In a modern world, we get our news from a wide variety of sources. I admit it: I am both lazy and cheap. I don’t pay for any high quality news sources, or even any moderate quality news sources. I mostly read the news items on Yahoo Canada News. and sure, it is full of celebrity crap, and other topics of which I don’t care, but hey, I just skip over them. The point is that I believe what I read, and trust the editors of Yahoo News to be telling the truth to the best of their abilities.

But this morning I was surprised to see the headline:

Edward Snowden: Aliens Are Trying To Contact Planet Earth

In case you don’t recognise the name, Edward Snowden is the man who copied thousands of secret NSA documents and revealed some of those documents showing that the US government has been illegally spying on innocent civilians on a massive scale. Snowden has been interviewed before. I found him to be intelligent and quite reasonable. but there are always rumours about what secret files he has kept. The internet is swarming with conspiracy theories, and some strange people out there have been posting stories about how the CIA has known about aliens, and Snowden has seen their secret files. But there has never been a shred of evidence offered in support of these claims. And there was never any evidence that Snowden himself has made such claims. So when i saw the above headline in Yahoo News, I thought that maybe he has been saying something about aliens. So I read the article. The quote in the article, taken from the podcast is as follows:

“So when we think about everything that we’re hearing through our satellites or everything that they’re hearing from our civilisation (if there are indeed aliens out there), all of their communications are encrypted by default.

So what we are hearing, that’s actually an alien television show or you know a phone call… is indistinguishable to us from cosmic microwave background radiation.”

Note that Snowden himself expresses the caveat : “(if there are indeed aliens out there)”. The quote from the Yahoo article wasn’t very convincing in support of the headline.  So I looked up the podcast and listened to it. Neil DeGrasse Tyson, who conducted the interview, is a justly famous astro-physicist, and explains to his audience that he is not a journalist, and so would like to have a discussion with Snowden, geek-to-geek. He keeps it light, and, in the discussion of the theories of encrypted communication, it is Tyson himself who brings up the hypothetical question of alien communications. Snowden plays along, which leads to the quote cited above. At no time does Snowden make any claim that aliens are actually trying to communicate with us. Instead, he talks about the internal communications of a hypothetically advanced civilisation, and postulates that such communications, if intercepted by earth-bound listening devices, would be indistinguishable from background radio noise.

The Yahoo News headline is a bald-faced lie, in the tradition of the worst of tabloid journalism. Shame on you Yahoo News. And shame on the idiot who put this article together. From now on I’ll be more careful of what I read: you have lost my trust.