The Sunday Times article, with the headline “British Spies Betrayed to Russian and Chinese,” carries the byline of Tom Harper, Richard Kerbaj and Tim Shipman and expands on a news story spreading across the UK on the pulling of some intelligence operators from Russia and China by the UK government over fears that they might have been compromised by information leaked by Edward Snowden.
This article prompted an article published last night on The Intercept by Glenn Greenwald: “The Sunday Time’ Snowden Story is Journalism at It’s Worst — and Filled With Falsehoods.”
The Intercept article, which attempts to detail alleged inaccuracies in The Sunday Times article, has prompted Times Newspapers Ltd., the owner of the Times, to circle the wagons and issue a DMCA takedown notice in the U.S. The notice indicates that The Times takes exception to the posting of a photograph of yesterday’s Times front page, as well the inclusion of a handful of quotes from the Times article — all of which would appear to be covered under U.S. “fair use” copyright provisions.
Since the publication of The Intercept article, The Sunday Times has made some quick edits to Sunday’s article, according to Greenwald:
“The Sunday Times has now quietly deleted one of the central, glaring lies in its story: that David Miranda had just met with Snowden in Moscow when he was detained at Heathrow carrying classified documents. By ‘quietly deleted,’ I mean just that: they just removed it from their story without any indication or note to their readers that they’ve done so (though it remains in the print edition and thus requires a retraction).”
A spokesperson for The Intercept has indicated the site has no intention of complying with the notice.
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Christine Hall has been a journalist since 1971. In 2001, she began writing a weekly consumer computer column and started covering Linux and FOSS in 2002 after making the switch to GNU/Linux. Follow her on Twitter: @BrideOfLinux
As far as I’m concerned, any publication that is owned by Murdoch has no credibility. I know I shouldn’t generalize like that, but there are too many other quality sources of info out there. I’d rather not waste my time with Murdoch’s stuff.
Thanks for the article, Christine.
I hope The Intercept can stand against the onslaught from the Murdoch empire that I suspect will come their way.
The ST article has been greeted with widespread scepticism and some ridicule in the UK, because. the article comes a few days after the government comissioned Anderson report (“A Question of Trust”) was published. It called for greater transparency and control of the Intelligence services activities. Clearly the ST article, from an anonymous source, must have been a coincidence?
Glenn Greenwald, interviewed by the BBC, re-iterated his criticism of the article succinctly and his tweet rejecting the dmca notice is widely reported here too.