>Odd to have officials speaking anonymously about an investigation while the Secret Service is putting out press releases about it.
This is a bizarre new take that seems to be making the rounds. Not that they are right or wrong but they've been a staple of national security communication and reporting for as long as once followed the news, which for me is dating back to the George W. Bush admin. Glenn Greenwald in his heyday had a field day ripping apart credulous NSA wiretapping reporting that relied on unnamed officials. In fact I think he popularized the idea that the pervasiveness of such quotes was so widespread that they constituted a systematic problem with national security reporting. Not that I think it's necessarily a good practice but I wouldn't say it's presence in a story constitutes a "tell" that anything about the story is unusual.
I don't understand what's bizarre about it. When you're putting out a press release about something, you want the public to know about it for some reason. And the U.S. Secret Service met with a huge number of outlets and did lots of separate interviews about this particular takedown. A lot of self-congratulation going on in those articles.
And they try to tie the UN to this SIM card farm over and over in those official statements. Then there's this one anonymous source inside the New York Times article.
> There is no specific information that the network, now dismantled, posed a threat to the conference itself, Secret Service officials said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation.
So in the middle of a press conference and media blitz, including official posts on the U.S. Secret Service website, we're announcing this giant takedown, and then we have to go to one anonymous source to find out that there is no threat to the actual UN itself.
It could be that I'm the crazy one here, but that sure seems weird to me. Have you seen that kind of thing before?
The story has a number of technical problems with it, but there's a lot of other weird stuff besides this. I listed it out in a separate post if you want to go look.
This is a bizarre new take that seems to be making the rounds. Not that they are right or wrong but they've been a staple of national security communication and reporting for as long as once followed the news, which for me is dating back to the George W. Bush admin. Glenn Greenwald in his heyday had a field day ripping apart credulous NSA wiretapping reporting that relied on unnamed officials. In fact I think he popularized the idea that the pervasiveness of such quotes was so widespread that they constituted a systematic problem with national security reporting. Not that I think it's necessarily a good practice but I wouldn't say it's presence in a story constitutes a "tell" that anything about the story is unusual.