The campaign to tar Snowden and Greenwald and help the NSA

[JackRiddler]

God, I don't give a fuck. Not even a fraction thereof.

I think this is moderator burnout. I keep thinking about how you're all older than me, and yet I'm the motherfucker you complain to.

This is too much like my day job. I'm gonna go apply to be a civilian again in the mod forum: fuck you all. Honestly, no sarcasm.

Will it help if I add this to the RI's greatest quotes thread?

[coffin_dodger]

Why aren't the msm all over this? This is a gift for them. Greenwald is setting up his truthy media, in direct competition to regular news outlets (whom he has publicly heavily criticized), to deprive them of status, readership and thus, revenue. Something is wrong here. The most screamingly effective way to 'tar' Greenwald and Snowden would be through the msm, not some fringe blogs written by disaffected 'misfits' from our glorious society. Starting to feel hoodwinked, here.

[Villager]

We traveled to Rio de Janeiro to meet the man who broke the biggest news story of 2013. Glenn Greenwald is an American journalist and author who's best known for reporting on the leaks of classified National Security Agency documents by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden. Before he was a journalist, Greenwald was a constitutional law and civil rights litigator, and until 2012 he was a contributing writer at Salon. He has authored four books: How Would a Patriot Act, Tragic Legacy, Great American Hypocrites, and With Liberty and Justice for Some. For 14 months Greenwald was a columnist at the Guardian, where he broke the first NSA story in June of 2013. He has since left the newspaper to team up with filmmaker Laura Poitras and journalist Jeremy Scahill to start a new media venture, First Look Media, backed by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar.

[JackRiddler]

Clearing out my cache of further notes on this, but let's start with the latest complaint:

Why aren't the msm all over this?

They are. Here:

They sure were trashing him on the CBS morning "news" today.

"I mean, he ran off to China, that should tell you everything you need to know." That's what they said (my wording, but they repeated it like every fourth sentence).

Bonus: They interviewed Eric Kantor for about 10 minutes, just so he could sling all of his sh!t about Snowden.

And here:

http://www.buzzfeed.com/bennyjohnson/am ... owden-dead

America’s Spies Want Edward Snowden Dead

“I would love to put a bullet in his head,” one Pentagon official told BuzzFeed. The NSA leaker is enemy No. 1 among those inside the intelligence world.
posted on January 16, 2014 at 11:25pm EST

Benny Johnson BuzzFeed Staff

406,784 Total Views

“I would love to put a bullet in his head,” one Pentagon official told BuzzFeed. The NSA leaker is enemy No. 1 among those inside the intelligence world. posted on January 16, 2014 at 11:25pm EST

Benny Johnson BuzzFeed Staff

Edward Snowden has made some dangerous enemies. As the American intelligence community struggles to contain the public damage done by the former National Security Agency contractor’s revelations of mass domestic spying, intelligence operators have continued to seethe in very personal terms against the 30-year-old whistle-blower.

“In a world where I would not be restricted from killing an American, I personally would go and kill him myself,” a current NSA analyst told BuzzFeed. “A lot of people share this sentiment.”

“I would love to put a bullet in his head,” one Pentagon official, a former special forces officer, said bluntly. “I do not take pleasure in taking another human beings life, having to do it in uniform, but he is single-handedly the greatest traitor in American history.”

That violent hostility lies just beneath the surface of the domestic debate over NSA spying is still ongoing. Some members of Congress have hailed Snowden as a whistle-blower, the New York Times has called for clemency, and pundits regularly defend his actions on Sunday talk shows. In intelligence community circles, Snowden is considered a nothing short of a traitor in wartime.

“His name is cursed every day over here,” a defense contractor told BuzzFeed, speaking from an overseas intelligence collections base. “Most everyone I talk to says he needs to be tried and hung, forget the trial and just hang him.”

One Army intelligence officer even offered BuzzFeed a chillingly detailed fantasy.

