Samuel Martin - Navy Trial Claims Prosecutors Spied on Defense

Navy SEAL War Crimes Trial in Turmoil Over Claims Prosecutors Spied on Defense

Summary
During the trial of a Navy SEAL platoon leader for war crimes, the defense attorney claims that the prosecution sent emails with malware embedded into them to track who reads the emails, responses, and forwards to other people. Upon further investigation, Navy cybersecurity experts say that the virus has the ability to do much more than that, and could even infest itself into the reader's computer and see other emails and private information. Not only were these emails sent to the defense, they were also sent to journalists in the Navy Times, all as what the judge and prosecution claim is an attempt to figure out who is leaking classified information. University professors in journalism ethics say that this malware is violating many laws of ethics that journalists have. Other prosecutors that were interviewed believe that this was an ignorant method to try to catch leakers and that it puts the whole case into jeopardy because there is an "inherent conflict of interests." The original cases could be suspended for 6 or more months until the justice system decides how to handle this turn of events.

Analysis
This article was written in Colorado Springs, CO on Friday, May 17th, 2019. I already knew about the alleged war crimes trial against Edward Gallagher but I didn't know about this new malware situation. This is similar to the Watergate Scandal and Nixon where he illegally recorded private information because this is essentially what the virus was supposed to do. The audience of this article is all of the United States. The author is David Philipps who is a National War Correspondent for the NY Times. This article was written because we need to stay informed about what the military is doing as well as what the courts are doing. For one side of the court to steal private information from the other side is unethical and most likely illegal.

Source
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/17/us/navy-seal-war-crimes-spying.html