Sibel Edmonds destroys Glenn Greenwald

[Nordic]

And now Arthur Silber.

http://powerofnarrative.blogspot.com/20 ... e.html?m=1

Call Me "Irresponsible" -- Please

The lamentable circumstances surrounding the ongoing sterilization and neutering of the Snowden documents compel me to return to some fundamental principles of singular importance. One notion has attained what is now uncontroversial popularity even among those who severely criticize the manner in which Lord Greenwald & Friends have chosen to dole out what might have been significantly more disruptive disclosures had they been handled in a very different way.

In a thorough, detailed and richly-deserved trouncing of Lord Greenwald's incoherent, narcissistic, grandiose posturings (which never respond to actual criticisms in a manner understandable to a functioning human being, but are solely designed to browbeat and bully his critics into silence and submission), and a post which deserves your attention (as do many of the comments), Chris Floyd writes:
I feel that, on balance, the method of dissemination [utilized by Lord Greenwald & Friends] has not been as effective as other approaches might have been. (I have never advocated a "total dump" of the data, by the way; in fact, I don't know anyone who has.)
Other Greenwald critics have offered the same observation. They're wrong: I emphatically called for a TOTAL DUMP of ALL the Snowden documents. I went much farther: I imagined a dozen, or a hundred, Snowdens appearing, each laden with a huge trove of documents -- ALL of which are DUMPED on the internet. With this opportunity for additional explanation, I repeat that call. I reiterate and amplify my argument not primarily in connection with the Snowden documents -- that ship departed on its ill-fated voyage long ago, and will eventually find its resting place in the unreachable depths of the silent ocean -- but with a hopeful eye cast in the direction of future whistleblowers.

"Oh, Arthur! How dreadful you are! How criminally reckless! Don't you care at all about innocent lives that might be endangered? Has every spark of decency in your soul been extinguished? How can you be so irresponsible?"

But you see, I reject every standard and every assumption that leads to negative judgments of this kind. I am painfully aware that almost everyone disagrees with me. I don't give a damn. A brief response to those who condemn me would consist simply of an ostensive proof: "Look! The world we have is the world that conforms to your standards and follows your rules. It is a world of brutality, violence, exploitation, cruelty and death. So how's that working out for you?"

I made my call for a total dump in the first article I wrote about the Snowden affair, on June 11, 2013. In rereading that post today, and although I recognize it is unforgivably bad form to say so, I was startled at how accurately I captured a large part of the central problem, and how prescient my words turned out to be. Indulge me for a moment, and consider the opening of that first essay on this subject, keeping in mind what has happened in what is now almost a year since I wrote it:
An immense and unexpected sadness now suffuses the last part of my life. I did not anticipate, when we are ruled by a Death State which grows more brazenly callous in its murderous practices by the day, that those who challenge authority and seek to push back against the ascendance of brutality and oppression would willingly adopt critical aspects of the monsters' manner of destroying us. Whatever radicals and revolutionaries may be found among us, they are, with extraordinarily rare exceptions, always intent on minding their p's and q's, and never, ever soiling their cuffs with even a smidgen of dirt or dust. Even when we speak of peaceful revolution founded in civil disobedience, if you think that an unfailingly polite, neat, and manicured revolution is a contradiction in terms, you're correct. A well-mannered revolution is one doomed to fail. In the current circumstances, polite, rules-abiding challenges to authority have been rendered irrelevant and utterly without meaning.

If you wish to challenge authority in any serious manner, you must be prepared to provoke an unholy, chaotic, extremely messy scene, one punctuated with howls of outrage by those in power, where everyone is mortified, humiliated and riven with panic -- including you. Anything short of that is merely a very small speed bump on power's journey to ever-increasing destruction and death.
The manner of disclosure adopted by Lord Greenwald & Friends, a model of a polite, rules-abiding challenge to authority, has stopped exactly nothing. To the contrary, the primary effect of the disclosures has been to normalize increasingly pervasive, all-encompassing surveillance, and even to make it "legal." The title of my first article was, "In Praise of Mess, Chaos and Panic" -- qualities which Greenwald & Friends obviously detest. That's only to be expected: it's impossible to become celebrated, powerful and wealthy if your goal is the fundamental disruption -- and ultimately, the dissolution -- of the very system that bestows fame, power and money.

In the earlier article, I explained why I call the United States a "Death State": "More and more, oppression and brutalization have become the bywords of domestic policy as well [as foreign policy]. Today, the United States as a political entity is a corporatist-authoritarian-militarist monstrosity: its major products are suffering, torture, barbarism and death on a huge scale." It is a measure of how far we've gone through the looking glass that "dissenters" appear to believe sincerely that they can challenge a Death State by adopting its methods. But when you adopt its methods -- as, for example, by internalizing its standards for disclosure and non-disclosure -- you voluntarily render your dissent "irrelevant and utterly without meaning" insofar as fundamental change is concerned. But the dissenters' acquiescence in this charade offers an additional, invaluable asset to the State: they offer the appearance of serious dissent, while ensuring that the challenge is ultimately inconsequential. In this way, people continue to delude themselves that "reform" is all that is needed, and that the system itself can be saved. This is precisely the pattern followed by Lord Greenwald & Friends.

I do not think that the monstrous Death State can be "saved" in any respect at all. It is a system that is corrupt and evil at its foundation, and in every one of its branches. My dearest hope is that circumstances force its dissolution and/or fundamental reconfiguration over an extended period of time, which might serve to minimize the pain and suffering involved (which would still be enormous, but certainly not greater than the suffering and death which is sure to come if the Death State continues on its current path). It is true that there are isolated, specific issues where injustice and deprivation can and should be ameliorated, if possible. Marriage equality is one such example -- but opening up the military to gays, lesbians and transgendered persons is most certainly not. Marriage equality bestows economic and other advantages on all the population equally. It is beyond indecent to insist that everyone should be entitled to join the Death State's military arm, and thus to become first-hand murderers themselves. Never has a push for "equality" been so ill-conceived, when there is no longer any legitimate reason for anyone to join the military at all.

And the manner of disclosure chosen by Greenwald & Friends is most decidedly not lessening the crimes of the Surveillance State. As noted above (and detailed in several of my articles, such as this one), the final effect of the Snowden leak will only be the normalization and legalization of surveillance on a vast scale.

