Charlie Savage

Like many people, I have found zombie Twitter — Elon Musk’s X — to be increasingly unusable for the purposes that originally attracted me to it. Among many other degradations of the former Twitter experience, its algorithmic suppression of posts with news links significantly impedes my ability as a journalist to get a broader audience for and engagement with posts about my stories. This has been a problem for a couple of years, but only in the last month has a viable alternative emerged with the explosive growth of Bluesky. So for now I’ve shifted to that place, where my handle @charliesavage.

This move raises the question of what, if anything, to do about my now-dormant X account. I started posting on Twitter in 2009, and even if a lot of that was just ephemeral blather about sports or whatever, it feels weird to just nuke 15 years worth of posts that also contain discussion of news articles, detailed responses to critics whose attacks are still floating around the web, etc. Someone on Bluesky brought to my attention an open-source Github project, Tweetback, that allows one to post one’s downloaded archives. So I’ve done that here. Thanks to Zach Leatherman, the primary creator of that project, and to my son, a computer science major who helped me fix some glitches when rolling it out. (If you are thinking of trying this, here is the list of little problems we encountered, all of which were quick fixes once recognized.)

This is the next step in the ongoing experiment of stepping away from Twitter/X. I may eventually also delete all my posts there and shut down my account, but for now I’m leaving it up for three reasons. First, this will make it harder for anyone to successfully impersonate me on that platform, a real risk since the destruction of its verified identity system. Second, there is utility in keeping some original posts there to show their context — the downloaded archive does not show other people’s posts I was responding to or other people’s replies to my posts, and it cuts off the back ends of other people’s posts that I RT’d. Finally, there are on increasingly rare occasions still newsworthy posts there amid all the dreck, and having an open account can make it easier to see them.

Back in December 2020, the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board completed a report on the National Security Agency’s XKEYSCORE system, whose existence had come to light as part of the Snowden leaks. XKEYSCORE is a software program that N.S.A. analysts use to query the vast repository of stuff that the agency has sucked up, including through bulk collection of communications abroad or foreign-to-foreign stuff transiting the U.S. network under Executive Order 12333. The report was entirely classified at the time, but a few months later a Democratic PCLOB member, Travis LeBlanc, got declassified and released a lengthy statement basically saying the report was garbage, which I wrote about for the New York Times. Anyway, the agency has now released a declassified version of the report itself, though it is so heavily redacted that I don’t see anything newsy to write about in it that wasn’t brought to light in the flap over the LeBlanc statement in 2021. Here it is:

Nora Dannehy, now a Connecticut Supreme Court justice, publicly confirmed at her confirmation testimony that she resigned as the No. 2 in John Durham’s counter-investigation of the Russia investigation in protest of what she saw as unethical politicization of the effort by then-Attorney General Bill Barr. With my NYT colleagues Katie Benner and Adam Goldman, we had first reported this backstory in our January 2023 deep dive investigative project on the Durham probe. Our piece went into greater detail than what she testified, but everything she said dovetails with our reporting.

I wrote in the New York Times Magazine (gift link) about my weird connection to the experience of listening to Pink Floyd’s “The Dark Side of the Moon” while watching “The Wizard of Oz,” which is sometimes called “The Dark Side of the Rainbow.” I didn’t invent this idea, but an article about it I wrote in 1995, as a 19-year-old college intern at the Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette, is its earliest available documentation. Not unlike the Oxford English Dictionary’s citations to the first published usage of a word — even though people were surely using that word in the same way earlier, just without leaving any record of it — this article has come to be a stand-in for its mysterious origins. As a result people keep citing it and it has barnacled itself to my career as a national security and legal policy journalist. I’ve come to accept that the world is intent on treating this somewhat ridiculous thing as a defining contribution, and that no matter what else I have done or may yet do professionally, if I get an obituary after I die, it may well mention that article as a somehow notable fact.

UPDATE: Thanks to brothers Jeff and Scott Warden for sending in this shot – it’s apparently been taped to Jeff’s wall since 1995:

As Alberto Ibargüen — the head of the Knight Foundation and former publisher of The Miami Herald — retires, I would like to add a public note of personal appreciation to the encomiums.

https://www.philanthropy.com/article/knight-foundation-leader-to-retire-leaving-a-powerful-legacy

In 1999, when I went to work for The Miami Herald as a cub reporter just out of college and he was its publisher, he took a mentor-like interest in me. We got to know each other over occasional dinners/drinks, a Miami Heat game, etc.