“I think if we had the chance, we would end it very quickly,” he said. “Just casually walking on the streets of Moscow, coming back from buying his groceries. Going back to his flat and he is casually poked by a passerby. He thinks nothing of it at the time starts to feel a little woozy and thinks it’s a parasite from the local water. He goes home very innocently and next thing you know he dies in the shower.”

There is no indication that the United States has sought to take vengeance on Snowden, who is living in an undisclosed location in Russia without visible security measures, according to a recent Washington Post interview. And the intelligence operators who spoke to BuzzFeed on the condition of anonymity did not say they expected anyone to act on their desire for revenge. But their mood is widespread, people who regularly work with the intelligence community said.

“These guys are emoting how pissed they are,” Peter Singer, a cyber-security expert at the Brookings Institute. “Do you think people at the NSA would put a statue of him out front?”

The degree to which Snowden’s revelations have damaged intelligence operations are also being debated. Shawn Turner, a spokesman for the director of national intelligence, recently called the leaks “unnecessarily and extremely damaging to the United States and the intelligence community’s national security efforts,” and the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, Dutch Ruppersberger said terrorists have been “changing their methods because of the leaks.” Snowden’s defenders dismiss those concerns as overblown, and the government has not pointed to specific incidents to bear out the claims.

On the ground, intelligence workers certainly say the damage has been done. The NSA officer complained that his sources had become “useless.” The Army intelligence officer said the revelations had increased his “blindness.”

“I do my work in a combat zone so now I have to see the effects of a Snowden in a combat zone. It will not be pretty,” he said.

And while government officials have a long record of overstating the damage from leaks, some specific consequences seem logical.

“By [Snowden] showing who our collections partners were, the terrorists have dropped those carriers and email addresses,” the DOD official said. “We can’t find them because he released that data. Their electronic signature is gone.”

And here:

House Intelligence chairman hints at Russian help in Snowden leaks
By Tom Curry, NBC News national affairs writer
A leading House Republican is raising questions about Russia's involvement in the largest security leak in recent U.S. history.
House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers said that former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, who has leaked details of the NSA’s surveillance operations, “was a thief who we believe had some help.”
In an interview to be aired Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press, Rogers said that rather Snowden being a crusader for Americans’ privacy, “the vast majority” of what Snowden stole “had nothing to do with privacy. Our Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines have been incredibly harmed by the data that he has taken with him and we believe now is in the hands of nation states.”

The Michigan Republican added that there are still “certain questions that we have to get answered” about who helped Snowden remove data from the NSA and later make it public in newspapers in the United States and Britain.
“He was stealing information that had to do with how we operate overseas to collect information to keep Americans safe…. And some of the things he did were beyond his technical capabilities” -- a fact which Rogers said “raises more questions. How he arranged travel before he left. How he was ready to go, he had a go bag, if you will.”
Rogers added that he believes “there's a reason he ended up in the hands, the loving arms, of an FSB (Russian security service) agent in Moscow. I don't think that's a coincidence….I don't think it was a gee-whiz luck event that he ended up in Moscow under the handling of the FSB.”
It was mostly in response to Snowden’s disclosures that President Barack Obama announced Friday some restrictions on how the NSA will collect data and conduct surveillance.
Separately, Bruce Riedel, director of the Intelligence Project at the Brookings Institution in Washington and a former CIA official, said Friday that one key question now in the Snowden affair is “Is it really Edward Snowden who is doing this, or is there a larger apparatus? I know that many people in the intelligence community… now no longer regard Edward Snowden as a thief or a traitor…. They regard him as a defector” who has gone over to a foreign intelligence agency.

(Thanks, SLAD! )

This is a gift for them. Greenwald is setting up his truthy media, in direct competition to regular news outlets (whom he has publicly heavily criticized), to deprive them of status, readership and thus, revenue.

It's not "truthy" because you've decided to label it that way. Change your adjective and suddenly it sounds like a great idea. Don't you want to deprive the regular news outlets of status, readership and thus, revenue, and direct this to media about shit that matters? (Perhaps you would prefer David Icke to be the one doing it?)

Something is wrong here. The most screamingly effective way to 'tar' Greenwald and Snowden would be through the msm, not some fringe blogs written by disaffected 'misfits' from our glorious society.

