrophic for Bloomberg - if a news org is seen as more interested in protecting its reputation than protecting its sources, no sensitive source would speak to it again. They can easily eat the hit of one potentially bad story. They can't eat the hit of 'dicks around with sources'.

Well, they would obviously get consent from the sources first, rather than simply sharing their names with the other outlets.

A source contacts a journalist offering sensitive information with the expectation that their anonymity will be zealously protected. Then the journalist comes back to the source asking they risk compromising their anonymity further by talking to an entirely different news organization. This would qualify as 'dicking with sources' and no sane journalist would normally do this, for both professional ethical and business reasons.

What you're suggesting involves both violating the trust of the source and creating the impression the news organization needs its competitors to establish its credibility. I can't imagine this is anything short of a complete non-starter for Bloomberg, an actual serious news organization.

Bloomberg might be a serious financial news organization but its credentials as a serious tech news organization are very much questionable at this point.

I agree that it seems tricky for them to go to their sources and ask them to talk to some other news org however.

yeah, right.

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