Like Will McAvoy refusing to disclose the name of his source, we refuse to relent in our recaps of Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom. In this week’s discussion, which we dedicate to our most loyal fan, @svaroschi, we explore the wisdom of storing piles of classified documents in a glass office, the likelihood of traveling from New York City to Washington and back in four hours in a rainstorm while avoiding government surveillance of the BlackBerry in your hand, and whether any news organization’s operational security could be as dismal as ACN’s.

Peter Maass: Gametime!

Margot Williams: So what about the opsec of having all the documents in the middle of the newsroom in a glass-walled office?

PM: I thought the exact same thing. As in, you must be fucking kidding?

MW: And non-staffers wandering in.

PM: I also thought, I hope they have a couple of industrial-strength shredders, because you don’t want that many classified documents lying around for a long time.

MW: And boxing them up to send to the Associated Press? With the ACN logo on the cover sheets. COVER SHEETS?

PM: Just printing out those things seemed incredibly irresponsible. Not to belabor our good friend Mr. Air Gap, but was there any sign that they printed those things securely? Micah, what can we say about protocols for printing 27,000 classified documents, should we so desire?

Micah Lee: Some printers store a cache of everything that’s been printed on them. So if the folks at ACN used their big networked office printer, there’s a good chance that all 27,000 documents are both on their air-gapped computer as well as on the networked printer now. If you want to print secret documents in a secure way, it’s best to use a dedicated air-gapped printer. You might also want to open the printer and remove the wireless card.

MW: I don’t think they did that

PM: Remove the card so that outsiders can’t teleport into the stuff being printed, right?

MW: So the HR guy can’t get in. Like the photos deleted from Instagram. The near enemy=HR.

PM: Never thought I’d say this about someone from human relations, but I’m going to miss the HR guy from The Newsroom. Kind of liked him.

ML: You might be interested to know that printers often uniquely watermark the pages that were printed.

PM: Meaning?

ML: If the FBI raids the AP and finds the boxes of documents (assuming the docs didn’t already have the ACN logo on the letterhead) they could use the documents themselves to prove they came from ACN.

MW: Were those cardboard boxes secure? They did have TAPE.

PM: Tape is a higher level of encryption.

MW: Total Adhesive Protocol Encryption=TAPE.

PM: May I raise another risible opsec issue in this episode?

ML: Please.

PM: Mac’s cellphone. As in, taking your cellphone to a meeting with a secret source who just leaked 27,000 docs to you. Not. A. Good. Idea.

ML: OK, so there were a large number of problems with that. First, the act of arranging the meeting would be very, very tricky to do securely, assuming Mac is under surveillance, which I think is a fair assumption. Did she call the source on the phone? Send an email? Last I checked ACN isn’t using SecureDrop, which is a secure and anonymous way to communicate with sources.

PM: I believe she had her cellphone in her hand when she told Don she would be gone for four hours, so implying she was going to call the source on said insecure phone.

ML: And what’s her reason for taking a last-minute plane flight from NYC to the DC area, and then a taxi ride to Langley? Her cell is being tracked this entire time.

MW: And how did she make a round-trip from midtown NYC to Washington and back in four hours? In the rain. Excuse me.

PM: Maybe she encrypted herself to Washington? Much faster that way.

ML: The government would be able to track her cellphone’s location to the meeting. I think it’s less likely but also possible that the government hacked her phone and was using it as a listening device.

MW: But it was raining.

ML: Margot’s right, it was raining pretty hard, so they might not have been able to hear the conversation. But good opsec on the source’s part: disabling GPS in her car, and not having the meeting in her car in case there was a bug. If you want to have a secret meeting, the safest place to have it is outside.

PM: Pity that Mac wasn’t so astute. She had her cell in her hand in the taxi. I think Sorkin did that for a reason, though; I’m wondering whether he’s setting up America for a lesson in location tracking via cellphones?

MW: THAT would be amazing

PM: Strange thing is that the source is a pro but deals with know-nothings like Mac. Edward Snowden insisted that his interlocutors follow strict security protocols (Laura Poitras, Glenn Greenwald). Why doesn’t ACN’s source?

ML: True. The source isn’t pushing opsec on the journalists the way Snowden pushed opsec on Glenn and Laura.

ML: Oh, and Mac threatened to turn the source into the FBI if she published the documents on her own??!?!?

PM: Like, what kind of journalist are you?

ML: Not the best way to build a good relationship with the source.

PM: “My source is bossy. I’m going to threaten to turn her into the Feds.” Wtf?

ML: That was messed up. In Mac’s defense, I think she was maybe just angry and wouldn’t really turn in the source. But regardless, that was messed up.

PM: If memory serves, Snowden made it clear at some point that if he was going to risk leaking those docs, he wanted to be sure the risk would be worthwhile in the sense of the docs being published. I get that. So I get the source pushing Mac.

PM: Last little thing about Mac and opsec. She was using a BlackBerry, right? Although few people still own them, they used to be known as one of the more secure cellphones. Still true, Micah?

ML: I think the Android and iOS have played catch-up quite a bit recently. The reason BlackBerry has the reputation is because it was the only phone that encrypted much of what the user did for a long time. But right now there are no perfect choices. You can’t trust phones at this point. I would trust a Cryptophone or Blackphone more than something you buy from a cellphone carrier, but I wouldn’t call them NSA-proof. (For that matter, I wouldn’t call anything NSA-proof.)

PM: Hold on a sec for a great tweet on NSA-proofing cellphones that was on my feed this weekend.