Now of course, this is exactly what has been happening, which you seem to be ignoring, which is why it's worth repeating the above articles in the hope it sinks in.

The smearing is not a one-size-fits all project. The fringe is a different demo and the disaffected are a bigger threat, because people who think for themselves are.

But no less than the head of the NSA has been singing a tune the blogs can hum along with, too:

https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20131 ... eaks.shtml

As noted by Politico, General Alexander isn't a fan of journalists doing anything about these documents:

"I think it’s wrong that that newspaper reporters have all these documents, the 50,000—whatever they have and are selling them and giving them out as if these—you know it just doesn’t make sense," Alexander said in an interview with the Defense Department's "Armed With Science" blog.

"We ought to come up with a way of stopping it. I don’t know how to do that. That’s more of the courts and the policymakers but, from my perspective, it’s wrong to allow this to go on," the NSA director declared.

That was on October 25th. (Can you believe this asshole gets to play leftish like that?!)

Then a month later, what do you know? Along comes Mark Ames, with a complaint about journalists who have all these documents and are selling them to the highest bidder:

Who “owns” the NSA secrets leaked by Edward Snowden to reporters Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras? Given that eBay founder Pierre Omidyar just invested a quarter of a billion dollars to personally hire Greenwald and Poitras for his new for-profit media venture, it’s a question worth asking. It’s especially worth asking since it became clear that Greenwald and Poitras are now the only two people with full access to the complete cache of NSA files, which are said to number anywhere from 50,000 to as many as 200,000 files.

Followed by Sibel Edmonds, for emphasis, a week after that:

http://www.boilingfrogspost.com/2013/12 ... t-bidders/

You see, when you add these qualities and personal history to the fact that a whistleblower and 50,000-pages of documents are being used to make mega money and mega fame, while simultaneously the public at large is being kept in the dark and 99% of these documents are censored, what do you get? A few days ago the checkbook wanna-be journalist released a very long argument in defense of his indefensible actions and practices. I am going to address a couple of those, but I want you to keep in mind that the argument is coming from a person known as an ambulance-chaser attorney and litigious money grabber, thus is brilliant at obscuring facts and realities with mud and distortions. Consider how a partnership with a mega billionaire corporate man is being characterized and fudged here:

She doesn't cite one source or provide one piece of evidence that he's selling to the highest bidder, btw.

(And "checkbook journalism" means paying sources to say what you want to hear.)

You know what it looks like? It's as if General Alexander said "jump," and a bunch of people jumped!

Greenwald left the Guardian, which was being subjected to heavy-duty harassment and pressure by the state!

The Omidyar cash is funding an indie media outlet, not being paid to GG personally.

So Omidyar might be a problem. But he also might be a solution. (Long as the state is after you it's good to have $250 million worth of insurance/protection/legal money.)

Could be either with Omidyar. It's too soon to say which. (Except for those of you who already know all the answers in advance.)

And apart from that? Greenwald has a book deal and some interest from movie studios. That's not surprising. People like stories about heroes and villains. It's Hollywood. They can always rewrite it.

Starting to feel hoodwinked, here.

I hear that!

.

[slimmouse]

Why is it that whenever I look at this thread, amongst many others here, I get this vision of the 99.9% shafting each other in any way they can, whilst the 0.01% are lovin it?

85 people own more material wealth than almost half of the rest of us?

How did that happen LOL ?

[conniption]

Live Q & A with Snowden
Happening now.

[Searcher08]

Why is it that whenever I look at this thread, amongst many others here, I get this vision of the 99.9% shafting each other in any way they can, whilst the 0.01% are lovin it?

85 people own more material wealth than almost half of the rest of us?

How did that happen LOL ?

Interest and Fractional Reserve Banking?

[stillrobertpaulsen]

Why is it that whenever I look at this thread, amongst many others here, I get this vision of the 99.9% shafting each other in any way they can, whilst the 0.01% are lovin it?

85 people own more material wealth than almost half of the rest of us?

