Sibel Edmonds destroys Glenn Greenwald

[divideandconquer]

Keep shooting the messenger guys.
Would you have preferred no leaks at all?

I'd prefer no leaks at all if those leaks are/were intended to habituate the population to what's in those leaks. The Greenwald/Snowden "leak" show is nothing more than a mind-fuck.

[DrEvil]

Keep shooting the messenger guys.
Would you have preferred no leaks at all?

I'd prefer no leaks at all if those leaks are/were intended to habituate the population to what's in those leaks. The Greenwald/Snowden "leak" show is nothing more than a mind-fuck.

So you would rather not know that your government is spying on you?

And why would they need to habituate us to the leaks, when the vast majority of people couldn't care less? There's no point in vaccinating for a disease you're already immune too.

[JackRiddler]

The Riddler recently made the claim that the latest (ironic) "revelation" from Looky Here First, involving deep state sock puppetry and the like, operates on the principle of simplicity,

Yeah, what are you on about, since I didn't? And then this:

which is an absurd assertion on its face because if everyone here knows anything, it's that, as it relates to the engines of the deep state, the more noise, the better. What that latest entailed, including the Riddler's contribution, was getting out ahead of the story and pre-emptively mocking anyone attempting deeper analysis by portraying them as crazy.

So you have me as part of a larger plan, as I then said, to preemptively etc. on behalf of the NSA's real plan - which apparently is not Kill Snowden and Make Greenwald Pay, but... to have them leak stuff we maybe should not know! Am I reading, or what?

.

[divideandconquer]

It's no secret. I already knew they were spying on me and everyone else.

There were plenty of disclosures published before Snowden, The existence of ECHELON was revealed in the 1980s, the existence of the GCHQ.in the 1970s. And more recently, Trailblazer.

From USA Today 5/10/2006: NSA has massive database of Americans' phone calls

The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the arrangement told USA TODAY.

The NSA program reaches into homes and businesses across the nation by amassing information about the calls of ordinary Americans — most of whom aren't suspected of any crime. This program does not involve the NSA listening to or recording conversations. But the spy agency is using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity, sources said in separate interviews.

QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS: The NSA record collection program

"It's the largest database ever assembled in the world," said one person, who, like the others who agreed to talk about the NSA's activities, declined to be identified by name or affiliation. The agency's goal is "to create a database of every call ever made" within the nation's borders, this person added.

For the customers of these companies, it means that the government has detailed records of calls they made — across town or across the country — to family members, co-workers, business contacts and others.

The three telecommunications companies are working under contract with the NSA, which launched the program in 2001 shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the sources said. The program is aimed at identifying and tracking suspected terrorists, they said.

The sources would talk only under a guarantee of anonymity because the NSA program is secret.

Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden, nominated Monday by President Bush to become the director of the CIA, headed the NSA from March 1999 to April 2005. In that post, Hayden would have overseen the agency's domestic call-tracking program. Hayden declined to comment about the program.

The NSA's domestic program, as described by sources, is far more expansive than what the White House has acknowledged. Last year, Bush said he had authorized the NSA to eavesdrop — without warrants — on international calls and international e-mails of people suspected of having links to terrorists when one party to the communication is in the USA. Warrants have also not been used in the NSA's efforts to create a national call database.

In defending the previously disclosed program, Bush insisted that the NSA was focused exclusively on international calls. "In other words," Bush explained, "one end of the communication must be outside the United States."

As a result, domestic call records — those of calls that originate and terminate within U.S. borders — were believed to be private.

Sources, however, say that is not the case. With access to records of billions of domestic calls, the NSA has gained a secret window into the communications habits of millions of Americans. Customers' names, street addresses and other personal information are not being handed over as part of NSA's domestic program, the sources said. But the phone numbers the NSA collects can easily be cross-checked with other databases to obtain that information.

Don Weber, a senior spokesman for the NSA, declined to discuss the agency's operations. "Given the nature of the work we do, it would be irresponsible to comment on actual or alleged operational issues; therefore, we have no information to provide," he said. "However, it is important to note that NSA takes its legal responsibilities seriously and operates within the law."

The White House would not discuss the domestic call-tracking program. "There is no domestic surveillance without court approval," said Dana Perino, deputy press secretary, referring to actual eavesdropping.

She added that all national intelligence activities undertaken by the federal government "are lawful, necessary and required for the pursuit of al-Qaeda and affiliated terrorists." All government-sponsored intelligence activities "are carefully reviewed and monitored," Perino said. She also noted that "all appropriate members of Congress have been briefed on the intelligence efforts of the United States."

The government is collecting "external" data on domestic phone calls but is not intercepting "internals," a term for the actual content of the communication, according to a U.S. intelligence official familiar with the program. This kind of data collection from phone companies is not uncommon; it's been done before, though never on this large a scale, the official said. The data are used for "social network analysis," the official said, meaning to study how terrorist networks contact each other and how they are tied together.

Carriers uniquely positioned

AT&T recently merged with SBC and kept the AT&T name. Verizon, BellSouth and AT&T are the nation's three biggest telecommunications companies; they provide local and wireless phone service to more than 200 million customers.

The three carriers control vast networks with the latest communications technologies. They provide an array of services: local and long-distance calling, wireless and high-speed broadband, including video. Their direct access to millions of homes and businesses has them uniquely positioned to help the government keep tabs on the calling habits of Americans.

Among the big telecommunications companies, only Qwest has refused to help the NSA, the sources said. According to multiple sources, Qwest declined to participate because it was uneasy about the legal implications of handing over customer information to the government without warrants.

Qwest's refusal to participate has left the NSA with a hole in its database. Based in Denver, Qwest provides local phone service to 14 million customers in 14 states in the West and Northwest. But AT&T and Verizon also provide some services — primarily long-distance and wireless — to people who live in Qwest's region. Therefore, they can provide the NSA with at least some access in that area.

