Tim Onion: Fucking ridiculous. — Subium • Bluesky web client

Fucking ridiculous.

Journalist Tim Burke Indicted For Leaking Tucker Carlson Clips That Embarrassed Fox Newswww.rollingstone.com The clips, which included unaired, antisemitic remarks by Kanye West, were published by Vice and Media Matters.

Absolute bullshit. WTF.

“you are under arrest for exposing anti-Semitism” is a hell of a thing

“no not that anti-semitism, we want the kind we use to manufacture consent for Palestinian genocide”

How the fuck did Garland not just tell Fox to go piss up a rope? How the fuck is leaking embarrassing clips bringing 14 federal charges down on anyone's head?

If we’re fair and evenhanded and take their concerns seriously, this time they DEFINITELY won’t yank away the football.

Is Kanye being an anti-Semite a state secret now or something I don't understand

According to the Tampa Bay Times article, he's charged with computer hacking (even though he hasn't been accused of doing anything resembling hacking) and of "intercepting communications". Seems sketchy af.

How did we end up with a justice department so scared of being called biased against conservatives that it's pursuing conservative grudges for them even when they're out of power?

Info war

Federalist Society

Isn't this one of those 1st amendment thingies?

I'm waiting on the GOP to decry this "weaponization of the Justice Department," as I'm sure they'll do any moment. (Of course, I'm not and I don't but...yeah)

Hi Ben, there’s a Tim Burke legal fund: timburkelegalfund.org

Tim Burke Legal Fundtimburkelegalfund.org Information about supporting Tim Burke.

What country is this again?

Absolutely crazy. Thank you for helping me be aware of this story! Donated to the defense fund!

For those that hit the paywall: archive.is/2024.02.22-1...

Donate to his defense fund: timburkelegalfund.org#one

Tim Burke Legal Fundtimburkelegalfund.org Information about supporting Tim Burke.

How would he be indicted? Which laws does that break? This is a serious question.

From what I can tell, the prosecution is alleging he hacked into Fox's encrypted database using stolen credentials, which would be illegal. According to Burke, though, he was able to access the unedited interview through an unencrypted URL using publicly-available credentials.

timburkelegalfund.org

once again showing our country is ruled by dinosaurs

Thank you for the info. If the DOJ can't prove their allegations this will be a disaster for them.

Hopefully it will all come out in court. Either the prosecutor is lying or Burke is.

The allegations in the indictment are that the streams themselves were publicly available if you knew the URL, but the list of URLs was password-protected and that Burke accessed that list using credentials he was not authorized to have.

Times like this I harken back to "A Man For All Seasons" which my crim law professor required all of us to read as first years. This seems like a classic instances of "I know what's legal, not what's 'right' and I'll stick to what's legal."

Sounds like the data was available out in the open through unsecured streams. If true, this will almost certainly get thrown out eventually but will be expensive for Tim Burke and have a chilling effect on others

He's indicted for violations of CFAA

Wait, what? The content was, per the article, from a publicly accessible feed with no protections beyond being obscure. How is this even a case if the content was publicly accessible? That's not theft, at most it's yelling "hey look at this thing" & pointing to something happening in broad daylight.

The indictment has allegations that some resources were password-protected and that Burke accessed them via credentials that were sent to him by a friend. If those allegations are true, that could be sticky for him.

If Burke's lawyer is to be believed, he got publicly available demo credentials to a site listing links to Fox News streams. www.cjr.org/the_media_to...

Q&A: Tim Burke’s lawyer on the seizure of his devices and what it means for journalismwww.cjr.org In May, agents from the Federal Bureau of Investigation showed up at Tim Burke’s home in Tampa, Florida, and seized several computers, hard drives, his cellphone, and other equipment that he uses as a...

Oof. This is maybe not great for him. Just because credentials are "publicly posted" doesn't automatically mean that any given individual is authorized to use them to access a computer. (Scare quotes because "publicly posted" can mean a lot of different things.)

Please note, nothing I say on this issue should be taken as an endorsement of these charges or an opinion that they're not complete bullshit in the grand scheme of things

CFAA is one of the broadest Crim law statutes around. It's terrifying.

I just don't know how you prove intent if the credentials truly were public.

If someone's email address and password are published in a paste on doxbin, that doesn't mean it's totes legal to log into their email

"Publicly available" might be Burke's lawyer's interpretation of something not so cut & dried. We'll see what comes out.

Wait, so did he get a URL and then have to type in the credentials or was this some sort of: www.example.com/link_to_url/with_credentials_token_here/image/5 or something? Or even www.example.com/link_to_url/image/5?credential_token=xyxpdq And the credential token is some sort of obfuscated key?

Basically, if it's a URL where the credentials are built-in AND they are obfuscated then he has NO way of knowing he's subverting a password. AND the people in charge of it are idiots. So, since we're talking about Fox News, it's worth asking...

I don’t know. The indictment definitely has a screenshot of someone DMing him credentials.

Looks like he grabbed the credentials for the second site off the ftp of the first one. Couldn't find the screenshot on storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us... but the DMs were discussed. So, yeah...

Okay, I can totally see how there is a case. But the resources that were not password-protected should be dropped from the charges. Including them feels like intentional inflation of charges, which might cause some jury members to assume guilt simply by virtue of sheer volume.

Yeah well, we're in an information war and some of the people waging it have a lot of power

This reminds me of the journalist charged with “hacking” because he viewed the HTML source of a state website, noticed it showed teachers’ SSNs, and *let them know* before publishing anything

Journalist indicted for journalism America, you're doing great sweaty

Someone needs to create a blog that keeps track of all these URLs

Here's the Timothy Burke indictment: storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

storage.courtlistener.com

What the hell is the "National Sports League" that federal prosecutors allege is "one of the major sports leagues in North America"? Do they run the World Series of Sportsball? storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.us...

bsky.app/profile/abtn...

It's actually just a weird introduction of a pseudonym, made confusing by the lack of all-caps (like in "CONSPIRATOR 2") and the definite "The".

I think they’re anonymizing the actual identity of the organization (probably the NHL?), along with StreamCo and the two named networks (#1 Fox and #2 NBC?)

based on the URL in this part of the filing, streamco is liveu[.]tv

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