How did that happen LOL ?

Interest and Fractional Reserve Banking?

[bks]

JR wrote:

As noted by Politico, General Alexander isn't a fan of journalists doing anything about these documents:

"I think it’s wrong that that newspaper reporters have all these documents, the 50,000—whatever they have and are selling them and giving them out as if these—you know it just doesn’t make sense," Alexander said in an interview with the Defense Department's "Armed With Science" blog.

"We ought to come up with a way of stopping it. I don’t know how to do that. That’s more of the courts and the policymakers but, from my perspective, it’s wrong to allow this to go on," the NSA director declared.

That was on October 25th. (Can you believe this asshole gets to play leftish like that?!)

Then a month later, what do you know? Along comes Mark Ames, with a complaint about journalists who have all these documents and are selling them to the highest bidder:

Who “owns” the NSA secrets leaked by Edward Snowden to reporters Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras? Given that eBay founder Pierre Omidyar just invested a quarter of a billion dollars to personally hire Greenwald and Poitras for his new for-profit media venture, it’s a question worth asking. It’s especially worth asking since it became clear that Greenwald and Poitras are now the only two people with full access to the complete cache of NSA files, which are said to number anywhere from 50,000 to as many as 200,000 files.

Alexander isn't asking any question about ownership. He wants the documents for himself and the NSA, so he can continue to exert illegitimate power and spread fear and distrust.

Ames, and the other substantive left critics of Snowden want the information shared more widely and more quickly with concerned parties than it's presently being shared, because no one should own it. Ideally many of the activities depicted and the resultant information it wouldn't even exist, but since that can't be brought off, the next best thing to do would be to either open it up for review by everybody or make it available for review to as many concerned and competent parties as possible. This way, the power of the NSA to make use of it for its own ends will be severely diminished, as will their credibility.

They're nothing like the same concerns.

[Nordic]

JR seems to confuse the MSM's trashing of Snowden/Greenwald with Sibel Edmonds (and others) finding large gaping holes in Greenwald.

They are two completely different things. They couldn't be MORE completely different.

And if anybody thinks "the public" is gonna be swayed by anything going on in the Sibel Edmonds world, then they're insane.

The MSM is acting exactly as we knew it would. Along with all the career criminal politicians who use it as their mouthpiece. It's so predictable it's hardly worth making a thread about.

Yet to Jack this the goring of the sacred cow is the same. Doesn't matter who's doing it.

If you have a sacred cow, that means you have an emotional attachment that might actually get in the way of clear thinking.

Jack had the same musty old attitude about the Dems in the last "election".

The guy just can't get over his old emotional attachments.

[Nordic]

While there is no evidence the board has died ("RI died and it's because of YOU" is probably the second oldest RI meme) if it did, it would be because of the constant valorization of the stupid by the naive. The latter, that would be you. If you think providing a different frame for this subject than the one you put out is "bullying," that's too bad for you.

There you go again. Who in their right mind would want to have any conversation with a jackass like you about ANYTHING? You're a fucking asshole. Your personality is the flavor and the smell of piss.

[coffin_dodger]

Thanks for the reply Jack, you said:

You know what it looks like? It's as if General Alexander said "jump," and a bunch of people jumped!

But the profile of the people currently 'jumping' are typically the last to fall prey to such suggestion.

Greenwald left the Guardian, which was being subjected to heavy-duty harassment and pressure by the state!

Heavy-duty - or perhaps heavy-handed harassment?

The Omidyar cash is funding an indie media outlet, not being paid to GG personally.

Where is the access to the financial details involved? Transparency is paramount, critical even, here.

So Omidyar might be a problem. But he also might be a solution. (Long as the state is after you it's good to have $250 million worth of insurance/protection/legal money.)

If the 'state behind the state' wants you quietened, quietened you shall be, regardless of capital expenditure. Omidyar is one of the 1%er's, well known for stopping payments to Wikileaks through his company, Paypal. What historical actions (as opposed to words) has Omidyar sponsored/taken against the state to inspire trust?