Created by President Truman in 1952, during the Korean War, the NSA is charged with protecting the United States from foreign security threats. The agency was considered so secret that for years the government refused to even confirm its existence. Government insiders used to joke that NSA stood for "No Such Agency."

In 1975, a congressional investigation revealed that the NSA had been intercepting, without warrants, international communications for more than 20 years at the behest of the CIA and other agencies. The spy campaign, code-named "Shamrock," led to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which was designed to protect Americans from illegal eavesdropping.

Enacted in 1978, FISA lays out procedures that the U.S. government must follow to conduct electronic surveillance and physical searches of people believed to be engaged in espionage or international terrorism against the United States. A special court, which has 11 members, is responsible for adjudicating requests under FISA.

Over the years, NSA code-cracking techniques have continued to improve along with technology. The agency today is considered expert in the practice of "data mining" — sifting through reams of information in search of patterns. Data mining is just one of many tools NSA analysts and mathematicians use to crack codes and track international communications.

Paul Butler, a former U.S. prosecutor who specialized in terrorism crimes, said FISA approval generally isn't necessary for government data-mining operations. "FISA does not prohibit the government from doing data mining," said Butler, now a partner with the law firm Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld in Washington, D.C.

The caveat, he said, is that "personal identifiers" — such as names, Social Security numbers and street addresses — can't be included as part of the search. "That requires an additional level of probable cause," he said.

The usefulness of the NSA's domestic phone-call database as a counterterrorism tool is unclear. Also unclear is whether the database has been used for other purposes.

The NSA's domestic program raises legal questions. Historically, AT&T and the regional phone companies have required law enforcement agencies to present a court order before they would even consider turning over a customer's calling data. Part of that owed to the personality of the old Bell Telephone System, out of which those companies grew.

Ma Bell's bedrock principle — protection of the customer — guided the company for decades, said Gene Kimmelman, senior public policy director of Consumers Union. "No court order, no customer information — period. That's how it was for decades," he said.

The concern for the customer was also based on law: Under Section 222 of the Communications Act, first passed in 1934, telephone companies are prohibited from giving out information regarding their customers' calling habits: whom a person calls, how often and what routes those calls take to reach their final destination. Inbound calls, as well as wireless calls, also are covered.

The financial penalties for violating Section 222, one of many privacy reinforcements that have been added to the law over the years, can be stiff. The Federal Communications Commission, the nation's top telecommunications regulatory agency, can levy fines of up to $130,000 per day per violation, with a cap of $1.325 million per violation. The FCC has no hard definition of "violation." In practice, that means a single "violation" could cover one customer or 1 million.

In the case of the NSA's international call-tracking program, Bush signed an executive order allowing the NSA to engage in eavesdropping without a warrant. The president and his representatives have since argued that an executive order was sufficient for the agency to proceed. Some civil liberties groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, disagree.

Companies approached

The NSA's domestic program began soon after the Sept. 11 attacks, according to the sources. Right around that time, they said, NSA representatives approached the nation's biggest telecommunications companies. The agency made an urgent pitch: National security is at risk, and we need your help to protect the country from attacks.

The agency told the companies that it wanted them to turn over their "call-detail records," a complete listing of the calling histories of their millions of customers. In addition, the NSA wanted the carriers to provide updates, which would enable the agency to keep tabs on the nation's calling habits.

The sources said the NSA made clear that it was willing to pay for the cooperation. AT&T, which at the time was headed by C. Michael Armstrong, agreed to help the NSA. So did BellSouth, headed by F. Duane Ackerman; SBC, headed by Ed Whitacre; and Verizon, headed by Ivan Seidenberg.

With that, the NSA's domestic program began in earnest.

AT&T, when asked about the program, replied with a comment prepared for USA TODAY: "We do not comment on matters of national security, except to say that we only assist law enforcement and government agencies charged with protecting national security in strict accordance with the law."

In another prepared comment, BellSouth said: "BellSouth does not provide any confidential customer information to the NSA or any governmental agency without proper legal authority."

Verizon, the USA's No. 2 telecommunications company behind AT&T, gave this statement: "We do not comment on national security matters, we act in full compliance with the law and we are committed to safeguarding our customers' privacy."

Qwest spokesman Robert Charlton said: "We can't talk about this. It's a classified situation."

In December, The New York Times revealed that Bush had authorized the NSA to wiretap, without warrants, international phone calls and e-mails that travel to or from the USA. The following month, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group, filed a class-action lawsuit against AT&T. The lawsuit accuses the company of helping the NSA spy on U.S. phone customers.

Last month, U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales alluded to that possibility. Appearing at a House Judiciary Committee hearing, Gonzales was asked whether he thought the White House has the legal authority to monitor domestic traffic without a warrant. Gonzales' reply: "I wouldn't rule it out." His comment marked the first time a Bush appointee publicly asserted that the White House might have that authority.

Similarities in programs

The domestic and international call-tracking programs have things in common, according to the sources. Both are being conducted without warrants and without the approval of the FISA court. The Bush administration has argued that FISA's procedures are too slow in some cases. Officials, including Gonzales, also make the case that the USA Patriot Act gives them broad authority to protect the safety of the nation's citizens.

The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., would not confirm the existence of the program. In a statement, he said, "I can say generally, however, that our subcommittee has been fully briefed on all aspects of the Terrorist Surveillance Program. ... I remain convinced that the program authorized by the president is lawful and absolutely necessary to protect this nation from future attacks."

The chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Rep. Pete Hoekstra, R-Mich., declined to comment.

One company differs

One major telecommunications company declined to participate in the program: Qwest.

