I wrote to the NYT public editor and received this response:
Thank you for writing to us. The public editor has looked into this, and does not see any reason to believe that the article was retracted or taken down from the site.
As the news was developing, the article was updated and changed, which is not unusual (particularly when reporting on breaking news). But The Times continued to report on encryption, including in a a front-page story written by Ms. Bennhold, Mr. Schmidt as well as Adam Nossiter and Jim Yardley. Encryption was also the primary subject of a separate and detailed follow-up story.
It appears to be up at the moment, although I note that the URL redirects to make the SEO name simply “paris-terror-attack.html”. Conceivably this redirect was added because of your communication. Newsdiffs has a history that doesn’t show a deletion or restoration, but does show a complete rewrite in the November 16th change:
It’s a shame Newsdiffs doesn’t yet have support for de-duplicating content and tracking redirect edits. I bet they’d appreciate feedback, and maybe I’ll write some later. :)
I agree with your assessment, especially with the absurdity of the NYT’s narrow interpretation of “take down”. I just wanted to present information so everyone can clearly see that. Sorry, in retrospect I really should have said so explicitly.
I can’t believe they published it in the first place. Backdooring encryption in response to terrorist attacks is like poisoning your own food because terrorists also eat food.
I think you’re confusing backdoors and prohibitions against encryption, which did exist once upon a time. Most corporate laptops have a “backdoor” to their disk encryption, for example.
I think better terminology here is “single user encryption” vs “multi user encryption” — the question is how many legal entities can decrypt the disk, not whether it’s encrypted at all.
No. A “backdoor” to encryption is approximately the same thing as there not being any encryption in the first place, and that is completely different from authorized access.
Backdoors are unauthorized access from the perspective of the user. They are also, in effect, broken encryption. A backdoor requires a central repository somewhere with the keys to millions of encrypted data sets and streams. No entity has proven itself capable of keeping such a secret safe. “TOP SECRET” government data is repeatedly compromised and published online for all to see. When that happens with a “backdoor”, you’ll realize nobody actually had encrypted data in the first place. Far from securing yourself, with backdoors you achieve the exact opposite.
I wrote to the NYT public editor and received this response:
I think they are being a bit ridiculous in construing what “taken down” means so narrowly. The article was once available at http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/16/world/europe/paris-attackers-communicated-with-isis-officials-say.html ; it is no longer available there. That’s “taken down” in my book and I think most people would interpret it similarly.
It appears to be up at the moment, although I note that the URL redirects to make the SEO name simply “paris-terror-attack.html”. Conceivably this redirect was added because of your communication. Newsdiffs has a history that doesn’t show a deletion or restoration, but does show a complete rewrite in the November 16th change:
http://newsdiffs.org/article-history/www.nytimes.com/2015/11/16/world/europe/paris-attackers-communicated-with-isis-officials-say.html
There’s a separate and longer history of edits to the URL that is now the redirect target:
http://newsdiffs.org/article-history/www.nytimes.com/2015/11/16/world/europe/paris-terror-attack.html
It’s a shame Newsdiffs doesn’t yet have support for de-duplicating content and tracking redirect edits. I bet they’d appreciate feedback, and maybe I’ll write some later. :)
The story at the destination of the redirect has different authors, a different dateline, a different URL (of course), and doesn’t mention encryption. To my mind, that makes it a different story, not a rewrite. (You can see the original story, pre-redirect, at https://web.archive.org/web/20151115191248/http:/www.nytimes.com/2015/11/16/world/europe/paris-attackers-communicated-with-isis-officials-say.html).
I agree with your assessment, especially with the absurdity of the NYT’s narrow interpretation of “take down”. I just wanted to present information so everyone can clearly see that. Sorry, in retrospect I really should have said so explicitly.
I can’t believe they published it in the first place. Backdooring encryption in response to terrorist attacks is like poisoning your own food because terrorists also eat food.
We won’t poison our food, just everybody else’s food. Including our friends and family! We’ll make sure our food is safe, though. Don’t worry.
Right, that’s the rhetoric. The reality is they’d be poisoning their own food too.
I think you’re confusing backdoors and prohibitions against encryption, which did exist once upon a time. Most corporate laptops have a “backdoor” to their disk encryption, for example.
I think better terminology here is “single user encryption” vs “multi user encryption” — the question is how many legal entities can decrypt the disk, not whether it’s encrypted at all.
If my data is encrypted but the company that made it has a special key that gets around my encryption, that sounds like a backdoor.
No. A “backdoor” to encryption is approximately the same thing as there not being any encryption in the first place, and that is completely different from authorized access.
Backdoors are unauthorized access from the perspective of the user. They are also, in effect, broken encryption. A backdoor requires a central repository somewhere with the keys to millions of encrypted data sets and streams. No entity has proven itself capable of keeping such a secret safe. “TOP SECRET” government data is repeatedly compromised and published online for all to see. When that happens with a “backdoor”, you’ll realize nobody actually had encrypted data in the first place. Far from securing yourself, with backdoors you achieve the exact opposite.