Timely!

Posted May 23, 2013 2:24 UTC (Thu) by jmorris42 (guest, #2203)
Parent article: DeadDrop and Strongbox

Wondering how you guys could post this and fail to note how timely it is. Had it went live on schedule nobody would have noticed, but the delay just happened to cause it to hit the news at exactly the time when multiple assaults on media outfits trying to catch whistleblowers also hit the papers.

We probably always needed something like this, but few would have actually used it. Especially back in the days of Bush, the Patriot Act and whining about the evil government coming after your library records... lots of talk but nobody actually believed it would happen. Well now it happened and lookie who it was that went and done invoked the Espionage more in four years than in the decades it was on the books before.

Timely!

Posted May 23, 2013 7:04 UTC (Thu) by micka (subscriber, #38720) [Link] (6 responses)

You seem to talk about precise events that are occuring now.
I might not be be in the same part of the world than you (US ?) so I'm not aware of these possibly related events.Do you mind giving pointers ?

Timely!

Posted May 23, 2013 8:46 UTC (Thu) by smitty_one_each (subscriber, #28989) [Link] (1 responses)

>Do you mind giving pointers ?
Probably not without a system like the one described in the article.

Timely!

Posted May 23, 2013 9:05 UTC (Thu) by micka (subscriber, #38720) [Link]

Thank you, that was useful, now I understand.

Timely!

Posted May 23, 2013 11:57 UTC (Thu) by sorpigal (guest, #36106) [Link] (3 responses)

In the USA it was recently (within the last ~2 weeks or so) reported that the government had been monitoring the business and personal phones of some large number of employees (read: journalists) of a respected news organization. The upshot of this is that if any of these people over a rather long time frame (months, I believe) had called or been called by a confidential source the content of their conversation was recorded.

If I seem vague on details it's because I haven't really followed the story, but I had the same reaction: DeadDrop comes at *just* the right time. Barnum could not have picked a better moment to unveil a mechanism to allow safe communication between journalists and sources that makes a plausible promise to be free of government surveillance.

Timely!

Posted May 23, 2013 12:16 UTC (Thu) by micka (subscriber, #38720) [Link] (2 responses)

Ah I see. We (in France) had similar events. One journalist's phone bill was studied by an "intelligence" agency to find its source (who happened to be from the ministry of justice) in a political affair ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bettencourt_affair ). Then that was the judge's phone bill...

Timely!

Posted May 23, 2013 20:20 UTC (Thu) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (1 responses)

This wasn't just one Journalist, this was a very large portion (if not the entire staff) of the New York Times, and not just for a short time but for several months.

Timely!

Posted May 25, 2013 21:18 UTC (Sat) by fandingo (guest, #67019) [Link]

s/New York Times/Associated Press/