According to sources familiar with the events, Qwest's CEO at the time, Joe Nacchio, was deeply troubled by the NSA's assertion that Qwest didn't need a court order — or approval under FISA — to proceed. Adding to the tension, Qwest was unclear about who, exactly, would have access to its customers' information and how that information might be used.

Financial implications were also a concern, the sources said. Carriers that illegally divulge calling information can be subjected to heavy fines. The NSA was asking Qwest to turn over millions of records. The fines, in the aggregate, could have been substantial.

The NSA told Qwest that other government agencies, including the FBI, CIA and DEA, also might have access to the database, the sources said. As a matter of practice, the NSA regularly shares its information — known as "product" in intelligence circles — with other intelligence groups. Even so, Qwest's lawyers were troubled by the expansiveness of the NSA request, the sources said.

The NSA, which needed Qwest's participation to completely cover the country, pushed back hard.

Trying to put pressure on Qwest, NSA representatives pointedly told Qwest that it was the lone holdout among the big telecommunications companies. It also tried appealing to Qwest's patriotic side: In one meeting, an NSA representative suggested that Qwest's refusal to contribute to the database could compromise national security, one person recalled.

In addition, the agency suggested that Qwest's foot-dragging might affect its ability to get future classified work with the government. Like other big telecommunications companies, Qwest already had classified contracts and hoped to get more.

Unable to get comfortable with what NSA was proposing, Qwest's lawyers asked NSA to take its proposal to the FISA court. According to the sources, the agency refused.

The NSA's explanation did little to satisfy Qwest's lawyers. "They told (Qwest) they didn't want to do that because FISA might not agree with them," one person recalled. For similar reasons, this person said, NSA rejected Qwest's suggestion of getting a letter of authorization from the U.S. attorney general's office. A second person confirmed this version of events.

In June 2002, Nacchio resigned amid allegations that he had misled investors about Qwest's financial health. But Qwest's legal questions about the NSA request remained.

Unable to reach agreement, Nacchio's successor, Richard Notebaert, finally pulled the plug on the NSA talks in late 2004, the sources said.

Contributing: John Diamond

[JackRiddler]

It's no secret. I already knew they were spying on me and everyone else.

There were plenty of disclosures published before Snowden, The existence of ECHELON was revealed in the 1980s, the existence of the GCHQ.in the 1970s. And more recently, Trailblazer.

So great, who needs to know any more. Personally, I think all of the older disclosures must have been to sucker you into believing the wrong thing about stuff you'd already guessed = knew. We should always prefer reasonable surmise by spidey sense to mere documentary disclosure.

[seemslikeadream]

Oligarchs Triumphant: Ukraine, Omidyar and the Neo-Liberal Agenda

1.
The Western intervention in Ukraine has now led the region to the brink of war. Political opposition to government of President Viktor Yanukovych -- a corrupt and thuggish regime, but as with so many corrupt and thuggish regimes one sees these days, a democratically elected one -- was funded in substantial part by organizations of or affiliated with the U.S. government, such as the National Endowment for Democracy (a longtime vehicle for Washington-friendly coups), and USAID. It also received substantial financial backing from Western oligarchs, such as billionaire Pierre Omidyar, founder of eBay and sole bankroller of the new venue for "adversarial" journalism, First Look, as Pandodaily reports.

Yanukovych sparked massive protests late last year when he turned down a financial deal from the European Union and chose a $15 billion aid package from Russia instead. The EU deal would have put cash-strapped Ukraine in a financial straitjacket, much like Greece, without actually promising any path for eventually joining the EU. There was one other stipulation in the EU's proffered agreement that was almost never reported: it would have also forbidden Ukraine to "accept further assistance from the Russians," as Patrick Smith notes in an important piece in Salon.com. It was a ruthless take-it-or-leave-it deal, and would have left Ukraine without any leverage, unable to parlay its unique position between East and West to its own advantage in the future, or conduct its foreign and economic policies as it saw fit. Yanukovych took the Russian deal, which would have given Ukraine cash in hand immediately and did not come with the same draconian restrictions.

It was a policy decision. It might have been the wrong policy decision; millions of Ukrainians thought so. Yanukovych, already unpopular before the deal, would have almost certainly been ousted from office by democratic means in national elections scheduled for 2015. But the outpouring of displeasure at this policy decision grew into a call for the removal of the government. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, Washington was maneuvering to put their preferred candidate, Arseniy Yatseniuk, in charge of the Ukrainian government, as a leaked tape of a conversation between Victoria Nuland, assistant secretary of state, and Geoffrey Pyatt, U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, clearly showed. It is worth noting that when Yanukovych was finally ousted from power -- after the opposition reneged on an EU-brokered deal for an interim unity government and new elections in December -- Arseniy Yatseniuk duly took charge of the Ukrainian government, as planned.

By all accounts, Viktor Yanukovych was an unsavoury character running an unsavoury government, backed by unsavoury oligarchs exploiting the country for their own benefit, and leaving it unnecessarily impoverished and chaotic. In this, he was not so different from his predecessors, or from many of those who have supplanted him, who also have oligarchic backing and dubious connections (see addendum below). But in any case, the idea of supporting an unconstitutional overthrow of a freely elected Ukrainian government in an uprising based squarely on the volatile linguistic and cultural fault-lines that divide the country seems an obvious recipe for chaos and strife. It was also certain to provoke a severe response from Russia. It was, in other words, a monumentally stupid line of policy (as Mike Whitney outlines here). Smith adds:

[U.S.] foreign policy cliques remain wholly committed to the spread of the neo-liberal order on a global scale, admitting of no exceptions. This is American policy in the 21st century. No one can entertain any illusion (as this columnist confesses to have done) that America’s conduct abroad stands any chance of changing of its own in response to an intelligent reading of the emerging post–Cold War order. Imposing “democracy,” the American kind, was the American story from the start, of course, and has been the mission since Wilson codified it even before he entered the White House. When the Cold War ended we began a decade of triumphalist bullying — economic warfare waged as “the Washington Consensus” — which came to the same thing.