Let us briefly consider some of the major objections raised to the apparently horrifying prospect of a "total dump." We've heard that disclosure of certain documents would empower other governments to engage in surveillance in ways that the U.S. government does. This objection rests on assumptions, and one notable omission, that seriously undermine it. I assume an adult realizes that every government engages in spying and surveillance to some extent; the major and most powerful governments engage in very broad spying and surveillance. How believable is it that the U.S. government utilizes methods of surveillance that are totally unknown to other States? Did Lord Greenwald do a survey of other governments, asking them if they know about Project Nostradamus (described sufficiently so they know what he's talking about in general terms, but shorn of specifics that would allow them to duplicate it)? That seems unlikely. So how does Greenwald or anyone else know what other States are already aware of, and what would be genuine news to them? Even if we assume that certain surveillance methods will take many people by surprise, the disclosure of those methods will enable those who would resist to develop far more effective means of combatting them and rendering them ineffective. For some reason, that possibility never seems to make it into the equation. So Lord Greenwald & Co. declare this area a no-go. The State is delighted. (I completely discount the outraged statements from heads of state and similarly placed individuals in response to the "revelation" that they themselves have been spied on. When such spying is disclosed in a major news story, of course Merkel will fume and stamp her feet; the charades of politics demand no less. Does anyone -- anyone over the age of ten, that is -- seriously believe that this came as news to her? I'm a nobody, and I assume the government knows everything about me if it wants to. If Merkel and every other foreign political leader hasn't made the same assumption, they're idiots.)

We've also heard that a total dump would reveal the names of individuals who have been surveilled who are completely innocent of wrongdoing, and that such disclosure might reveal details of their lives that they legitimately wish to keep private. But such individuals, or at least some of them, might very much want to know that they've been spied upon, and they might be perfectly willing to accept any temporary inconvenience or even serious embarrassment. Equally important is the point that, if these all-knowing, all-seeing journalists can appreciate how outrageous and unjust it is that innocent people are spied on, then so can the general public. It seems much more likely to me that there would be an outpouring of public sympathy and understanding for those innocent people who have had their lives invaded by the State. Or is it the case that only the very special journalists are able to appreciate issues of this kind? The very special journalists certainly seem to believe that themselves. That's why they're so special.

Or we hear that a total dump would endanger "innocent" people of a different kind: those individuals who work for the Death State, including those engaged in covert operations, including spies themselves. In that first essay a year ago, I parsed some statements from Snowden and Greenwald, trying to figure out who specifically they believed would be harmed by certain disclosures. I pointed out that it certainly sounded as if they were talking about U.S. spies, among others. Later statements confirmed that this was indeed what they meant. And recall that Snowden recently said: "I love my country, and I believe that spying serves a vital purpose and must continue." I termed this "highly objectionable." One reader (of severely impaired mental acuity) thought that I found Snowden's declaration, "I love my country," to be the problem. While I do find such statements offensive (and "objectionable"), I regard them as empty political bloviating; it's a revealing, and enormously depressing, indication of the trajectory of the Snowden Follies that Snowden and Greenwald sound more and more like politicians with each day that passes. But my objection was to the second part: "I believe that spying serves a vital purpose and must continue." I thought of highlighting that part of the sentence in my original post, but decided against it. I thought readers could figure out which part was the more significant. I always underestimate the stupidity of certain readers.

We are talking about those individuals who have chosen to work for the Death State in some of its most deadly and illegitimate branches: in covert operations and in spying. If you believe that "spying serves a vital purpose," you will believe that spies are "innocent," and perhaps even noble. And Snowden "loves" the Death State, for he does not see it as a Death State. I would never expect such a person, or his carefully selected journalists, to mount a serious challenge to the Death State, for they cannot even take the accurate measure of the enemy with which they contend. They do not even see it as an enemy in the way I do, and in the way the facts compel one to see it. (I will address in a separate essay what a journalist should have done in my view, when offered the opportunity to receive the Snowden documents. It is a subject which requires a detailed discussion. For our purposes here, I need only note that to accept the documents -- and to accede to the conditions that Snowden apparently imposed -- requires that the journalist(s) in question be completely comfortable with the exercise of power and, in this particular case, a great degree of power.)

This brings us to the heart of the matter. Just as I view the State as monstrous and illegitimate, so too I view any and all spying and surveillance activities as entirely illegitimate and almost completely without merit of any kind. I've been over this ground many times. For the detailed argument as to why "intelligence" generally is an elaborate (and very profitable) fraud, you can start here and here. The links provide much more background. Always remember that "intelligence" is almost always wrong. I said that spying and surveillance are "almost completely without merit of any kind" only because there are very rare instances where the "intelligence" stumbles upon a small piece of information that is correct. And as rare as it is, even correct information will be disregarded when it runs counter to a policy that the government has already embraced.

You can go through every other objection to disclosure that has been offered and make counterarguments of the kind indicated above with regard to these particular claims. None of the objections is credible or convincing; in every case, a case for disclosure can be made that is at least as compelling, and usually it is far more compelling. Most importantly, since I reject the entire elaborate edifice of the State and surveillance in general, I reject at its root the notion that the State has secrets worthy of protection. The State has no secrets whatsoever that deserve protection from disclosure. None.

So I am brought back to what I wrote at the conclusion of that article from almost a year ago:
The entire edifice of "secrecy," especially with regard to national security, is a vicious lie from start to finish. Put it all out there. If full disclosure endangers those who work for the Death State, the problem -- and the responsibility -- is with those who choose to directly advance the Death State's goals. It is decidedly not with the leaker, or with the journalists.

...

I want mess. I want chaos. I want to see the ruling class in unrelenting, hysterical panic. My fantasy is that a dozen, or a hundred, Edward Snowdens appear, each laden with huge piles of documents. And all those documents are dumped on the internet -- but in a fully mindful and discriminating manner, and with a specific purpose in mind. The Death State's ruling class is intent on destruction, brutality, oppression and murder and, as they tell us repeatedly, their work is far from done. The purpose of unmasking all the secrets that the ruling class is so desperate to keep, of shoveling all of it directly into the blazing, unforgiving sunlight in a fully unfiltered way, is to stop them. ...

Stop them. Your life -- and the lives of many others -- depend on it.
This is emphatically not the view of Lord Greenwald & Friends. They are "serious," "respectable," and "responsible." I am none of those things, and I thank God for it every day.

*****

ADDENDUM: One of the best passages answering the charge of "irresponsibility" in a political context remains the following from Hannah Arendt. I have offered it several times before; I discuss this passage (and another one, as well) at length in "Against Voting." Arendt's essay is titled, "Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship," and it appears in Responsibility and Judgment.

