If the workers of the world want to win, all they have to do is recognize their own solidarity. They have nothing to do but fold their arms and the world will stop. The workers are more powerful with their hands in their pockets than all the property of the capitalists. --Joe Ettor (IWW labor organizer)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IASdERt3-m0
Monday, February 26, 2024
Journalist Timothy Burke was Indicted for the Crime of... Journalism ~~ Parker Molloy
No, he didn't hack any computers. This is nonsense.
Hello, dear readers. Parker here.
You may know Timothy Burke as the man who created that 2018 viral mash-up of Sinclair Broadcast Group anchors reading a weird pro-Trump message on air.
Well, Burke is once again in the news, and this time it’s because he’s facing some serious charges brought by the federal government over his leak of unaired footage of Kanye West’s 2022 interview with Tucker Carlson to Vice and Media Matters.
Burke’s case is the topic of this week’s edition of First Five.
First Five: Stories on a Single Topic to Start Your Week
After being raided by federal law enforcement back in 2023, Burke has been charged with seven counts of intercepting or disclosing communications and six counts of accessing a protected computer. I’m not a lawyer, but this sounds like BS. Here’s what you should know:
Tampa media consultant Tim Burke was charged Thursday with 14 federal crimes related to alleged computer hacks at Fox News.
Federal law enforcement officials arrested Burke, 45, on Thursday morning. He appeared in handcuffs in a Tampa federal courtroom Thursday afternoon, wearing a brown sweater, white collared shirt and dark jeans, and was released on his own recognizance shortly thereafter.
The indictment charges Burke with one count of conspiracy; six counts of accessing a protected computer without authorization; and seven counts of intercepting or disclosing wire, oral or electronic communications.
Burke runs Burke Communications, a media and political consulting company. He produces a wide range of video content, including for high-profile media clients like HBO and ESPN. He previously worked for the online news outlets Deadspin and the Daily Beast.
According to the indictment, Burke and an unnamed person used “compromised credentials” to access and save protected commercial broadcast video streams, then disseminate specific clips after taking steps to mask where they came from and how they were obtained.
The case of Tim Burke, a prominent Tampa media figure, took another dramatic turn Thursday when the federal government hit Burke with 14 federal charges, including conspiracy.
This isn’t Burke’s first time in the headlines. The owner of the media and political consulting company Burke Communications has been creating viral content for more than a decade. In 2013, Burke was on the team of journalists for the website Deadspin who broke the explosive story that the famous girlfriend of former Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te’o never actually existed.
So how did Burke end up as the subject of federal law enforcement scrutiny? Here’s a brief timeline.
Last May, Burke’s home in Tampa, Florida, was raided by the FBI as part of the bureau’s investigation into how unaired clips of Fox News’ Tucker Carlson Tonight were leaked to Vice and liberal watchdog Media Matters. The indictment does not name Fox News explicitly, but instead refers to Network #1 “a multinational media company headquartered in New York City, New York that produced and distributed content through multiple brands.”
The clips included video of Kanye West repeating antisemitic tropes, as well as embarrassing footage of Carlson making inappropriate comments to his make-up artist and talking about giving a deposition in the Dominion defamation case — an experience he said “triggered the shit out of me” — that was conducted by a lawyer whom Carlson referred to as a “slimy little motherfucker.” (Carlson was later dropped by the network.)
The leaks were deeply embarrassing for Fox News, whose executives, the The Daily Beast reported, “full-on freaked out” about the Kanye clip in particular. Fox News lawyers later sent a cease-and-desist letter to Media Matters warning them to stop publishing the clips. “Reporting on newsworthy leaked material is a cornerstone of journalism. For Fox to argue otherwise is absurd and further dispels any pretense that they’re a news operation,” Media Matters president Angelo Carusone wrote in a statement at the time.
Here’s what we know: Fox News does the Kanye West–Tucker Carlson interview. They broadcast two hours of it. At the same time, Fox, like many other broadcasters, are livestreaming continuously to many different entities—to their affiliates, and so on—and these live feeds are in high definition and encrypted. But at the same time, they are also broadcasting low-definition, unencrypted feeds. They’re internet addressable, with no user ID and password required. All you need to know is the URL.
There are third-party sites that transmit these live feeds as a service. They have password-protected websites. And in this case, somebody on the internet provided Tim with the publicly posted user ID and password for a demo account on one of these services that are used by broadcasters. So Tim logs in to the site, and the site automatically downloads to his computer a list of all the livestreams on the site. The important thing to note here is that those livestreams did not require a user ID and password to access them, just a URL.
“Indictment of journalist raises serious First Amendment concerns” (Freedom of the Press Foundation, 2/22/24)
Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) Advocacy Director Seth Stern said, “The Computer Fraud and Abuse Act is a vague, ambiguous law, and the Supreme Court and the DOJ itself have cautioned prosecutors against testing its outer limits. Prosecutors should not be experimenting with the CFAA as a means of criminalizing journalists finding information online that embarrasses public figures.”
Lawyers for Burke have said that he got the Tucker Carlson outtakes from a livestreaming site where Fox uploaded unencrypted footage of the entire interview with Ye to a public URL. They’ve contended that Burke obtained login credentials for an unrestricted “demo account” for the site from a source, who found them publicly posted online. He was then able to locate a URL hosting the interview that can be accessed by anyone, without credentials.
The CFAA prohibits unauthorized access to “protected computers” (which has been defined to include websites) and is commonly associated with criminal hacking.
However, the indictment against Burke does not accuse him and his source of hacking into any servers, or deceiving anyone, to get the outtakes or any of the other content he allegedly intercepted. Nowhere does the indictment allege that either the footage or the login credentials were not publicly available. Instead, it accuses Burke and the source of “using the internet to search protected computers” and “scour[ing] the protected computers for electronic items and information they deemed desirable.”
The indictment threatens journalists’ ability to gather information online by implying that they have a previously unrecognized duty to ask for express permission to use information they find posted on the internet. It does so by accusing Burke and his source of "steal[ing]" information they found online merely by using it “without securing any authorization or permission.”
Burke, Carlson, and Fox News
I’ve long respected Burke’s work, and I stand with him now.
This indictment isn't just an attack on Burke; it's an assault on the foundation of investigative journalism and the broader digital news landscape. The charges, predicated on journalistic endeavors to bring to light information that powerful figures like Carlson, West, and Fox News would rather keep hidden, underscore a chilling effort to criminalize the core of journalistic work: uncovering and sharing the truth.
The Freedom of the Press Foundation’s analysis of the indictment reveals a concerning potential precedent that could leave journalists vulnerable to prosecution for simply doing their jobs. This case is emblematic of a larger battle against attacks on journalistic freedoms, and we must rally behind Burke and press freedom, recognizing that his fight is intrinsically linked to the broader struggle to safeguard the tenets of free and independent journalism.
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