American policy is based upon -- dependent upon -- a raging, willful, arrogant ignorance of other peoples, other cultures, history in general, and even the recent history of U.S. policy itself. The historical and cultural relationships between Ukraine and Russia are highly complex. Russia takes its national identity from the culture that grew up around what is now Kyiv; indeed, in many respects, Kyiv is where "Russia" was born. Yet one of the first acts of the Western-backed revolutionaries was to pass a law declaring Ukrainian as the sole state language, although most of the country speaks Russian or Surzhyk, "a motley mix of Ukrainian and Russian (sometimes with bits of Hungarian, Romanian and Polish)," as the LRB's Peter Pomerantsev details in an excellent piece on Ukraine's rich cultural and linguistic complexity. This is not to say that Ukrainians are not justified in being wary of Russia's embrace. Millions of Ukrainians died in the 1930s from the famine caused by inhuman policies imposed by a Moscow government (although that government was itself headed by a Georgian, in the name of a trans-national ideology). The complexity and volatility is always there. Today, as Smith puts it, "many Ukrainians see room for closer relations with the West; the more sensible seem to favor a variant of “third way” thinking, no either/or frame. Many fewer desire a decisive break with Russia."

Yet at every turn, the new Western-backed government in Kyiv has stomped hard on these volatile fault-lines, pushing stringent anti-Russian policies, with Western governments pretending that this would have no consequences, no reverberations in Moscow. What's more, the neo-fascist factions that played a leading role in the uprising are now calling for Ukraine to become a nuclear power again, having given up the Soviet nuclear weaponry on its territory in 1994. Indeed, hard-right leader Oleh Tyahnybok made nuclear re-armament one of the planks of his presidential race a few years ago. Now the party is sharing power in the Western-brokered government; will we soon see Ukraine added to the ranks of nuclear nations? With a bristling nuclearized frontier with Russia -- like the hair-trigger holocaust flashpoint between India and Pakistan?

Again we see the blind stupidity of arrogance, of entitlement, as the "Washington consensus" of elitist neo-liberalism continues its blundering away around the world.

2.
Now we stand on the brink of war over Crimea. Here too there are historical complexities entirely ignored by the media narrative. The Crimea was not considered part of Ukraine until it was simply tranferred by administrative edict in 1954 by the Soviet government, removing it from the Russian "socialist republic" to the jurisdiction of the Ukranian "socialist republic." When the Soviet Union collapsed, the Crimea became an autonomous republic operating under the constitution of Ukraine. Its population is about 60 percent Russian, yet this majority has had its language stripped of official status by the government in Kyiv which took power outside of constitutional means.

None of this justifies the heavy-handed muscle-flexing that Putin has been engaging in. But Russia, in post-Soviet times, with no trans-national ideology, has become a highly nationalist state. Putin is an authoritarian leader who now bases his threadbare claims to "legitimacy" -- and the dominance of his brutal clique -- on his championing of Russian nationalism and "traditional values". It is inconceivable that he would not consider the West's blatant interference in Ukraine to be an act of provocation and brinkmanship aimed at him and his regime, and that he would react accordingly.

So here we are. Chaos, strife, the threat of war -- and the heavy smoke of ignorance covering it all. Sleepwalking once more toward disaster. Deliberately setting tumultuous events in motion without the slightest concern for their ultimate consequences, or the suffering they will cause, now and perhaps for generations to come. (Think of Iraq, for example, or the spread of violence and chaos that has already flowed to many countries from the intervention in Libya's internal affairs.)

But why are we here? Greed. Greed and the lust for dominance. Let's not say "power," for that word carries positive connotations, and can also include an element of responsibility. But the oligarchs and ideologues, the militarists and ministers involved in this episode of Great Gamesmanship don't want power in any broader, deeper sense. What they want is dominance, to lord it over others -- physically, financially, psychologically. Among those at the top in this situation, on every side, there is not the slightest regard for the common good of their fellow human beings -- not even for those with whom they share some association by the accident of history or geography: language, nationality, ethnicity. The lust for loot and dominance outweighs all the rest, regardless of the heavy piety oozing from the rhetoric on all sides.

And if war is avoided, what is the likely outcome for Ukraine (aside from living in eternal tension with an enraged, threatened, authoritarian neighbor to the North)? Smith tells us: betrayal.

Instantly after Yanukovych was hounded from Kiev, seduction began its turn to betrayal. The Americans and Europeans started shuffling their feet as to what they would do for Ukrainians now that Russia has shut off the $15 billion tap. Nobody wants to pick up the bill, it turns out. Washington and the E.U. are now pushing the International Monetary Fund forward as the leader of a Western bailout.If the past is any guide, Ukrainians are now likely to get the "shock therapy" the economist Jeffrey Sachs urged in Russia, Poland and elsewhere after the Soviet Union's collapse. Sachs subsequently (and dishonestly) denied he played any such role -- understandable given the calamitous results, notably in Russia -- but the prescription called for off-the-shelf neoliberalism, applied without reference to any local realities, and Ukrainians are about to get their dosage.

It is wrong, as ahistorical thinking always is. Formerly communist societies, especially in the Eastern context, should logically advance first to some form of social democracy and then decide if they want to take things further rightward. Washington;s fear, evident throughout the Cold War, was that social democracies would demonstrate that they work -- so presenting a greater threat, paradoxically, than the Soviet model. Ukrainians favoring the Westward tilt, having idealized the E.U., appear to assume they are to evolve into some system roughly between the Scandinavians and Germany, as East Europeans earlier anticipated. They will thus find the I.M.F.'s deal shocking indeed. It will be bitter, after all the treacherous, carefully couched promises.