Could be either with Omidyar. It's too soon to say which. (Except for those of you who already know all the answers in advance.)

Yes, it's too soon to say, but at least questions on both sides of the argument are now being discussed.

And apart from that? Greenwald has a book deal and some interest from movie studios. That's not surprising. People like stories about heroes and villains. It's Hollywood. They can always rewrite it.

No, it's not surprising, given the current paradigm. But this isn't a 'story' is it? It's real life. I suppose it depends on how much faith you have in Hollywood to reproduce a story accurate retelling of events that actually happened. Sexing up 'stories' like this, to make them more palatable and exciting for a public that want to spend 90 mins of their life escaping reality doesn't, to my mind, remotely constitute a credible telling of factual events. But that's the beauty of powerful Hollywood - tell the story, disclaimer it, then watch the public filing from their seats believing it to be an accurate representation. I haven't watched the film about Assange, but I understand he said it was whitewash. I'd wager Greenwald will thoroughly endorse his movie on release.

Yes, I've skipped confronting the majority of your post countering my questions, Jack, because I'm in a totally different frame of mind to you, regarding this matter. The nature of this debate demands absolutes and I don't have any. That makes me wishy-washy/flaky - I accept that. I sincerely respect your single-mindedness and passion - however, personally, being a little paranoid, accepting a truth from anyone but those closest to me, is always up for scrutiny/contemplation of the actions behind the event, should they exist.

[JackRiddler]

While there is no evidence the board has died ("RI died and it's because of YOU" is probably the second oldest RI meme) if it did, it would be because of the constant valorization of the stupid by the naive. The latter, that would be you. If you think providing a different frame for this subject than the one you put out is "bullying," that's too bad for you.

There you go again. Who in their right mind would want to have any conversation with a jackass like you about ANYTHING? You're a fucking asshole. Your personality is the flavor and the smell of piss.

I have no problem letting these two comments stand as examples of our respective quality of insult. What is your problem? Seriously. You're acting like a rude little baby because someone wants to start a different thread? Get a life. I'll try to use fewer big words, if that will help you with your headaches.

.

[JackRiddler]

Omidyar is one of the 1%er's, well known for stopping payments to Wikileaks through his company, Paypal. What historical actions (as opposed to words) has Omidyar sponsored/taken against the state to inspire trust?

Please point to any evidence that Omidyar, who made a fortune off involvement in the founding of Paypal (not simply "his" company) was, however, responsible as a decision maker for stopping payments to Wikileaks, or plays any role in the management of this company. I do not look to him for inspiration. I see him taking an action right now to start a new company that will give a platform to Greenwald. I reserve judgment until seeing at least some of the results of this venture. Outside this thread and my dislike for exaggerated preemptive hysterias emanating from those who appear to be threatened by this project because it might intrude on their own demarcation of territory, it doesn't occupy my mind much more than other current interesting media ventures that may or may not result in worthy and interesting work.

I suppose it depends on how much faith you have in Hollywood to reproduce a story accurate retelling of events that actually happened.

Golly, how true. Thanks for explaining this to me.

It also depends on how much you care about it long in advance of any production, which a) is hardly guaranteed to actually happen, as these things go; b) like the Wikileaks movie (flop) going to be on the level of award-seeking and attempted influence within the market of the media village, rather than a blockbuster that captures mass awareness; and c) just not concerning me very much right now, or serving as any kind of basis in making judgments about what is going on with Greenwald, Snowden, the NSA, and related matters. Also,

I'd wager Greenwald will thoroughly endorse his movie on release.

d) you're off in some future speculating into Greenwald's head about what he may eventually think of and say about a movie that may or may not ever be made as you are currently imagining it, and how you will eventually judge him on the basis of that reaction. I'm sure you can dig up something more concrete to throw at him?

tell the story, disclaimer it, then watch the public filing from their seats believing it to be an accurate representation.

Public filing from their seats? I think your paradigm on how this is likely to work needs a bit of updating.

Yes, I've skipped confronting the majority of your post countering my questions, Jack,

Quite alright and I appreciate the acknowledgement.

accepting a truth from anyone but those closest to me, is always up for scrutiny/contemplation of the actions behind the event, should they exist.