In writing about Nazi Germany, Arendt addresses the question: "in what way were those few different who in all walks of life did not collaborate and refused to participate in public life, though they could not and did not rise in rebellion?" This is part of her answer:
The answer to the ... question is relatively simple: the nonparticipants, called irresponsible by the majority, were the only ones who dared judge by themselves, and they were capable of doing so not because they disposed of a better system of values or because the old standards of right and wrong were still firmly planted in their mind and conscience. On the contrary, all our experiences tell us that it was precisely the members of respectable society, who had not been touched by the intellectual and moral upheaval in the early stages of the Nazi period, who were the first to yield. They simply exchanged one system of values against another. I therefore would suggest that the nonparticipants were those whose consciences did not function in this, as it were, automatic way—as though we dispose of a set of learned or innate rules which we then apply to the particular case as it arises, so that every new experience or situation is already prejudged and we need only act out whatever we learned or possessed beforehand. Their criterion, I think, was a different one: they asked themselves to what extent they would still be able to live in peace with themselves after having committed certain deeds; and they decided that it would be better to do nothing, not because the world would then be changed for the better, but simply because only on this condition could they go on living with themselves at all. Hence, they also chose to die when they were forced to participate. To put it crudely, they refused to murder, not so much because they still held fast to the command “Thou shalt not kill,” but because they were unwilling to live together with a murderer—themselves. The precondition for this kind of judging is not a highly developed intelligence or sophistication in moral matters, but rather the disposition to live together explicitly with oneself, to have intercourse with oneself, that is, to be engaged in that silent dialogue between me and myself which, since Socrates and Plato, we usually call thinking. This kind of thinking, though at the root of all philosophical thought, is not technical and does not concern theoretical problems. The dividing line between those who want to think and therefore have to judge by themselves, and those who do not, strikes across all social and cultural or educational differences. In this respect, the total moral collapse of respectable society during the Hitler regime may teach us that under such circumstances those who cherish values and hold fast to moral norms and standards are not reliable: we now know that moral norms and standards can be changed overnight, and that all that then will be left is the mere habit of holding fast to something. Much more reliable will be the doubters and skeptics, not because skepticism is good or doubting wholesome, but because they are used to examine things and to make up their own minds. Best of all will be those who know only one thing for certain: that whatever else happens, as long as we live we shall have to live together with ourselves.


Arthur Silber at 2:31 PM
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[Sounder]

But when you adopt its methods -- as, for example, by internalizing its standards for disclosure and non-disclosure -- you voluntarily render your dissent "irrelevant and utterly without meaning" insofar as fundamental change is concerned. But the dissenters' acquiescence in this charade offers an additional, invaluable asset to the State: they offer the appearance of serious dissent, while ensuring that the challenge is ultimately inconsequential. In this way, people continue to delude themselves that "reform" is all that is needed, and that the system itself can be saved. This is precisely the pattern followed by Lord Greenwald & Friends.

In an empty world, appearances are all that matter.

It would not be surprising if we were to find out that this operation at its core is an Israeli op to collect leverage information to be applied toward their American partners.

And this again, as it may have been lost in the earlier sound and fury.

It is reasonable to suggest that these sorts of events happen by way of facilitation rather than developing active agents. It’s possible for this to be a higher level implementation of an FBI style entrapment exercise. One set of folk ‘opens doors’ for another set that has been profiled and can be assumed to act in a certain way because that ‘way’ is a strong element of the target person’s self-identity to begin with.

Both Snowden and Greenwald may be innocent in a technical sense, while still serving a larger agenda that is contrary to their own declared values.

This may apply less to Greenwald because he seems to be a philo-semite; yes Glenn Greenwald is a racist.

http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/1.567377

Greenwald agreed that the Snowden revelations are relevant to Pollard’s case. “When the U.S. government goes around the world criticizing other countries for spying on allies and prosecuting them,” he said, “are they going to maintain that with a straight face when they’re doing exactly that?”
(Uh, Glenn, its their job to lie with a straight face.)

It’s proper to raise Pollard’s case in the context of U.S. spying on its Israeli ally, he continued, because that underscores the hypocrisy of what the U.S. itself is doing. The U.S. government, Greenwald charged, does exactly what it accuses its enemies of doing, and no country has the right to say other countries shouldn’t do something while it is secretly violating that very same taboo.
(has Glenn not learned anything about the nature of imperialism from reading the Snowden docs.?)


Asked about the U.S. government’s claim that the purpose of the eavesdropping is to fight terrorism, he responded by citing the documents’ revelations that the NSA eavesdropped on both German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Israeli officials, asking, Does the U.S. government think Angela Merkel is a terrorist? Or that democratically elected Israeli officials are involved in terror?

Oh yes please spare me the thought, !.7 million beautiful human being must try to create life in a constant context of humiliation and threats of arbitrary death, yeah, no terror involved there. It’s not possible, were Democratic.



From the comments:
Pollard was an AMERICAN not an ISRAELI!!!!
• By Get it straight, it is not that difficult
• 07 Jan 2014
• 05:58AM
What part of that TRAITOROUS relationship do you not get? American citizens spying on Israel and Israeli citizens spying on America are NOT traitors. American citizens spying on America and Israeli citizens spying on Israel ARE traitors. Good grief, this has to be spelled out for you?? (Of course, this gets at the very problematic dual citizenship, dual loyalty question. Let's save that for another day.) But Pollard was a TRAITOR and the comparison to American citizen agents spying on Israel is FALSE, it is DISSEMBLING.

[RocketMan]

Greenwald is a "philo-semite" and a "racist" because of that one quote? It seems to be the only one ever dragged out to support such ridiculous claims. And "philo-semite"...? What kind of a word is that anyway, sounds like something David Irving would say.

[JackRiddler]

I missed altogether that back on March 1st, Greenwald had responded to the Mark Ames attack on him (in which Omidyar was presented as the mastermind of the Ukrainian putsch and controller of the Snowden documents, see http://pando.com/2014/02/28/pierre-omid ... ents-show/), just hours after the publication in Pando. I also missed that although the Pando article suggests that Greenwald and even Snowden are controlled by Omidyar since he's the owner of First Look, Pando in turn is part-owned by... Peter Thiel! The same guy involved in financing Palantir and Team Themis (which you'll remember suggested somehow breaking Greenwald as a means of going after Wikileaks). So by the logic of Ames...

Anyway, while one group attack Snowden for supposedly being Putin's slave, another attack Snowden and Greenwald for collaborating with the author of the Ukrainian coup. Fascinating stuff. What goes lost in this squeeze play is, of course, the actual stories about the NSA.

