This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss data dumps, high stakes, and lizard brain screen time.
JOSEPH: Flight Manifests Reveal Dozens of Previously Unknown People on Three Deportation Flights to El Salvador is the hardest hacking related article we’ve ever worked on.
I’ve obtained some very sensitive data breaches over the last decade: metadata of specific individuals from the massive AT&T breach; photos of peoples’ genitalia pre- and post-plastic surgery. Honestly it’s hard to remember them all.
The data here wasn’t even necessarily as sensitive or personal as those. It was flight manifests, which contain peoples’ names, the flight they were on, and their gender. That’s basically it. But it was how to handle publication of the data that was exceptionally complicated and why it took us a while from when we first obtained the data a few months ago to publishing this week.
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