In late 2001 or early 2002, when I was thinking about applying for a Knight Foundation journalism fellowship at Yale Law School, he encouraged it (he has a law degree from Penn) and wrote a strong letter of recommendation that really helped me stand out from the pac

The Yale year transformed my life both personally — I met my future wife, Luiza Chwialkowska Savage, another fellow — & professionally, putting me on the path to journalism that specialized in post-9/11 legal policy & executive power issues like Gitmo, hot topics on campus that year.

Alberto and I continued to periodically stay in touch as he went on to lead the Knight Foundation, where has steered altruism at a programmatic level. The help he provided to me as an individual is just a footnote to that legacy. Thank you, Alberto, and enjoy retirement!

Originally tweeted by Charlie Savage (@charlie_savage) on March 26, 2023.

Judge Beryl Howell, the chief judge of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia, has decided not to unseal filings and rulings ancillary to the material presented to the grand jury investigating Trump’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election and the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. The New York Times and I had made that request, along with Politico and Kyle Cheney. I was hoping to liberate for public understanding the briefs and rulings about whether Trump’s former aides could lawfully avoid answering questions as witnesses under executive privilege, a hidden fight that has raised novel issues about the extent of a former president to assert residual secrecy powers and that has likely set precedents that will affect unrelated future disputes.

Norma Thiele, my journalism teacher at North Side High School in Fort Wayne, Indiana, died on Monday at age 92. For more than four decades, “Miss Thiele” was a great writing teacher and adviser to the then-weekly student newspaper, The Northerner. After each issue of the paper, she would mark up everything that was wrong with it in red pen and staple it to the bulletin board; there was always a lot of red pen. She was also someone whom the teenaged version of me butted heads with a lot: she took no guff, but also had a big laugh. It was such a big and complicated influence that I wrote about our relationship as one of my college application essays. She retired at the end of my senior year in 1994. In honor of that, the editors of The Northerner – Josh Kline, Adam Loeffler and I – wrote to the former editors in chief going back two generations to solicit essays and memories about her. The principal, Dr. Richard Gardner, gave us some funds and we published all the essays in a special commemorative issue that surprised her when it showed up. On several occasions in the years since some of us newspaper vets met up with her for coffee or lunch to see how things were going. She never married and lived much of her life on a farm outside of Fort Wayne. But Miss Thiele took on a second career of sorts after retiring by becoming a mentor to the large Burmese refugee community in Fort Wayne — helping them adjust and navigate life, and often serving as an honored grandparent stand-in for people separated from their extended families. Her funeral service is tomorrow. https://www.midwestfuneralhome.com/obituary/Norma-Thiele

Updated 2/20/2023: Big thanks to Adam Loeffler, who found and scanned the tribute issue from her retirement, with remembrances from former editors-in-chief of The Northerner.

Chancellor Kathaleen St. Jude McCormick, a judge in Delaware, has ordered a previously heavily redacted court document to largely be made public, partly at my request. It is a complaint that Rodney Joffe filed against his former company, Neustar, in a lawsuit over whether Neustar has to pay his legal bills for matters arising from his role in the suspicions developed in 2016 by a group of cybersecurity experts about odd internet data they said could be a sign of a clandestine communications channel between someone associated with the Trump Organization and Alfa Bank, a Kremlin-linked financial institution. Neustar sold large amounts of so-called DNS data to Georgia Tech, where two of those data scientists worked, in connection with that effort and a larger project of mining DNS data for insights into malicious activities online.

I don’t see a stand-alone news story here but there are some interesting details so I will post it for any who want to read. Among other things, it shows that Neustar established a subsidiary called ERP Services to handle sensitive government contracts.

My thanks to Samantha Hamilton, the New York Times’ First Amendment Fellow, for assisting me in writing to the court to ask for it to be released. Apparently a Wall Street Journal reporter also made that request. I was not in the court when Chancellor McCormick ruled, but the anonymous person behind a Twitter account that follows the Delaware Court of Chancery, @chancery_daily, reported that she ruled from the bench, saying that the “public’s right of access is fact fundamental” and most of the document did not meet legal standards for redaction. Thanks to that person as well.

The Alfa Bank suspicions were a sideshow to the FBI’s pre-existing investigation into the Trump campaign’s links to Russia, which later evolved into the Robert Mueller investigation. They got new attention when the Trump-era special counsel, John Durham, indicted Joffe’s lawyer, Michael Sussmann, on an accusation that he had lied to the F.B.I. when relaying the tip; Sussmann was acquitted.

