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Comment on Writing The Snowden Files: 'The paragraph began to self-delete'parent

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One the hand, the "self-deletion" seems very fishy, coming from a layperson's assumptions about computers and hacking, so I lean towards innocuous explanations, if not utter bullshit.

But to play devil's advocate, I wouldn't rule out the possibility of a gaslighting-style psychological attack. If the author was deeply infiltrated with the right malware, the keyboard stunt could done, and would achieve one of two things:

1. The writer is so unsettled or terrified that he abandons the project ("the chilling effect").

2. The writer foolishly goes public with the incident, making him look like a liar or a lunatic to the tech crowd, and probably everybody else too.

Food for thought.

(As I think about it, this is also exactly the sort of prank that a 14-year-old with a malware toolkit would find hilarious.)

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