Former CBS News reporter links her computer intrusions to Benghazi reporting | Hacker News Reader

Former CBS News reporter links her computer intrusions to Benghazi reporting

washingtonpost.com

28 pointsrpm432117 comments

Sharyl Attkisson is a crank who, prior to resigning from CBS over its liberal bias, was most notable for being one of the very few mainstream reporters to dignify antivax conspiracy theorists. Here she suggests not only that the government bugged her computer, but did so in a way that allowed her to literally see the cursor erasing things she typed --- because that's how government computer bugs work.

If you believe that the Obama administration is a Nixonian enterprise that will do anything and everything to prevent investigation into Benghazi, I (gingerly) suggest that you don't really need Attkisson to tell you about the government's misdeeds.

So is anything Cheryl says incorrect, or only those things that upset you? These ad hominems are a slippery slope.

I don't think you need to drag out Nidon. Simple fact of the matter is that anybody investigating anything truly juicy is a security threat no matter who the president is or what the scandal. No conspiracy required (sadly enough for this author) It's probaby just folks doing what we pay them to do.

If someone makes a claim, and their only evidence to support that claim is saying "Trust me," then their history of making claims is relevant. If they are not trustworthy, then we should insist on evidence other than their word.

I also find your comment odd, because by the end you seem to be taking it at face-value that she was spied on. Personally, I'm dubious for the reasons Thomas stated.

I don't find the story that unusual.

If somebody has a job of reporting, and they make 500 valid claims and 1 bad one, them reporting something commonplace isn't a situation where we need all the nasty character impeachment.

I get really tired of folks wanting a to start a knife fight over any little thing that might make their guy look bad. I'm not going to defend her or even try to debate what happened or didn't happen. It's a mainstream professional reporter reporting something that, while odd and perhaps PR-worhty, isn't that big of a deal. Should we start talking about all the computers, networks, and other things that are insecure? It's jsut silly. Let her make her observations, her friends pump it, and maybe she sells a few more books. Good for her. These kind of political show-and-tell books are a dime-a-dozen, and nobody will remember her book a year from now.

But this thing of attacknig the messenger in a personal way, and then driving all the conversation to either a support or defense of their character (instead of the issue at hand)? That's gone on way too long, and sadly enough they'll still be doing it ten years from now. That's my reason for posting.

Hope that helps clear it up for you.

Yeah, when I read that line of the article I was glad I wasn't drinking anything, I almost did a spit take.

I don't really know the woman's work, but if you claim that hackers wiped your files while you watched your screen racing doing their bidding, I suggest you have another Hollywood screenplay to write.

Luke Harding, a journalist for the Guardian who covered the NSA, makes a similar claim:

>I was writing a chapter on the NSA's close, and largely hidden, relationship with Silicon Valley. I wrote that Snowden's revelations had damaged US tech companies and their bottom line. Something odd happened. The paragraph I had just written began to self-delete. The cursor moved rapidly from the left, gobbling text. I watched my words vanish. When I tried to close my OpenOffice file the keyboard began flashing and bleeping.

>Over the next few weeks these incidents of remote deletion happened several times. There was no fixed pattern but it tended to occur when I wrote disparagingly of the NSA. All authors expect criticism. But criticism before publication by an anonymous, divine third party is something novel. I began to leave notes for my secret reader. I tried to be polite, but irritation crept in. Once I wrote: "Good morning. I don't mind you reading my manuscript – you're doing so already – but I'd be grateful if you don't delete it. Thank you." There was no reply. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/feb/20/edward-snowden-...

It doesn't seem absurd to me that something like this could be done to intimidate or gaslamp journalists.

Sounds like a stuck key (backspace in particular).

That isn't REALLY the governments style. They like to send in the black suits to come have a polite word about your work and remind you of vague potential consequences.

If they're spying on you (and I'm sure they are) then all this does is cost them potential bugs. I'm all for believing that government intimidates journalist (particularly the British and US governments). I am just skeptical they're doing it this specific way.

Also I've had a keyboard with a struck backspace key (after writing a long essay no less). Maybe they're after me too?!

I'd be very interested in whether the deleting continued after disabling internet connectivity. I've met enough reporters to know that soda on the keyboard can cause this sort of behaviour.

I knew before I even clicked this would be the top comment on this story.

Fascinating! What else can you predict? :)

Looks like she's using Hollywood OS :-) http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?HollywoodOs http://www.steampunk.demon.co.uk/hollywoodos.htm

Quoted from the site: "A user may delete a file that is used by someone else, and force their screen to stop displaying it"

I barely remembered her name and I find it hard to believe she'd be at the top of the list of reporters the government wanted to surveil, intimidate or control. Glen Greenwald and Laura Poitras are two more likely targets (though I'm not really qualified to say who would be at the top.

If she suffers from delusions of grandeur, could this be her interpretation of her computer being part of a botnet? Someone might have indeed gained remote access (probably through her own unsafe computer practices), but this sounds like a script-kiddie playing.

Not buying it. In western nations, letting journalists "know" that you can access their computers is about the stupidest thing a "government-related entity" can do. It hardly ever works, produces a ton of backlash, and just imagine trying to do this with a few thousand journalists covering political topics.

I mean, granted, intelligence agencies can do things as stupid as any other governmental agency, but there is a limit to "covert" operations. Controlling western media on a useful scale is way beyond this limit.

> Controlling western media on a useful scale is way beyond this limit.

Define "useful scale". There are many examples of the government controlling mass media.

> "I knew because I’d had so many anomalies over the past year and a half, two years that somebody was interfering with the computer."

She's saying that she believed it to be infected for two years, and she didn't replace the PC, or do anything to remedy the 'bug' during that two years? Real genius we've got here. If this is the kind of critical thinking she brings to her journalism, I'm sure her book is going to be a great read.

This is exactly the kind of article that was written, edited, and published by and for people who don't understand anything about technology.

It sounds more likely that the delete key was stuck

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