[idownvoted]

Whether it is the Blockchain, Tor or other privacy guards that wane us in anonimity - we, especially us techies, often underestimate typical chokeholds which a government can easily control (eg your ISP, your cell phone tower, your cell phone maker, payment provider, ...), because it usually does and government agents usually don't make a fuzz about it because it's a valuable trap.

Without the fuzz over enough time passed we, even NSA experts, seem to forget about those traps.

The moral of the story for us techies: Don't wane people in anonimity if they use X or do Y. There will be a percentage of people who do things, they wouldn't have done without that info, and some of said percentage will be blackmailable (think miners having "inciminating pictures" on their machines because they were stored on the blockchain once).

Worse than a privacy infringing government are blackmailable citizens (One could argue the former causes the latter, I argue the latter steers the former into worse).

[angry_octet]

She was a linguist, not a techie.

The handling at The Intercept was amateur journalism at best, and at worst a cynical ploy (incriminate their source, hence confirmation, generate a media storm and clicks). They ignored fundamental techniques to protect sources: retyping documents without formatting, spell checking them, sharing only small snippets of text, in person instead of allowing retention, confirming via an external expert.

Of course, even without the printout they would have got her, she had terrible OPSEC.