Whatever happens, it seems certain that oligarchs -- Western, Ukrainian, European or Russian, will continue to exercise dominance -- although some who backed the losing side too prominently may be cast down. Then again, most oligarchs, in every nation, are usually expert at playing both sides, or changing sides as necessary.

One is tempted to see this principle at work in the case of Pierre Omidyar, a prominent private backer of American efforts to fund and guide the Ukrainian opposition to power, as Pandodaily reported. Omidyar, who founded eBay and now owns PayPal, has recently become widely known -- and universally lauded -- for committing $250 million to fund First Look, a publishing group dedicated to adversarial journalism. He has assembled an all-star team for his venture, including Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, Jeremy Scahill, Marcy Wheeler and others of similar reputation. It is no exaggeration to say that he has become a bonafide hero of the left, which has tended to dismiss all criticism or questioning of his new enterprise, or his wider operations, as the grumbling of jealous losers -- or even as covert actions of the State, trying to derail this dangerous new threat to elite rule.

Yet the fact remains that Omidyar's wider operations -- including those in Ukraine -- sit uneasily with the image of an adversarial paragon and danger to the system. Putting aside the troubling circumstance of adversarial activism being dependent on the personal whims of a billionaire, there is the fact that Omidyar's philanthropic vision lies largely in the monetizing of poverty relief efforts -- of turning them from charitable or government-based programs into money-making enterprises which reward investors with high returns while often leaving the recipients worse off than before. As nsfwcorp.com reports, these include micro-financing initiatives in India that have led to mass suicides among the debt-ridden poor, and "entrepreneurial" programs which bestow property rights on the small plots of slum-dwellers -- who, still in dire straits, sell them, for a pittance, to large-scale operators who then clear the ghettos for profitable developments, leaving the poor to find another shanty-town elsewhere. In this, Omidyar has partnered with Hernando de Soto, a right-wing "shock doctrinaire" and one-time advisor to former Peruvian dictator, Alberto Fujimori; de Soto is also an ally of the Koch Brothers. Omidyar has also poured millions of dollars into efforts to privatize, and profitize, public education in the United States and elsewhere, forcing children in some of the poorest parts of the world to pay for basic education -- or go without.

Thus Omidyar seems very much a part of the "neo-liberal order" which, as Patrick Smith noted above, the United States has been pushing "on a global scale, admitting of no exceptions." So it is not surprising to see him playing a role in trying to spread this order to Ukraine, in tandem with the overt efforts and backroom machinations of the U.S. government. Omidyar is, openly, a firm adherent of the neo-liberal order -- privitazing public assets for individual profit, converting charity and state aid to profitable enterprises for select investors, and working to elect or install governments that support these policies.

None of these activities are illegal. None of them necessarily preclude him also funding independent journalism. But I can't see that it is unreasonable to bring up these facts and point them out. I don't think it's unreasonable to apply the same kind of considered skepticism toward this billionaire oligarch that you would apply to any other. For instance, if one of First Look's websites publishes some blistering expose on the nasty machinations of some other oligarch or corporate figure, I don't think it will be unreasonable for people to look and see if the target happens to be a rival of Omidyar's in some way, or if his or her removal or humbling would benefit Omidyar's own business or political interests. One does the same with the New York Times and its obvious pro-Establishment agenda, or with Rupert Murdoch's newspapers, and so on; the wider context helps the reader put articles in perspective, and weigh them accordingly. It doesn't mean the facts of this or that particular story are untrue; it does mean they aren't swallowed whole, uncritically, without awareness of other agendas that might be in play.

This seems so elementary that it's almost embarrassing to point it out. Yet for the most part, anyone who raises these kinds of questions about Omidyar's media enterprise has been immediately shouted down, sometimes vociferously, by those who otherwise evince a savvy skepticism toward Big Money and its agendas. Many of those assailing the Pandodaily report about Omidyar and Ukraine pointed out that "this is the world we live in" -- a world dominated by Big Money -- and you have to make the best of a bad lot. And anyway, news outlets have always been owned by rich and powerful interests, and First Look is no different.

Well yes, exactly. And thus First Look -- owned solely by a neo-liberal billionaire, who, as Jeremy Scahill has pointed out, takes a very active interest in the daily workings of his news organization -- should be subject to the same standards of scrutiny as any other news outlet owned by the rich and powerful. But this doesn't seem to be happening; quite the opposite, in fact.

I think perhaps there might be a category mistake at work here. Because of the reputations of those who have signed up with Omidyar, the idea has taken hold that Omidyar is dedicated to throwing a broad light on the secret machinations of the national security state and its imperialist rampages around the world. But Scahill's statement intimates that Omidyar's "vision" is actually much more limited. The interview that Scahill gave to the Daily Beast, quoted by Pandodaily, is quite revealing. Below is an excerpt, somewhat longer than the Pando quote:

The whole venture will have a lower wall between owner and journalist than traditional media. Omidyar, he says, wanted to do the project because he was interested in Fourth Amendment issues, and they are hiring teams of lawyers, not just to keep the staff from getting sued, but to actively push courts on the First Amendment, to “force confrontation with the state on these issues.”

“[Omidyar] strikes me as always sort of political, but I think that the NSA story and the expanding wars put politics for him into a much more prominent place in his existence. This is not a side project that he is doing. Pierre writes more on our internal messaging than anyone else. And he is not micromanaging. This guy has a vision. And his vision is to confront what he sees as an assault on the privacy of Americans.”