Original full of hyperlinks:

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014 ... ependence/

On the Meaning of Journalistic Independence
By Glenn Greenwald 1 Mar 2014, 8:50 AM EDT 805

This morning, I see that some people are quite abuzz about a new Pando article ”revealing” that the foundation of Pierre Omidyar, the publisher of First Look Media which publishes The Intercept, gave several hundred thousand dollars to a Ukraininan “pro-democracy” organization opposed to the ruling regime. This, apparently, is some sort of scandal that must be immediately addressed not only by Omidyar, but also by every journalist who works at First Look. That several whole hours elapsed since the article was published on late Friday afternoon without my commenting is, for some, indicative of disturbing stonewalling.

I just learned of this article about 30 minutes ago, which is why I’m addressing it “only” now (I apologize for not continuously monitoring Twitter at all times, including the weekend). I have not spoken to Pierre or anyone at First Look – or, for that matter, anyone else in the world – about any of this, and am speaking only for myself here. To be honest, I barely know what it is that I’m supposed to boldly come forth and address, so I’ll do my best to make a few points about this specific article but also make some general points about journalistic independence that I do actually think are important:

(1) The Pando article adopts the tone of bold investigative journalism that intrepidly dug deep into secret materials and uncovered a “shocking” bombshell (“Step out of the shadows…. Pierre Omidyar”). But as I just discovered with literally 5 minutes of Googling, the Omidyar Network’s support for the Ukrainian group in question, Centre UA, has long been publicly known: because the Omidyar Network announced the investment at the time in a press release and then explained it on its website.

In a September 15, 2011 press release, the Omidyar Network “announced today its intent to grant up to $3M to six leading organizations focused on advancing government transparency and accountability” including “Centre UA (Ukraine)”. The Network then devoted an entire page of its website (entitled “New Citizen (Centre UA)”) to touting the investment and explaining its rationale and purpose (the group, claims the Network, “seeks to enable citizen participation in national and regional politics by amplifying the voices of Ukrainian citizens and promoting open and accountable government”).



I think it’s perfectly valid for journalists to investigate the financial dealings of corporations and billionaires who fund media outlets, whether it be those who fund or own Pando, First Look, MSNBC, Fox News, The Washington Post or any other. And it’s certainly reasonable to have concerns and objections about the funding of organizations that are devoted to regime change in other countries: I certainly have those myself. But the Omidyar Network doesn’t exactly seem ashamed of these donations, and they definitely don’t seem to be hiding them, given that they trumpeted them in their own press releases and web pages.

(2) Can someone please succinctly explain why this is a scandal that needs to be addressed, particularly by First Look journalists? That’s a genuine request. Wasn’t it just 72 hours ago that the widespread, mainstream view in the west (not one that I shared) was that there was a profound moral obligation to stand up and support the brave and noble Ukrainian opposition forces as they fight to be liberated from the brutal and repressive regime imposed on them by Vladimir Putin’s puppet? When did it suddenly become shameful in those same circles to support those very same opposition forces?

In fact, I’ve been accused more times than I can count – including by a former NSA employee and a Eurasia Foundation spokesman - of being a Putin shill for not supporting the Ukrainian opposition and not denouncing Russian involvement there (by which they mean I’ve not written anything on this topic). Now we seem to have the exact opposite premise: that the real evil is supporting the opposition in Ukraine and any journalist who works at First Look – including ones who are repeatedly called criminals by top U.S. officials for publishing top secret government documents; or who risk their lives to go around the world publicizing the devastation wrought by America’s Dirty Wars and its dirty and lawless private contractors; or who have led the journalistic attack on the banks that own and control the government - are now tools of neo-liberal, CIA-cooperating imperialism which seeks to undermine Putin by secretly engineering the Ukrainian revolution. To call all of that innuendo muddled and incoherent is to be generous.

(3) Despite its being publicly disclosed, I was not previously aware that the Omidyar Network donated to this Ukrainian group. That’s because, prior to creating The Intercept with Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill, I did not research Omidyar’s political views or donations. That’s because his political views and donations are of no special interest to me – any more than I cared about the political views of the family that owns and funds Salon (about which I know literally nothing, despite having worked there for almost 6 years), or any more than I cared about the political views of those who control the Guardian Trust.

There’s a very simple reason for that: they have no effect whatsoever on my journalism or the journalism of The Intercept. That’s because we are guaranteed full editorial freedom and journalistic independence. The Omidyar Network’s political views or activities – or those of anyone else – have no effect whatsoever on what we report, how we report it, or what we say.

The author of the Pando article seems to understand this point quite well when it comes to excusing himself from working for a media outlet funded by national-security-state-supporting tech billionaires whose views he claims to find “repugnant”:

It is a problem we all have to contend with—PandoDaily’s 18-plus investors include a gaggle of Silicon Valley billionaires like Marc Andreessen (who serves on the board of eBay, chaired by Pierre Omidyar) and Peter Thiel (whose politics I’ve investigated [GG: before working for a media outlet he funded] and described as repugnant.)

So he acknowledges the truly repellent politics of those who fund the media outlet where he does his journalism: Andreessen, a Romney supporter, has become one of the NSA’s most devoted defenders, while the company owned by Paypal founder Thiel, Palantir Technologies, works extensively with the CIA and got caught scheming against journalists, WikiLeaks supporters and Chamber of Commerce critics. [Including Greenwald, he omits to mention. RI thread here: http://rigorousintuition.ca/board2/view ... =8&t=31176] But he obviously believes those repellent views and activities do not reflect on him or his journalism. Indeed, any of you who are approvingly citing the Pando article are implicitly saying the same thing: namely, that media outlets funded by government-supporting tech moguls with repugnant histories can produce important journalism, including reporting on other tech moguls.

More generally, you’re endorsing the point that the political ideology of those who fund media outlets, no matter how much you dislike that ideology, does not mean that hard-hitting investigative journalism is precluded or that the journalism reflects the views of those who fund it. Anyone who thinks that The Intercept is or will be some sort of mouthpiece for U.S. foreign policy goals is invited to review the journalism we’ve produced in the 20 days we’ve existed.

Now, if you want to take the position that people should not work at organizations funded by oligarchs, or that journalism is inherently corrupted if funded by rich people with bad political views, then I hope you apply that consistently. Groups like the ACLU, Media Matters, the Center for Constitutional Rights and a whole slew of left-wing groups have been funded for years by billionaire George Soros and his foundations despite a long history of funding of and profiting from all sorts of capitalism projects anathema to the left, including Ukrainian pro-democracy groups (the same Pando writer previously claimed without evidence that the ACLU received a $20 million donation from the Koch Brothers). Or, as Kade Crockford of the ACLU of Massachusetts put it:



Are Chris Hayes and Rachel Maddow responsible for all the bad acts of Comcast, which owns MSNBC, or is their journalism impugned by those bad acts? Was WikiLeaks infected with Vladimir Putin’s sins, as some argued, because Julian Assange’s show appeared on RT? Or go ahead and apply those questions to virtually every large media organization or advocacy group you like, which needs substantial funding, which in turn requires that they seek and obtain that funding from very rich people who undoubtedly have political views and activities you find repellent.

