The
highly sophisticated hacking of Sharyl Attkisson's computers
Published
October 28, 2014
NOW
PLAYING
CBS
News reporter blowing lid off her experience
From the moment
that Sharyl Attkisson met a shadowy source I’ll call Big Mac, she was plunged
into a nightmare involving mysterious surveillance of her computers.
They met at a
McDonald’s in Northern Virginia at the beginning of 2013, and the source (she
dubs him Number One) warned her about the threat of government spying. During
their next hamburger rendezvous, Big Mac told Attkisson, then a CBS News
reporter constantly at odds with the Obama administration, that he was
“shocked” and “flabbergasted” by his examination of her computer and that this
was “worse than anything Nixon ever did.”
Attkisson’s
forthcoming book--“Stonewalled: My Fight for Truth Against the Forces of
Obstruction and Intimidation in Obama’s Washington”—reads in part like a spy thriller.
Just when you think Attkisson’s imagination might be running away with her
comes wave after wave of evidence that both her CBS computer and personal iMac
were repeatedly hacked and its files accessed, including one on Benghazi. A
consultant hired by CBS reached the same conclusion. Further scrutiny of her
personal desktop proves that “the interlopers were able to co-opt my iMac and
operate it remotely, as if they were sitting in front of it.” And an inspection
revealed that an extra fiber-optics line had been installed in Attkisson’s home
without her knowledge.
This is chilling
stuff.
There is the
strong implication that an administration that spied on the Associated Press
and Fox News correspondent James Rosen might have been involved. A Justice Department
spokesman said in an earlier statement that "to our knowledge" the
department "has never 'compromised' Ms. Attkisson's computers" or
tried to obtain information from any of her devices. A spokeswoman for CBS News
said the network had no comment on the book.
In the fall of
2013, with White House officials accusing Attkisson of being biased in her
Benghazi reporting, the files in her MacBook Air suddenly began deleting at
hyperspeed right before her eyes. She videotaped the process and showed it to
two computer experts. "They're [blanking] with you," one says.
"They're trying to send you a message," says the other. The experts
also found evidence that the intruders had tried to cover their tracks by
erasing 23 hours of log-in information.
The computer
melodrama forms the backdrop for the deterioration of Attkisson’s relationship
with CBS, where she worked for two decades and won Emmys and other awards. Time
and again, she writes, network executives in New York and Washington derailed
her stories and treated her like a troublemaker:
“They rarely said
the story wasn’t going to air. They just let it sit around and ‘loved it’ until
it began to stink like old fish.”
And Attkisson
names names, saying the blocking of her work became virtually routine under CBS
anchor Scott Pelley and his then-executive producer, Pat Shevlin. Stories were
repeatedly rewritten, watered down and delayed until they never made air, she
says. And Attkisson says these weren’t just stories that took on politically
charged controversies involving the administration, but also pieces that
challenged government waste and corporate conduct, such as the questions
surrounding Boeing’s Dreamliner.
Perhaps the most
eye-opening tale involves CBS’s “60 Minutes,” Benghazi and the president. During
the second presidential debate in 2012, Obama challenged Mitt Romney by
insisting he had labeled the assault in Libya a terrorist attack the very next
day. This became a huge controversy, especially since CNN’s Candy Crowley had
sided with the president.
Turns out that
Steve Kroft had conducted a “60 Minutes” interview with Obama the day after the
attack, portions of which had never aired. When Attkisson did a story on the
flap, her CBS bosses instructed her to use a particular script and a particular
sound bite that seemed to back up the president’s version.
She was stunned
when a CBS colleague later read her another exchange from the interview:
KROFT: Mr.
President, this morning you went out of your way to avoid the use of the word
terrorism in connection with the Libya attack.
OBAMA: Right.
The correspondent
then asked point-blank:
KROFT: Do you
believe that this was a terrorist attack?
OBAMA: Well, it’s
too early to know exactly how this came about, what group was involved, but
obviously it was an attack on Americans.
Attkisson writes,
“I couldn’t get past the fact that upper-level journalists at CBS had been a
party to misleading the public.”
Under pressure
from Attkisson and others, the network posted the exchange on its website the
Sunday night before the election, but it got lost in the final hours of the
campaign. She says CBS News President David Rhodes promised her there would be
an internal investigation, but she never heard another word about it.
Attkisson, who
will not comment until the book is published, resigned in frustration last
spring. She says there was a campaign to paint her as a disgruntled
conservative, while in reality she investigated George W. Bush’s administration
as aggressively as Obama’s.
More important,
she makes a broader case against agenda-driven journalism: “We do stories on
food stamps, but only to the extent that we prove the cast that they’re needed,
without also examining well-established fraud and abuse. We look at
unemployment but only to the extent that we present sympathetic characters
showing that benefits should be extended rather than examining, also, the
escalating cost and instances of fraud. We cover minimum wage but only to the
extent that we help make the case for raising it, without giving much due to
the other side, which argued it will have the opposite effect than intended.”
Attkisson doesn’t
explicitly accuse CBS and the rest of the mainstream media of a pervasive
liberal bias. But that view is clear from sheer accumulation of detail in her
book.
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