Omidyar is passionately concerned about government encroachments on privacy, Scahill says, while noting -- somewhat ominously -- that the enterprise will have "a lower wall between owner and journalist than traditional media." You might think this would set off alarm bells in a longtime adversarial journalist like Scahill, but apparently not. In any case, Omidyar's entire neo-liberal ideology is based on the ability of wealthy individuals to operate free from government control as they circle the world in search of profit. (And also, if it happens, some social benefits by the way; but if one's profit-making initiatives turn out to drive hundreds of people to suicide, well, c'est la vie, eh?) Naturally, wealthy individuals also want to be free from government spying as they go about their business. They are happy to cooperate with the National Security State when there is mutual benefit to be had, as with Omidyar and his government partners in Ukraine -- but they want it to be on their terms. They want their own information to remain within their control. The overthrow of foreign governments, the invasion of foreign lands, the extrajudicial murder of people around the world, the militarization of American policy and society -- this does not really concern them. In fact, it helps them expand the parameters of their business and extend their neoliberal ideology. But the idea that the government might also be spying on them -- well, this is intolerable. This must be resisted, there must be a "confrontation" about such behavior.

I'm sure the writers hired by Omidyar's quarter of a billion dollars will produce work of value, dig up some useful facts. So does the Times, so does the now oligarch-owned Washington Post, so do Murdoch's papers on occasion. But I don't think Omidyar's enterprise has been set up to challenge the status quo or pose the "threat" to the system that its hero-worshippers are looking for. Indeed, even Greenwald calls only for "reforms" of the system, for "real oversight" of the National Security State by legislators -- the same legislators bought, sold, cowed and dominated by Big Money. I honestly don't think that the powers-that-be feel threatened by an enterprise set up by one of their number that confines itself to calls for "reform" from "within" -- especially when its sole owner continues to cooperate with the Koch Brothers, hard-right ideologues like Hernando de Soto and indeed with the National Security State itself in subversive adventures overseas.

Omidyar's goals are limited: to protect the privacy of the individual from government. This is a noble, worthy aim. But based on his own actions, he is perfectly content for that privacy-protected individual to advance a punishing neo-liberal agenda on the rest of the world, and at home, in collusion with the National Security State if need be. Whether Greenwald, Scahill, Taibbi, Wheeler and the rest are equally content with this agenda is something we will find out in the months to come.


***
Addendum. Below is a passage cut out of the original text above, giving more detail on the opposition forces that the intervention by Omidyar and the U.S. government helped bring to power.

The occupation movement -- now the government -- is led by three main factions, one of which contains openly neo-fascist groups who -- while the protests were going on -- mounted a torchlight procession through the city of Lviv in honor of Stepan Bandera, the Ukrainian fascist leader who joined with Nazi invaders in World War II and took part in mass murders of Jews. As Max Blumenthal reports:

After participating in a campaign to assassinate Ukrainians who supported accommodation with the Polish during the 1930’s, Bandera’s forces set themselves to ethnically cleanse western Ukraine of Poles in 1943 and 1944. In the process, they killed over 90,000 Poles and many Jews, whom Bandera’s top deputy and acting “Prime Minister,” Yaroslav Stetsko, were determined to exterminate. ... Lviv has become the epicenter of neo-fascist activity in Ukraine, with elected Svoboda officials waging a campaign to rename its airport after Bandera and successfully changing the name of Peace Street to the name of the Nachtigall Battalion, an OUN-B wing that participated directly in the Holocaust. “’Peace’ is a holdover from Soviet stereotypes,” a Svoboda deputy explained. ...

After participating in a campaign to assassinate Ukrainians who supported accommodation with the Polish during the 1930’s, Bandera’s forces set themselves to ethnically cleanse western Ukraine of Poles in 1943 and 1944. In the process, they killed over 90,000 Poles and many Jews, whom Bandera’s top deputy and acting “Prime Minister,” Yaroslav Stetsko, were determined to exterminate.

Svoboda is the name of the top nationalist party. As Blumenthal notes:

Svoboda's leader, Oleh Tyahnybok, has called for the liberation of his country from the “Muscovite-Jewish mafia.” After the 2010 conviction of the Nazi death camp guard John Demjanjuk for his supporting role in the death of nearly 30,000 people at the Sobibor camp, Tyahnybok rushed to Germany to declare him a hero who was “fighting for truth.” In the Ukrainian parliament, where Svoboda holds an unprecedented 37 seats, Tyahnybok’s deputy Yuriy Mykhalchyshyn is fond of quoting Joseph Goebbels – he has even founded a think tank originally called “the Joseph Goebbels Political Research Center.” .... Svoboda’s openly pro-Nazi politics have not deterred Senator John McCain from addressing a EuroMaidan rally alongside Tyahnybok, nor did it prevent Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland from enjoying a friendly meeting with the Svoboda leader this February.

In a leaked phone conversation with Geoffrey Pyatt, the US ambassador to Ukraine, Nuland revealed her wish for Tyahnybok to remain “on the outside,” but to consult with the US’s replacement for Yanukovich, Arseniy Yatsenyuk, “four times a week.” At a December 5, 2013 US-Ukraine Foundation Conference, Nuland boasted that the US had invested $5 billion to "build democratic skills and institutions" in Ukraine ...

As Smith puts it, the "the Nuland tape is the Rosetta Stone of the Ukrainian riddle. It was an early advisory that we were about to watch Washington at work corrupting the affairs of another nation, exactly as it has for the past 60–odd years elsewhere. Nothing new under the American sun, even as the afternoon light starts to fade."

Blumenthal has much more on the history of Ukrainian fascism, including the extensive and highly connected network established in American politics after WWII, when many of Bandera's party members -- Nazi collaborators and killers of Jews and Poles -- were funneled to the US, often with the CIA's help. He also notes that former Ukraine President Viktor Yushchenko, the Western-hailed hero of the "Orange Revolution" that brought regime change to Ukraine 10 years ago, had named Bandera "National Hero of Ukraine" in 2010.

