So an anonymous source says he heard something about something. Great reporting!

Ah! OK, so the only supporting evidence for "limiting the number of people read in" is the Russia investigation -- which is now being conducted, in apparently leak-free secrecy, by special counsel Robert Mueller. So it has to do with Mueller actually doing his job, rather than Trump's White House ominously cracking down on leaks.

OK, but what matters and how thin?

Ha! How can they quote this with a straight face? What crackdown? Leaks are coming faster than ever out of the White House.

OK so theses unspecified subtle and not-so-subtle changes, what are they? Apparently, judging from the following paragraphs, just a lot of Trump hot air, which like all Trump hot air may not signify anything. So what we have here is: Anonymous national security officials tell us they are worried about Trump's threats. Legit. But not what the headline says.

So many speculations here.

OK this sounds almost like a fact. But what specifically does that mean?

There is a lot of "fear' and "concern" but where's the evidence?

Let's see if there's any supporting evidence for this assertion.

Amber sounds really scary, doesn't it?

Marcy's very good point is that while this lead gives the impression that the hackers are hacking into the controls of nuclear facilities, that is in fact not what the story says if you read it carefully.

As Marcy points out, she is not arguing that Russian spying on how our nuclear facilities work is not without risk.

It does carry risks that they are collecting the information so they can one day sabotage our facilities. But if we want to continue spying on North Korea’s or Iran’s nuclear program, we would do well to remember that we consider spying on nuclear facilities — even by targeting the engineers that run them — squarely within the bounds of acceptable international spying. By all means we should try to thwart this presumed Russian spying. But we should not suggest — as the NYT seems to be doing — that this amounts to sabotage, to the kinds of things we did with StuxNet, because doing so is likely to lead to very dangerous escalation.

And it’s not just me saying that. Robert M. Lee, who works on cyber defense for the energy industry and who recently authored a report on Crash Override, Russia’s grid-targeting sabotage tradecraft (and as such would have been an obvious person to cite in this article) had this to say:

So while the threat to nuclear from cyber is a real concern because of impact it’s very improbable and “what about Stuxnet” is a high bar

Or said more simply: phishing emails are lightyears removed from “what about Stuxnet” arguments. It’s simply otherworldly in comparison.

There’s one more, very real reason why the NYT should have been far more responsible in clarifying that this is collection, not sabotage. Among the things Shadow Brokers, with its presumed ties to Russia, has been threatening to expose is “compromised network data from Russian, Chinese, Iranian, or North Korean nukes and missile programs.” If the NYT starts inflating the threat from cyber collection on nuclear facilities, it could very easily lead to counter-inflation, with dangerous consequences for the US and its ability to monitor our adversaries.

There is very real reason to be concerned that Russia — or some other entity — is collecting information on how our nuclear and other power facilities work. But, as Lee notes, conflating that with StuxNet is “otherworldly.”

Here's Marcy:

That is, even while screaming “Amber Russian bear OMIGOSH StuxNet!!” the article admitted that this is not StuxNet. This amounts to spies, quite possibly Russian, “hunting SysAdmins,” just like the United States does (of course, the US and its buddy Israel also assassinate nuclear engineers, which for all its known assassinations, Russia is not known to have done).

That distinction is utterly critical to make, no matter how much you want to fearmonger with readers who don’t understand the distinction.

There is spying — the collection of information on accepted targets. And there is sabotage — the disruption of critical processes for malicious ends.

This is spying, what our own cyber doctrine calls “Cyber Collection.”

Cyber Collection: Operations and related programs or activities conducted by or on behalf of the United States Government, in or through cyberspace, for the primary purpose of collecting intelligence – including information that can be used for future operations – from computers, information or communications systems, or networks with the intent to remain undetected. Cyber collection entails accessing a computer, information system, or network without authorization from the owner or operator of that computer, information system, or network or from a party to a communication or by exceeding authorized access. Cyber collection includes those activities essential and inherent to enabling cyber collection, such as inhibiting detection or attribution, even if they create cyber effects. ( C/NF)

"NYT fearmongers nukes" is how blogger Marcy Wheeler (emptywheel) puts it in a great takedown post of this story, which I am turning into annotations as a proof of concept.

Bad editing transformed a good story into stenography.

So actually the editors took out the self-evidently hyperbolic and ambiguous "Defend Our Civilization" in the headline, and subbed in "Will to Survive" which is nonsensical but precisely what Trump would have wanted in the headline.

The way Newsdiffs works is the pink stuff was in an earlier version, but deleted. The green stuff has been added. As a result, the "highlighted" bits by me are either orange (where I'm highlighting bits that were deleted) or yellow-green (where I'm highlighting bits that remained.)

What does that even mean? The story now simply regurgitates Trump.

Why cut this?

This was moved way down, apparently. But it's a seminal contrast with his talk about having the will to triumph over evil. See, i.e., this terrifyingly fascistic tweet of his.

Again, a good explanation of what he was doing, rather than a mindless recitation of his nonsense.

This headline begs for some explanation. The "will to survive"? Of course the West has the "will to survive." What the hell does he really mean? It would be nice if the story explained that.

This deleted phrasing is much better than what ended up in the story: Rather than simply quoting Trump's words, it makes clear that they were hyperbolic and dark. I wish we could tell who edited this.

The mewling sycophancy of this particular tweet begs a short discussion at least.

On the one hand, this is a wonderfully bold and accurate headline from WaPo. Bravo!

But on the other, the story is really a devastating look at how Trump said solving North Korea was easy and was a sign of Obama's impotence, and now he's acknowledging it's hard and he's got nothing.

FWIW, I don't think that's a good read of the tweet below. Trump has been consistent that China needs to do something, the only exception being his ridiculous bluster.

No mealy-mouthed generalities here. Nice work.

Philip Bump is, sadly, too honest and too forthright to actually appear in the print edition of The Washington Post. A Nexis search found exactly 0 stories by him have ever made it to the front page.