Aside from the political swirl surrounding Trump and Durham, the episode also served to focus broader attention on the fact that DNS data — essentially, a record of when a computer has prepared to connect with another computer over the internet — existed as a thing that can reveal private information about web browsing and communications and that is largely unregulated. In December, Senator Ron Wyden, the Oregon Democrat who is deeply interested in surveillance and privacy issues like bulk data sales, sent a letter to the FTC focused on some of Neustar’s practices.

I accompanied a military-escorted congressional fact-finding trip organized by @LindseyGrahamSC to look at detention of ISIS men & wives & children operated by a Kurdish-led militia that is the main US partner in northeastern Syria. Story has just posted:

This is what Al Hol — the vast camp for refugees and others displaced by war looks like from a helicopter. It is effectively a prison for ISIS wives and children, who are not allowed to leave. About 55,000 people are living there, half under age 12.

The delegation drove up a road between the main camp (for Iraqis and Syrians) and the annex (for third country nationals) and kids came to the fence to look. Here's a boy in a Star Wars shirt.

This boy, wearing clothes much too large for him, was clutching some notebooks and had made a star out of a sheet of paper, which he held up as we drove past him.

The delegation did not go inside the wire. Reporters — including my colleagues based in the Middle East — have done so. There were regular murders in the camp throughout 2021, and killings have surged since April.

A lot of the violence is attributed to hard-core ISIS zealot women who kill people for transgressions like talking to camp authorities. In this recent report, @SavetheChildren analyzed the trauma kids growing up there are experiencing.

Human rights groups and national-security specialists (including the military) broadly agree that leaving these kids to grow up there is a horrific problem. It is cruel today — and the conditions are likely to shape them into adults who will be radicalized & angry at the world.

We also went to Hasaka, where some of the adult men (and teenage boys culled from Al Hol as they grew older) are housed in a separate prison. In January, ISIS staged a major attack and breakout attempt on that prison, leading to a nearly two-week battle.

The attack came as the men had been housed in an ad hoc prison at an old technical college & were about to be moved to a more secure facility, custom-built by the UK as a prison. Authorities still don’t know exactly how many & who escaped: bodies were vaporized in the fighting.

Here's General "Amuda" (a nom de guerre), the head of a Syrian Democratic Forces commando unit that is a US partner force, on the roof of a prison building describing how the fierce fighting unfolded, day by day, to Graham. You can see some of the battle damage behind them.

One of the big fears is that Turkey — which considers the SDF to be an arm of the PKK, a Kurdish separatist group in Turkey that is a designated terrorist organization — may soon attack the SDF in Northern Syria, as it did in 2019.

If Turkey attacks again, the SDF may pull its guards from Al Hol & the ISIS fighter prisons to defend its territory, losing control of the detainees. There could also be between 500k and 1.5 million newly displaced people from the border region, flooding toward this area. Chaos.

“If a Turkish attack in fact comes down, we’re going to potentially have ISIS 2.0,” Brig. Gen. Claude K. Tudor Jr., head of the anti-ISIS Special Ops task force, told Graham. He's at right; left is Maj. Gen. John W. Brennan Jr., head of the overall task force in Iraq and Syria.

Back in 2018, I accompanied @LindseyGrahamSC & @SenatorShaheen on a similar trip to look at ISIS fighter prisons run by the SDF. The takeaway was that it was not fair or sustainable for countries to outsource their ISIS nationals problem to the Kurds.

This is Guantanamo on steroids. In 2018, the SDF was detaining about 1k ISIS “fighters.” Four years later, it’s holding 10k. (5k Syrian; 3k Iraqi; & 2k from some 60 other countries.) The Kurds can’t prosecute them — they aren’t a sovereign government.

But if the takeaway from the 2018 trip was the near-term risks of outsourcing the custody of ISIS adult male fighters to the SDF, the takeaway from this one was the longer-term risk the world is creating by abandoning all these kids to grow up in this hell. What will they become?

Originally tweeted by Charlie Savage (@charlie_savage) on July 19, 2022.

This interesting 130-page report from July 2021 was included in a tranche of otherwise much older documents related to the government’s investigations into links between the 9/11 hijackers and various Saudi officials and agencies, which have been declassified as a result of Biden’s Executive Order 14040. Ahead of the 20th anniversary of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and as various family members of victims of the attacks were lobbying for the release of such documents, the FBI appears to have written this report as a comprehensive review and summary of its work through the years on that topic.