[Spiro C. Thiery]

The Riddler recently made the claim that the latest (ironic) "revelation" from Looky Here First, involving deep state sock puppetry and the like, operates on the principle of simplicity,

Yeah, what are you on about, since I didn't? And then this:

which is an absurd assertion on its face because if everyone here knows anything, it's that, as it relates to the engines of the deep state, the more noise, the better. What that latest entailed, including the Riddler's contribution, was getting out ahead of the story and pre-emptively mocking anyone attempting deeper analysis by portraying them as crazy.

So you have me as part of a larger plan, as I then said, to preemptively etc. on behalf of the NSA's real plan - which apparently is not Kill Snowden and Make Greenwald Pay, but... to have them leak stuff we maybe should not know! Am I reading, or what?

.

The conflation of pre-emptive mocking with some sinister plan is all yours, as is the inference. Nevertheless, the story you were citing in that thread (could we have more tit-for-tat threads on this topic, say, "yes it is!" and "no it isn't!" ?) was not only nothing new but, more importantly, it cited no new evidence. By anticipating this argument, the author and interpreters thereof attempt to assign an relevance to it that does not exist: as if it is relevant, simply because someone says so.

And as to its being vindication of the method of dissemination, again, making all of the docs available to everyone does not preclude publishing carefully planned analysis of specific focus on a periodical basis.

Back to the nature of simplicity and the framework within which professional trolls operate: We have known for so long that sockpuppetry has become a paying gig and that everything from silicon valley orgs on down to the lowliest basement nerd is a treasure trove of geniuses willing to sell out for their expertise, that you're asking an awful lot of people if you want them to treat all of this without scepticism. If you got a problem with that, I recommend a thread titled, "How what I say is is, and what you say is isn't."

[JackRiddler]

We have known for so long that sockpuppetry has become a paying gig and that everything from silicon valley orgs on down to the lowliest basement nerd is a treasure trove of geniuses willing to sell out for their expertise, that you're asking an awful lot of people if you want them to treat all of this without scepticism. If you got a problem with that, I recommend a thread titled, "How what I say is is, and what you say is isn't."

Yes, and given the sudden heat around the issue, one has to ask who's a sock puppet and who's not. Well, I'll ask it, anyway. Suddenly the government-corporate system of sock-puppetry is more of an issue, whether or not you think the documents from Snowden constitute anything "new." Wouldn't you think the sock puppets would have a position on that? I figure they do. Just a guess, you know?

Such an intense interest you seem to have in dismissing the issue and burying it as old news! Such an effort you make in attacking the latest messenger, and distracting from the latest evidence.

A whole bunch of people on this board have anonymous screennames but nevertheless have met each other. Or otherwise, incidentally through the content of their postings, they've indirectly given evidence of who they are in the real-world, often confirmably. They are not ashamed. They're also not afraid. Why should they be? Certainly it's not a secret who anyone is to the NSA, right?

(Why, that's so obvious to you that you are arguing that anyone who exposes the merely obvious by producing actual evidence for it can only be our enemy!)

There's no need for anyone to declare who they are, of course.

But I do find it interesting how the set of users who have remained altogether as anonymous screennames overlaps with that of those who are most insistent and convoluted in shooting the public messengers producing the latest documentation of NSA-directed sock-puppetry. The NSA-directed sock-puppetry is a minor issue, you tell us, since we already know that. Doing character assassination on Greenwald and Snowden, keeping the focus on them no matter what, seems to be the only concern. Since you're such a lover of looks-like-a-duck logic, what does this duck look like?

I'm only a lone human here, of course. Prolific, to be sure. But someone (or a group) with a little factory of personas who's being paid to pepper this board (as one of many, of course) with the same NSA-compatible illogic over and over is, in the end, going to win, on the principle of last man standing.

That's always an interesting discussion: How can one defend against sock-puppets? The imperfect attempts so far are either to set up exclusive clubs, to abandon anonymity, to disallow comments on articles, or to go on a banishment rampage (inevitably producing board meltdowns or authoritarian party-line places like Democratic Underground).

But hey, diagnosis has to come first, right?

At this point, shouldn't we ask for some honor system? As laughable as that is?

I'll start.

I am not here as a sock-puppet for the NSA or any other organization, no one pays me to post here, nothing that I write here is anything other than what I, individually, want to write after reading other stuff here. As for what my influences may be, I'll leave it to readers to decide.

How about you?

.

[coffin_dodger]

Hey Jack, I know you and I don't always see eye to eye - so I ask this dispassionately - do you really consider there to be sockpuppets or worse, here at RI?

[Spiro C. Thiery]

Why, that's so obvious to you that you are arguing that anyone who exposes the merely obvious by producing actual evidence for it can only be our enemy!

I am not arguing that at all. I honestly don't see the world as friends and enemies. My criticism of the words and occasional--what I assume to be sometimes egotistically misguided--deeds of the protagonist/s in this drama are simply that. My feeling is that this issue, particularly the privacy aspect of it, is being used to achieve another goal which, short of more sophisticated insight, I further assume to be of a financial nature, more specifically, funneling wealth upward. I seriously doubt that those who seize opportunities to enrich themselves a little bit while doing what they think is good work on the liberty front are able to see it that clearly. You know the old adage about someone's not being able to see the truth when they're paid not to? Well, apply that to someone with a chip on his shoulder because he sees himself as having spent his life fighting the good fight.

The spying and privacy issue as wedge is not unlike homosexual rights taking center stage and elucidating just how evil the GOP or Putin or any other convenient distraction happens to be: How could we not side with the Democrats/US in a battle against the likes of them/him!? Forget about nuance. It doesn't exist. Criticism is inconvenient. Or how an African-American president has single-handedly--if only paradoxically indirectly--shifted the opinions of African-Americans regarding longstanding US policies.