That journalistic outlets fail to hold accountable large governmental and corporate entities is a common complaint. It’s one I share. It’s possible to do great journalism in discrete, isolated cases without much funding and by working alone, but it’s virtually impossible to do sustained, broad-scale investigative journalism aimed at large and powerful entities without such funding. As I’ve learned quite well over the last eight months, you need teams of journalists, and editors, and lawyers, and experts, and travel and technology budgets, and a whole slew of other tools that require serious funding. The same is true for large-scale activism.

That funding, by definition, is going to come from people rich enough to provide it. And such people are almost certainly going to have views and activities that you find objectionable. If you want to take the position that this should never be done, that’s fine: just be sure to apply it consistently to the media outlets and groups you really like.

But for me, the issue is not – and for a long time has not been – the political views of those who fund journalism. Journalists should be judged by the journalism they produce, not by those who fund the outlets where they do it. The real issue is whether they demand and obtain editorial freedom. We have. But ultimately, the only thing that matters is the journalism we or any other media outlets produce.

(4) Typical for this particular writer, the Pando article is filled with factual inaccuracies, including one extremely serious one:

Of the many problems that poses, none is more serious than the fact that Omidyar now has the only two people with exclusive access to the complete Snowden NSA cache, Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras. Somehow, the same billionaire who co-financed the “coup” in Ukraine with USAID, also has exclusive access to the NSA secrets—and very few in the independent media dare voice a skeptical word about it. [emphasis added]

Let’s leave to the side the laughable hyperbole that Omidyar is now the mastermind who has secretly engineered the Ukrainian uprising. Let’s also leave to the side a vital fact that people like this Pando writer steadfastly ignore: that there are numerous media entities in possession of tens of thousands of Snowden documents, including The Guardian, Bart Gellman/The Washington Post, The New York Times, and ProPublica, rendering absurd any conspiracy theories that Omidyar can control which documents are or are not published.

The real falsehood here is that Omidyar himself has any access, let alone “exclusive access”, to “the NSA secrets.” This is nothing short of a fabrication. The writer of this article just made that up.

The only Snowden documents Omidyar has ever seen are the ones that have been published as part of stories in media outlets around the world. He has no possession of those documents and no access to them. He has never sought or received access to those documents. He has played no role whatsoever in deciding which ones will be reported. He obviously plays no role in deciding which documents all those other news outlets will report. Other than generally conveying that there is much reporting left to be done on these documents – something I’ve publicly said many times – I don’t believe I’ve ever even had a single discussion with him about a single document in the archive.

We’ve continued to report on those documents with media outlets around the world – in the last month alone, I reported on numerous documents with NBC, while Laura did the same with The New York Times - and will continue to report on them at The Intercept with full editorial independence. But the claim that he has obtained possession of, or even access to, the archive (in full or in part) is an outright falsehood.

Other inaccuracies pervade the article. Marcy Wheeler, whose comments were prominently featured, complained rather vehemently and at length that the article wildly misrepresented what she said.

(5) I have a long history of condemning U.S. government interference in the governance of other countries, and of the accompanying jingoistic moral narrative that this interference is intended to engender Freedom and Democracy rather than the promotion of U.S. interests. I have equal scorn for those who feign opposition to Russian interference in the sovereignty of other countries while continuing to support all sorts of U.S. interference of exactly that sort. I know little about the specific Ukrainian group at issue here – do any of you touting this article know anything about them? – and I certainly don’t trust this writer to convey anything accurately.

But what I do know is that I would never temper, limit, suppress or change my views for anyone’s benefit – as anyone I’ve worked with will be happy to tell you – and my views on such interference in other countries isn’t going to remotely change no matter the actual facts here. I also know that I’m free to express those views without the slightest fear. And I have zero doubt that that’s true of every other writer at The Intercept. That’s what journalistic independence means.

[Nordic]

http://www.businessinsider.com/wikileak ... try-2014-5

Well it looks like wiki leaks has decided to not play ball with Greenwald.

WikiLeaks Threatens To Reveal Information That Glenn Greenwald Says Could Lead To 'Deaths'
MICHAEL KELLEY MAY 19, 2014, 8:23 PM 60,066 50

REUTERS/Anthony Devlin

The @WikiLeaks Twitter handle is widely considered to be run by its founder, Julian Assange.
"We will reveal the name of the censored country whose population is being mass recorded in 72 hours." – WikiLeaks on Twitter


America's National Security Agency (NSA) can "vacuum up and store the actual content of every conversation" in the Bahamas and an unnamed country, the new publication The Intercept reported Monday, based on documents leaked by Edward Snowden.

Intercept editor Glenn Greenwald — who wrote about documents leaked by Snowden when he was a columnist at The Guardian — said the publication didn't reveal the country because it was "very convinced" that doing so would lead to "deaths."


The Intercept

This graphic shows the countries targeted in the program detailed by The Intercept.
After a heated discussion among WikiLeaks, Greenwald, Intercept editor in chief John Cook, and American WikiLeaks hacker turned Der Spiegal contributor Jacob Appelbaum, WikiLeaks tweeted that it would reveal the name of the second country being spied on by the NSA.

@GGreenwald @johnjcook We will reveal the name of the censored country whose population is being mass recorded in 72 hours.

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) May 19, 2014
That threat implies that WikiLeaks knows the other country — which would be possible only if the rogue publishing organization deduced it from the redaction or has access to the Snowden documents.

The most plausible way for WikiLeaks to have access to a Snowden cache is if Appelbaum, who led the reporting on several Der Spiegel articles based on NSA documents (which may or may not be from Snowden), shared information with his friend and WikiLeaks editor in chief Julian Assange. Applebaum tweeted that The Intercept's redaction was "a mistake."

Appelbaum, a close friend of Laura Poitras, the other journalist whom Snowden gave a large set of documents, also gave a presentation detailing a classified document listing technology available to the NSA's hacking unit, known as TAO. It is not known how he acquired those documents.

These coincidences do not imply that Appelbaum knows the unnamed country or that he offered this information to Assange — there are other ways WikiLeaks may be able to obtain Snowden documents — but the close association between Appelbaum and the key players involved are significant if they lend credibility to WikiLeaks' threat.

The threat's potential for harm is real: Snowden's closest source and the U.S. government believe that revealing the unnamed country "could lead to increased violence."

Scary stuff.

