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Comment by Cullinet | Hacker News Reader

is this the intercept magazine, the one at least formerly edited by a apparently entirely uninformed self appointed security expert, who nevertheless successfully duped Snowden into sending files in the clear literally by wearing him down with obstinate indigence and ignorance of the most elementary encryption concepts in a simultaneously suspicious display of incapacity to comprehend the most clear and simple instructions and theory of operation provided to him repeatedly over the course of months?

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this is a very long and weird sentence and I don't really understand what you're getting at

> this is a very long and weird sentence

Looks programmatically generated. The whole account is the same style of incoherent nonsense. Probably powered by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPT-3

There's a few other accounts I've seen here on HN that just spout random incoherent nonsense text, presumably to accumulate karma so they can power their sockpuppet ring and upvote any story they wish to the frontpage of HN.

Never attribute to GPT-3 that which can be easily explained by mental illness.

Seriously though, that sentence contains a lot of relevant context and understanding that would rival LaMDA. :)

Mental illness, intense boredom, weird autistic sense of humor, or being absolutely serious at being a network fuzzing troll farm. It's not fair to put such a fine point on it really.

What? What are you, a tinfoil hat prepper ? You too speak like a machine it's scary. What's a sockpupper ring :D

I think they're referring to Greenwald. I'm guessing this describes the interaction [1].

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2014/05/14...

Greenwald says[1]: "The most egregious, but by no means only, example of exploiting my name to evade responsibility was the Reality Winner debacle. As The New York Times recently reported[2], that was a story in which I had no involvement whatsoever. While based in Brazil, I was never asked to work on the documents which Winner sent to our New York newsroom with no request that any specific journalist work on them. I did not even learn of the existence of that document until very shortly prior to its publication. The person who oversaw, edited and controlled that story was Betsy Reed, which was how it should be given the magnitude and complexity of that reporting and her position as editor-in-chief."

[1] https://greenwald.substack.com/p/my-resignation-from-the-int...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/13/business/media/the-interc...

Greenwald left the intercept though quite a while ago so this is all very confusing.

he had no part in the reality winner debacle, as did laura poitras who eventually did get fired of it

No, he stated he had no part in her debacle. How plausible is that he wasn't involved in handling a major leak from NSA at his rag is left as an exercise.

thanks, I think the headline can be misleading, he ignored his mails that contained a guide to set encryption and not ignored setting up encryption out of carelessness and exchanged sensitive stuff.

Wow, that's a mouthful.

FWIW: Greenwald, as odd as his recent flip to Q-adjacency has been, doesn't seem to have been involved with the Winner episode.

It seems like Winner got burned as a source by a plain old journalist who fucked up badly while making a good faith attempt to validate a story. They got a bunch of scanned documents purporting to be from the NSA, so they called up the NSA to see if these documents were real. And in the process they provided the original scans, which identified the source printer and user.

But no, Glen Greenwald didn't have anything to do with this.

It's all speculation. Given that he was already shifting pro-Trump (and been pro-Putin long before that), Ockham razor can really point either way.

Reality really chose the correspondent for her leak unwisely.

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