New York Times: No friend to dissidents

Reveals secret shadow internet to get information out. [Link]

The title is bad enough (“U.S. Underwrites Internet Detour Around Censors“), but the fools who wrote the article* gave names and procedures. They also explicitly used still-classified material to break this story:

The American effort, revealed in dozens of interviews, planning documents and classified diplomatic cables obtained by The New York Times, ranges in scale, cost and sophistication.

Which is illegal. It was illegal when it happened to Bush, it’s illegal now, and it will be illegal in the next Republican administration. It’d also be a stupid idea even if it was legal. 

And

I presume that most of my readers get the point, but we might have some visitors from the New York Times or other newspapers, so let me spell this out: printing this story did not help any of the good guys. It did help the career advancement of half a dozen or so intelligence operatives for some very nasty regimes, as they can now easily pass along to their spymasters formerly-classified or simply obscure details about American covert aid to dissidents. Those regimes now know who to look for, and where to look; and with that, they can trace paths until they get to somebody that they can actually target. Which they will, because that is what bad guys do. Which is why this information was either classified or obscured in the first place. Put even more simply, this information was on a need-to-know basis, and we did not need to know that.