[JackRiddler]

Shouldn't that come with a corporate media warning? I mean, long as a thread is devoted to bloggers pointlessly shredding each other...

In any case, if the above story is factual, I can't wait to hear the name of that nation.

Looks like Ames, Silber, Edmonds, Ryan and the aptly named Rancid Honeytrap were all full of shit when they insinuated that Greenwald is the tyrannical sole gatekeeper of all Snowden documents, or that these are now somehow "owned" and controlled by Omidyar, etc. If that's not true, then their campaign against Greenwald is largely irrelevant.

And clearly, it was never true that Greenwald has a monopoly over Snowden's files. This idea was invented or imagined by those who have distracted from the real stories concerning NSA and the surveillance state.

Wikileaks has worked together with Snowden, Greenwald and Poitras often and productively, despite all the lame attempts to cast them as being at each others' throats. Maybe now, with the revelation of the country in question, there will be a split between Wikileaks and Greenwald: it will at least be about a mater of substance, and not the kind of made-up gossipy bullshit that's been offered by the anti-Greenwald panic-mongers.

[bks]

In any case, if the above story is factual, I can't wait to hear the name of that nation.

It's factual. The rift b/ Wikileaks and FirstLook on this is bigger than you're suggesting:

WikiLeaks ‏@wikileaks 13h

We condemn Firstlook for following the Washington Post into censoring the mass interception of an entire nation https://firstlook.org/theintercept/arti ... l-bahamas/ …

John Cook ‏@johnjcook 13h

@wikileaks that's a willfully stupid interpretation of the relationship between our story and the post's. but your condemnation is noted.

Jacob Appelbaum ‏@ioerror 13h

@johnjcook @wikileaks Why did you say "perhaps illegal" when it is clearly illegal in the Bahamas, illegal as it targets Americans, etc?

John Cook ‏@johnjcook 13h

@ioerror @wikileaks we’d hoped that the bahamian government would clarify that point for us but sadly they declined the opportunity

Jacob Appelbaum ‏@ioerror 13h

@johnjcook @wikileaks When speculating on "perhaps illegal" it is important to note which laws apply in said analysis, I think.

John Cook ‏@johnjcook 13h

@ioerror @wikileaks there’s probably another 4k words to be written about the legal issues; we wanted to do a story about the program...

Jacob Appelbaum ‏@ioerror 12h

@johnjcook @wikileaks I think that there is a good meta-journalism sub-article about the specific words used in that article.

John Cook ‏@johnjcook 12h

@ioerror @wikileaks i agree. or a sub-jourmalism meta-article.

Jacob Appelbaum ‏@ioerror 12h

@johnjcook Another topic: such a redaction choice makes @wikileaks look extreme and vindicates the WaPo standard line. This is a mistake.

Glenn Greenwald ‏@ggreenwald 10h

@ioerror @johnjcook And @wikileaks also withheld info when they were convinced it could harm innocents - we were very convinced this 1 would

WikiLeaks ‏@wikileaks 10h

@ggreenwald When has true published information harmed innocents? You are painting future publications into a corner with this Pentagon line

Glenn Greenwald ‏@ggreenwald 10h

@wikileaks No - the NSA & DNI urged us aggressively to suppress the names of those 4 countries, as the Post did. We refused.

WikiLeaks ‏@wikileaks 10h

@ggreenwald The fact is Firstlook is acting like a bunch of racists who believe citizens of US dominated countries do not have rights.

Glenn Greenwald ‏@ggreenwald 10h

@wikileaks Given that we just published FOUR non-white countries whom the NSA wanted suppressed & the WP did suppress, that's absurd.

WikiLeaksVerified account ‏@wikileaks

@ggreenwald Say you did it to avoid spin. Say you did it to avoid legal attacks. But don't say censoring an entire nation is ok. It's not ok

[JackRiddler]

The Intercept has confirmed that as of 2013, the NSA was actively using MYSTIC to gather cell-phone metadata in five countries, and was intercepting voice data in two of them. Documents show that the NSA has been generating intelligence reports from MYSTIC surveillance in the Bahamas, Mexico, Kenya, the Philippines, and one other country, which The Intercept is not naming in response to specific, credible concerns that doing so could lead to increased violence. The more expansive full-take recording capability has been deployed in both the Bahamas and the unnamed country.

SNIP

SOMALGET is part of a broader NSA program called MYSTIC, which The Intercept has learned is being used to secretly monitor the telecommunications systems of the Bahamas and several other countries, including Mexico, the Philippines, and Kenya. But while MYSTIC scrapes mobile networks for so-called “metadata” – information that reveals the time, source, and destination of calls – SOMALGET is a cutting-edge tool that enables the NSA to vacuum up and store the actual content of every conversation in an entire country.

All told, the NSA is using MYSTIC to gather personal data on mobile calls placed in countries with a combined population of more than 250 million people. And according to classified documents, the agency is seeking funding to export the sweeping surveillance capability elsewhere.

I was going to take a guess based on "250 million" but:

Population
Mexico: 120 million
Philippines: 100 million
Kenya: 44 million
Bahamas: 0.35 million
=======================
Total: ~264 million

Oops! So 250 million is a loose synonym for "a lot," a failure of the author's arithmetic, or a dodge.

[JackRiddler]

And now for some total speculation!

I checked out some guesses online, and the one that struck me as obvious is Afghanistan. I'll bet on it: Thirteen years into a post-9/11 occupation, the entire network there by now would have been built from the ground up by the U.S. military itself and/or its contractors (anyone remember Nick Berg?), and they would have thought of allowing total surveillance from the beginning. True, with a population of 25 million compared to the Bahamas' 350,000 it's a much bigger storage capacity required to record and render searcheable all voice calls by cell. But the call volume per capita is surely lower and you would expect the priority and budget devoted to it as an object of a major war operation to be high. One expects the Afghans already think all calls are monitored -- how could they not? -- but a revelation that spells it out undeniably may cause an initial spasm of violence targeting phone companies and network technicians. Don't want to sound heartless but this will be one pretext among many in a never-ending civil war still being stoked by the U.S., and the annual violence will work out roughly the same. I don't agree with a decision to suppress the info, if Afghanistan is the country. However it's certain that the national-security authoritarians & co. will blame all violence that happens there for any reason for the next half-year on Snowden and Greenwald, who in turn will get no defense from the faction of Ames/Thiel, et al.

[Wombaticus Rex]

^^Agreed.

Every passing leak makes it look more and more like the NSA is just the control room for the global drug trade.

[JackRiddler]

^^Agreed.

Every passing leak makes it look more and more like the NSA is just the control room for the global drug trade.

Nice, that would be what links the Bahamas to Afghanistan, no?

