What’s it like to cover national security in the current climate? Adam Entous of the New Yorker says it can be terrifying. “People are scared,” he said. “The job is much harder.”
Entous, who just shared a Pulitzer for his work at The Washington Post, says the Trump administration is so focused on catching officials who leak that individual copies of internal documents are seeded with different false information. “If it ends up in publication they know the leaker,” Entous told students at the University of Montana. “In that environment you have to be scared shitless, which is what I am.”
Developing and protecting his sources is critically important to Entous, whose stories rarely quote officials by name because they could face prosecution if they talked on the record.
“I sacrifice the trust of audience for the trust of sources dealing with classified information,” Entous said. “If the audience doesn’t think I’m credible, I’m sad. But I do anything to obscure where [information] is coming from.”
His methods may seem more suited for a spy than a reporter, but he says that’s how he has to operate these days. Some of his tactics:
- Never use email. For one story, he and a source shared a gmail account and left messages for each other in the draft folder, a technique he learned from a famous spy case. Entous prefers to meet sources in person if at all possible. On some occasions, he has communicated through a “cutout.”
- Use burners. He goes through a lot of “burner phones” and sometimes provides them to his sources. He records conversations but never plugs it into his computer. After making notes, he destroys not just the recording but the recorder itself.
- Encrypt everything. Entous leaves no files on his computer. Everything is on an encrypted key that he keeps with him at all times. He communicates using encrypted systems like Signal and WhatsApp, and carries his gear in a military-grade Faraday backpack that blocks all signals so he can’t be tracked.
- Share credit. When working with other reporters, he often asks to put their bylines first to throw investigators off the trail and force them to subpoena more phone records.
The stakes are high for journalists today trying to hold the powerful accountable, Entous said. “When Trump started saying the news media is the enemy, it was aimed at me and my colleagues. We were scared, hurt and angry.” His greatest fear is getting something wrong and proving Trump right.
On more than one occasion, Entous has not published information he couldn’t conclusively prove or that he was asked to withhold to avoid putting lives at risk. “You might get scooped and that’s OK,” he said. “My career will survive [being scooped] but not if I’m irresponsible.”
