NYT doxxed Russian soldiers criticizing Putin -- for months

A blockbuster investigation from the New York Times in September, 2022, inadvertently exposed the apparent phone numbers of Russian soldiers as well as the apparent civilian family members they were speaking to, Motherboard has learned. Some of these people were providing a frank assessment of the ongoing Ukraine war, and blunt criticisms of their superiors including President Putin himself. The exposure potentially put the people at risk of reprisal from their own government and other third parties. …

When contacted by Motherboard, the Times initially said that it took steps to delete the metadata but failed to scrub several audio files. It said that the metadata was up for only a “few hours.”

“Before publication, we worked to remove identifying information from the story. We later learned that some buried metadata was live on the site for a few hours, and took prompt steps to remove it,” Charlie Stadtlander, director, external communications, newsroom, at the New York Times initially told Motherboard in a statement.

Motherboard then found that additional phone numbers and internal notes for fact checkers—which in some cases seemingly included not only the number of the apparent soldier but also the person they were speaking to, as well as their supposed relation—remained online in the article’s source code as of Wednesday afternoon, months after publication. When contacted again by Motherboard, the Times edited the piece to remove that metadata from the source code, and replace it with “null.”