But let's wait to hear that it is Afghanistan.

[seemslikeadream]

Who Leaked NSA Documents to WikiLeaks?
Julian Assange's whistle-blowing group announced plans to publish an NSA report that allegedly could get people killed. The question is: How did they get the documents?


On Monday, Glenn Greenwald’s investigative enterprise, The Intercept, published another incendiary report about U.S. spying abroad: According to documents Edward Snowden leaked, the NSA secretly taps the entire telecommunications systems of four countries—the Bahamas, Mexico, the Philippines and Kenya.

But what’s most interesting about the story is something The Intercept left out. According to Greenwald and his co-authors, Laura Poitras and Ryan Devereaux, there was a fifth country on that list that The Intercept chose not to publish. Doing so, they wrote, “could lead to increased violence.”

NEW YORK, NY - APRIL 11: Investigative reporter Glenn Greenwald, who worked with National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden, speaks at a press conference after accepting the George Polk Award along side Laura Poitras, Ewan MacAskill and Barton Gellman, for National Security Reporting on April 11, 2014 in New York City. Greenwald, Poitras and MacAskill reported on the story for The Guardian; Gellman wrote for The Washington Post. This is the first time Greenwald and Poitras have returned to the United States since the story broke.

That’s where WikiLeaks, the radical whistle-blowing organization founded by Julian Assange, comes in. After the story came out, the official WikiLeaks Twitter account condemned Greenwald for not revealing the name of the fifth country and claimed that they would release it themselves in 72 hours.


MAY 19, 2014 22:35 UTC@WIKILEAKS
@GGreenwald @johnjcook We will reveal the name of the censored country whose population is being mass recorded in 72 hours.

| |
We’re not going to speculate on the country in question, but WikiLeaks’ truth-to-power chest-beating is rather perplexing, for a couple of reasons.

First, Snowden never worked with Assange in any official capacity, so how did WikiLeaks get the document?

Second, why would WikiLeaks choose to publish the country’s name when Greenwald, who was tapped by Snowden to publicly disseminate his leaked NSA reports, decided it would be too dangerous?

Before we get to the first question, it’s important to address the second, and to understand what would motivate WikiLeaks to publish the document—and to do so in a way that would cause such a media frenzy. After all, if the group was going to release the NSA report, why not just release the report? Why drum up so much attention?

Australian founder of whistleblowing website, 'WikiLeaks', Julian Assange holds up a copy of today's Guardian newspaper during a press conference in London on July 26, 2010. The founder of a website which published tens of thousands of leaked military files about the war in Afghanistan said Monday they showed that the "course of the war needs to change". In all, some 92,000 documents dating back to 2004 were released by the whistleblowers' website Wikileaks to the New York Times, Britain's Guardian newspaper, and Germany's Der Spiegel news weekly. Assange also used a press conference in London to dismiss the White House's furious reaction to the disclosures. AFP PHOTO/Leon Neal (Photo credit should read LEON NEAL/AFP/Getty Images)
Julian Assange holds up a copy of The Guardian that featured a story using the information from Bradley Manning's leaked military files.
AFP/GETTY IMAGES/LEON NEAL
In 2010, WikiLeaks rose to international fame after publishing thousands of raw documents and video footage obtained by Chelsea (then Bradley) Manning. Since then, the organization has steadily faded from prominence. This happened for a variety of reasons, ranging from several high-profile employee departures to allegations of sexual misconduct against Assange.

The Greenwald-Snowden NSA stories threatened to banish WikiLeaks to the sidelines for good. After all, people wondered, how could WikiLeaks call itself a whistle-blowing organization if it missed the biggest whistle-blowing scoop of the 21st century?

Fugitive former U.S. spy agency contractor Edward Snowden's new refugee documents granted by Russia is seen during a news conference in Moscow August 1, 2013. Snowden slipped quietly out of the airport on Thursday after securing temporary asylum in Russia, ending more than a month in limbo in the transit area. REUTERS/Maxim Shemetov (RUSSIA - Tags: POLITICS CRIME LAW) - RTX127IL
Edward Snowden's refugee visa granted by the Russian government.
REUTERS/MAXIM SHEMETOV
We’re just speculating here, but perhaps releasing the name of that fifth country could give WikiLeaks a renewed sense of legitimacy. At the very least, it would generate headlines for the group.

Still, that doesn’t explain how Assange and Co. got the information to begin with.

But we have an idea.

On June 9, 2013, Glen Greenwald unmasked Edward Snowden as the source for his NSA stories. The next day, Snowden went on camera from a hotel room in Hong Kong, explaining why he leaked the documents. Four days later, FBI Director Robert Mueller publicly announced that U.S. officials would hunt him down and prosecute him.

BERLIN, GERMANY - MAY 06: British journalist Sarah Harrison, who has worked closely with Wikileaks and accompanied Edward Snowden when he flew from Hong Kong to Moscow, and who said she is currently living in Berlin because she fears persecution under Section 7 of the British legal system should she return to Britain, speaks at the 2014 re:publica conferences on digital society on May 6, 2014 in Berlin, Germany. The conference brings together bloggers, developers, human rights activists and others to discuss the course of the digital future. Re:publica will run until May 8. (Photo by Sean Gallup/Getty Images)
WikiLeaks' Sarah Harrison
GETTY IMAGES/SEAN GALLUP
In mid-June, Sarah Harrison, one of Julian Assange’s protégés, flew to Hong Kong to meet with Snowden. There, she reportedly persuaded him to travel to Moscow. Snowden and Harrison appeared side by side arriving in Moscow’s Sheremetyevo airport a few weeks later.

Harrison, a 32-year-old British-born journalist, had climbed the ranks from WikiLeaks intern in 2010 to legal adviser by 2013—despite having no formal legal training. In a 2013 profile, The Washington Post described her as “the woman of WikiLeaks,” noting:

“Those who know Harrison say she appeared to blossom under Assange’s tutelage, going from starry-eyed intern to a savvy crusader for the no-holds-barred brand of public disclosure that has come to define WikiLeaks.”

Harrison is our best guess for the new leaks. She’s confident, smart and deeply loyal to both Julian Assange and Edward Snowden. In March, she penned a lengthy essay for The Guardian, describing her support of Snowden and her disdain for the British government, which she says treats journalists “like terrorists.” (Harrison currently resides in Berlin.)

“I cannot return to England, my country, because of my journalistic work with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and at WikiLeaks,” she wrote.

Then again, Harrison isn’t the only WikiLeaks figurehead with access to Snowden.

