[ddeck]

Not to mention the fact that they wait until the twelfth paragraph before disclosing the fact that the entire story is based on unverified transcripts sent to them by individual users, and not their own logs.

The Ars IRC server doesn't log conversations, and there are no official transcripts of any discussions on that server. However, after learning that Snowden appeared to be an Ars user, we received chat logs from multiple longtime users who recalled IRC conversations with the user known as TheTrueHOOHA