Back to my dismissal of these things because they are "obvious to me". Fair enough to say that everyone deserves a chance to know this shit. But in spite of this brilliant new multi-billion dollar venture, it's hardly registering a whimper. This story was huge last summer. It was all over the mainstream media. What happened?

edited out one "not"

[Spiro C. Thiery]

I am not here as a sock-puppet for the NSA or any other organization, no one pays me to post here, nothing that I write here is anything other than what I, individually, want to write after reading other stuff here. As for what my influences may be, I'll leave it to readers to decide.

How about you?
.

Not only am I not a sock puppet, but I would refuse to be one no matter what the agenda and how much it paid. Nevertheless, one could make the argument that I am anonymous, even though I am easy to find. I always assumed that anonymity was something that many on this forum embraced, but I don't spend a great deal of time here, so I suppose I may be mistaken about that.

The reason I referred to as "absurd" your crediting the likes of the disinfo spooks with simplicity doesn't have anything to do with my belief that there are NSA sockpuppets on this forum. It had to do with the fact that I think it is naive to believe that the PTB don't have a super-sophisticated and rather complex and convoluted way of co-opting people of all stripes, and also throw around a lot of the same just to make shit stick to the walls wherever you go. As to this forum: on the one hand, I think we'd be naive to think there are no spooks here, but on the other, I tend to agree with you that there are probably not. I suppose I'm agnostic on that one.

If there are any paid shit-stirrers here, however, I think it would just go to further demonstrate how decadent a society we have become that we can afford to be so crass both financially and interpersonally. And I also believe that that is one of the things about all of this spying: it is generated more for the contracts than it is to spy on anyone.

edited in: referred to as "absurd"/their>there

[JackRiddler]

I'm persuaded! That you're for real, that is. Those are very intelligent responses.

My problem is really that you present one of several possible, plausible scenarios, however unlikely, and then take it pretty much as given. You can think of something and it might be true, but verifiable only if you knew all that is hidden to us; that doesn't privilege it as a thesis. Face value would also look exactly the same. Face value being that Snowden's for real and the NSA is angry and Greenwald and Co. are promoting their stash for all it's worth, out of whatever mix of motives. The exaggerations don't help: with your billions, you just upped First Look's nominal kitty by a factor of at least 10 over any known amount. So far it's just one website with about 10 journalists and a support staff. The frequent use of adhominem and bizarroland logic of many making your case especially doesn't help. Don't you want to distance yourself from the kind of number Edmonds pulled, which actually is far for more easily interpretable as a matter of ego and opportunism? Finally, the context: on face value, the NSA declared war on Snowden and the journalists who have his stash. And the stories really are more important than the messengers. So it all seems like an effort to distract from those.

Why isn't it getting as much attention? I think it's getting about as much as before, but that wouldn't be the fault of the first publishers. (Also, we do have imminent World War III around the Black Sea being set up. And Oscars!)

.

[The Consul]

One way or another, we are all sock puppets, though we are doing our best to deny it.

But what, really, is sock puppetry? Is it like having your consciousness fisted by a complete stranger, a false god, a dead ideology? Or the utterly familiar childhood dye?
Alas, there are only so many figures that can fit in a hall of mirrors. Impugning each other for what we think is a tragic waste of time...

[JackRiddler]

One way or another, we are all sock puppets, though we are doing our best to deny it.

But what, really, is sock puppetry? Is it like having your consciousness fisted by a complete stranger, a false god, a dead ideology? Or the utterly familiar childhood dye?
Alas, there are only so many figures that can fit in a hall of mirrors. Impugning each other for what we think is a tragic waste of time...

In this discussion, a sock-puppet is a persona that (1) would not be present on a given site, except that (2) it is has been enlisted by payment or other means, or generated via persona software, by an unnamed third party to (3) convey that third party's desired message, or achieve other goals of the third party by disrupting or influencing the targeted site, (4) doing so without disclosing the motivating affiliation but instead (5) acting as if it is just an individual user interested in the site. The essential quality is deception on behalf of unspoken interest. Perhaps I should call it something else, since the term is also used to signify a persona started by any long-term (otherwise legit) user to support that user's objectives on a board (i.e., as part of trolling). Of course, what you're saying, Consul, is also taken: as usernames we're all just fragments of a real person, perhaps role-playing or expressing an atypical part of a person's personality, and thus sock-puppets in some sense. If you get to read and edit what you wrote, it's no longer "you" in the same sense as when you are physically present, or speaking on a phone. It's more like a snapshot, and once we're doing that serially we frame and we pose.

[The Consul]

I don't doubt that it is possible; that is, paid trollers here. There was that story about the NSA groups getting in trouble because they were spending too much of their time lurking on game boards like Minecraft. So if they are that bored, coming to a place like this would be almost probable (if they did a meta search on conspiracy+fascist+cover-up+etc. Hell, the Aaron Schwartz thread alone was probably deserving of at least one troll and the progenitor of the HSBC thread probably earned his own tail! I mean; it's possible. Like the couple who were visited by the men in black because they showed a little too much curiosity about p r essu r e coo k ers. Got to be careful. Always! But I also mean in general, any one of us...we are conditioned and opinionated according to our experience and exposure. I have found out in my own lifetime numerous times that what I believed to be true was bullshit. I try not to take anyone's opinion too seriously, other than through parody or farce. Many times I have come here and been exposed to thing I would not otherwise have seen/thought. Overall I believe in the essence of this board because of Jeff, a handful of posters and the wonderful hardee har comity of the place!!!
I was wondering, gee...how much do trolls get paid? Do they go to troll school? Can't imagine doing it myself. But sadly, more than likely, I am an unwitting poser.