Wikileaks Fifth Country Surveillance 05
Hacker Jacob Appelbaum
WIKIPEDIA/RAMA
Jacob Applebaum, a well-known computer researcher and hacker, interviewed Snowden back in July 2013 for Der Spiegel. As the paper noted in the introduction to his interview with Snowden, “Appelbaum first became more broadly known to the public after he spoke on behalf of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange at a hacker conference in New York in 2010.”

Applebaum has had a tenuous relationship with WikiLeaks over the years, but he fully supports WikiLeaks’ decision to release the fifth country.

[vanlose kid]

WikiLeaks statement on the mass recording of Afghan telephone calls by the NSA
Friday 23 May 2014, 05:00 GMT

The National Security Agency has been recording and storing nearly all the domestic (and international) phone calls from two or more target countries as of 2013. Both the Washington Post and The Intercept (based in the US and published by eBay chairman Pierre Omidyar) have censored the name of one of the victim states, which the latter publication refers to as country "X".

Both the Washington Post and The Intercept stated that they had censored the name of the victim country at the request of the US government. Such censorship strips a nation of its right to self-determination on a matter which affects its whole population. An ongoing crime of mass espionage is being committed against the victim state and its population. By denying an entire population the knowledge of its own victimisation, this act of censorship denies each individual in that country the opportunity to seek an effective remedy, whether in international courts, or elsewhere. Pre-notification to the perpetrating authorities also permits the erasure of evidence which could be used in a successful criminal prosecution, civil claim, or other investigations.

We know from previous reporting that the National Security Agency’s mass interception system is a key component in the United States’ drone targeting program. The US drone targeting program has killed thousands of people and hundreds of women and children in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia in violation of international law. The censorship of a victim state’s identity directly assists the killing of innocent people.

Although, for reasons of source protection we cannot disclose how, WikiLeaks has confirmed that the identity of victim state is Afghanistan. This can also be independently verified through forensic scrutiny of imperfectly applied censorship on related documents released to date and correlations with other NSA programs (see http://freesnowden.is).

We do not believe it is the place of media to "aid and abet" a state in escaping detection and prosecution for a serious crime against a population.

Consequently WikiLeaks cannot be complicit in the censorship of victim state X. The country in question is Afghanistan.

The Intercept stated that the US government asserted that the publication of this name might lead to a ’rise in violence’. Such claims were also used by the administration of Barack Obama to refuse to release further photos of torture at Abu Ghraib in Iraq.

While one might seriously question the moral exceptionalism which would deny another nation and its people the right to react to a mass rights infringement in a manner of its own choosing, such claims of risk by the US government have in any event consistently fallen short.

WikiLeaks has years of experience with such false or overstated claims made by US officials in their attempts to delay or deny publication.

In 2010, the US State Department falsely claimed that WikiLeaks’ release of diplomatic cables would "place at risk the lives of countless innocent individuals." The Pentagon also repeatedly made such false claims.

To this day we are not aware of any evidence provided by any government agency that any of our eight million publications have resulted in harm to life.

In 2013 US officials admitted under oath that they had been unable to find any such evidence. Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates admitted that the US government’s reaction to our publications had been "significantly overwrought".

The United States government’s claims to the media lack credibility. Not only has it not bothered to contact WikiLeaks pre-publication in this matter, it has been aware of the material obtained by Edward Snowden for almost a year. Almost every office in Washington DC has specifically been aware of the material relating to the censored victim country since at least March 18, 2014, when the Washington Post issued a front page story on the subject (with the identity of Afghanistan censored). It is the US government’s "responsibility" to protect its assets. It has had an egregious amount of time to do so. Given the above we believe any ongoing perceived risks to be fanciful or willfully embraced by the US goverment. But we also reject the implication that it is the role of the international press to protect US assets from arrest for the mass infringement of the rights of another nation’s people.

Julian Assange
Editor in Chief

https://wikileaks.org/WikiLeaks-stateme ... -mass.html

*

[vanlose kid]

Glenn Greenbacks is da bomb yo...

I like to think of it as a fireworks show: You want to save your best for last. There’s a story that from the beginning I thought would be our biggest, and I’m saving that. The last one is the one where the sky is all covered in spectacular multicolored hues. This will be the finale, a big missing piece. Snowden knows about it and is excited about it.

I like to think of it as a fireworks show: You want to save your best for last. There’s a story that from the beginning I thought would be our biggest, and I’m saving that. The last one is the one where the sky is all covered in spectacular multicolored hues. This will be the finale, a big missing piece. Snowden knows about it and is excited about it.

*

Skyrockets in Flight: The Profitable Spectacle of Stylized Dissent
Share
Written by Chris Floyd
Wednesday, 21 May 2014 20:58

As we all know, Glenn Greenwald recently revealed that he is saving the biggest revelations from the Snowden NSA archive until last, likening his journalistic process to a fireworks show a that builds up to a grand finale. This is, of course, the very opposite of any kind of actual journalism, which leads with the most important information first.

The traditional method would seem even more imperative in this case, as we are dealing with material which exposes vast crimes and deeply sinister actions by a tyrannical government. Greenwald himself has incessantly told us how important this material it is, how dangerous the government’s depredations have become, how urgent it is that we learn of this danger and do something about it. And yet he admits — no, he boasts — that he has been withholding information about the most dangerous activities, the greatest threats to liberty, for more than a year … solely in order to make a big splash, “where the sky is all covered in spectacular multicolored hues.”

If the threat is so great, should we not know the worst up front, in order to recognize the scale of the danger and take action more quickly? But if “the finale, a big missing piece” can wait for more than a year to be revealed, then how “big” can it be? Or turn the question around: if the finale really is that big and important, then what does it say about Greenwald’s constantly self-trumpeted concern for liberty that he would blithely wait more than a year before letting us know of this major threat — timing the sky-filling extravaganza with the release of his new book. A cynic might suspect that self-aggrandizement has trumped the love of freedom in this instance.

There is much to say about Greenwald’s astonishing admission, and I wanted to address a few more key points. But various matters have kept me away from the keyboard of late, and now I find that many if not most of the salient points I wanted to address are covered in a post at Rancid Honeytrap, especially in the long comment thread, where readers have unpacked the rest of the GQ story in which the fireworks impresario revealed his distorted vision of journalism.

http://www.chris-floyd.com/component/co ... ssent.html

*



*

[bks]

This can also be independently verified through forensic scrutiny of imperfectly applied censorship on related documents released to date and correlations with other NSA programs (see http://freesnowden.is).

This is very interesting, as it means no one had to share the Snowden documents with Wikileaks for them to figure it out. Occupational hazard of mass surveillance - you're bound on occasion to screw up your efforts to keep your criminal activity secret.