Aside from the utility of the standard (closest to you?), hope this applies equally to the kinds of logic and evidence being deployed here by the various campaigns that have arisen with such interesting timing against Snowden and Greenwald.

.

[JackRiddler]

Alexander isn't asking any question about ownership. He wants the documents for himself and the NSA, so he can continue to exert illegitimate power and spread fear and distrust.

Yes, of course, but he's inserting himself into this as though he's making the same point, with the clear intent of stirring the pot. In fact, how interesting that he started stirring this pot before Ames and "the other substantive left critics" came along with their version of this point.

Ames, and the other substantive left critics of Snowden want the information shared more widely and more quickly with concerned parties than it's presently being shared, because no one should own it. Ideally

Yes. But you know we're not in the world described by ideally. This information was generated by an unaccountable deep state agency that claims hegemony over the entire world of information and tries to define what the people should fear and how their accumulated tax-power should be spent (ultimately, in the service of an empire).

Out of all the thousands of people working in the bowels of that machine who had access and could expose the wrongdoing, it was Snowden and Snowden alone, so far, who decided to take the risk and do something approximating the right thing (or who was set up as the actor pretending to do the right thing, according to the insinuations of some). Sort of like with Manning -- out of hundreds of thousands of people who could have exposed the things he found out, sadly only he seems to have acted. That's why we're talking about Snowden, and Manning, and the quality of their non-conformist courage and actions, instead of the thousands of proverbial Little Eichmanns who continue to faithfully carry out their jobs without meriting any big debates or critiques from Ames.

Out of all the options available to Snowden, he decided not to publish his cache wholesale online, but to take it to Greenwald, presumably having weighed these options as to their strategic impact. In the real world, that no one should "own" the cache doesn't alone tell us what the best thing to do is when one suddenly gets such a cache as a windfall. This is not an enviable position, necessarily - given that they are going to come after you, and that there will also be some professional dissidents attacking you with utter nonsense, like Edmonds; though of course the vast majority of whistleblowers and dissidents have lined up in support of Snowden and Greenwald.

Would we even be talking about this if the documents had been released in toto once, most likely to be quoted for a time within the critical blogosphere with minimal attention otherwise, rather than according to the brilliant and obviously effective PR plan that has been employed so far?

I think, faced with the kind of tyrannical totalitarian state that the NSA represents, the duty of responsible whistleblowers and journalists who get such a windfall is not to follow some simplistic rule of what Ames would do (if Snowden had gone to him) but to find ways that do the most damage to the beast. Seriously. It is a beast, it is already at war with the world and with us. It is evil, and it is a matter of self-defense and self-respect if given the kind of opportunity that Snowden's cache represents to find ways to damage the surveillance and control beast, and to limit its ability to do harm to the world, rather than to make oneself feel good about how an immediate release of everything might satisfy the high standards of Ames. Which would have to be a secondary factor. I'm sorry for Ames, that he didn't get the same opportunity Greenwald did.

the next best thing to do would be

What we're talking about, and not at all as clear-cut as you're making it out to be.

make it available for review to as many concerned and competent parties as possible.

Different from full release. Who's on your list of that?

This way, the power of the NSA to make use of it for its own ends will be severely diminished, as will their credibility.

Ideally. We'd all like to see that. I'd say how it's gone so far exceeds reasonable expectations, whether or not it serves to the ideal but remote goal of just toppling the bastards down from their throne. (And so you've got people here arguing in this reality-distant fashion that the lack of a throne-toppling indicates Snowden-Greenwald must be working for it.)

And there's a reason why Ellsberg, Drake, Wikileaks, McGovern et al. are lining up in support of Snowden and Greenwald and Poitras rather than throwing a kitchen sink's worth of illogic at them. (Since the tendency in the crop of your legitimate left dissident critics seems to be to carpet bomb and insinuate bad actors, rather than to bring up a couple of valid concerns and go about this like civilized interlocutors, etc. etc.)

.