Glenn Greenwald was one of the first reporters to see — and write about — the Edward Snowden files, with their revelations about the United States’ extensive surveillance of private citizens. In this searing talk, Greenwald makes the case for why you need to care about privacy, even if you’re “not doing anything you need to hide.”
Dean G. Acheson, U.S. Secretary of State, January 21, 1949 to January 20, 1953
Recently it was reported that a blue-ribbon, anti-Iran nonprofit is so well-connected that it may have been working intimately with the U.S. government behind the scenes. Journalist Glenn Greenwald wondered whether the group, United Against Nuclear Iran, is in fact a government front. That would hardly be as unusual as you’d think.
After serving as President Harry Truman’s secretary of state, Dean Acheson reminisced that 1940s organizations he had supported — the Committee to Defend America by Aiding the Allies and the Citizens’ Committee for the Marshall Plan — were “uniquely and typically American.” Many groups engage in protest, Acheson noted, but “few organize privately to support Government, and fewer still to support policies and measures not directly beneficial to themselves or their group.”
My research discloses that these organizations, far from being extraordinary, were just the most famous of dozens of elite, bipartisan “citizens committees” that have secretly collaborated with the administration of the day, whether Democratic or Republican.… Read the rest
David Carr, the New York Times‘s star media reporter, visits Glenn Greenwald at his remote office in Brazil, where he’s building the alternative news company First Look Media:
… Read the restOn approaching Glenn Greenwald’s home office high in the jungle-encrusted mountains above Rio de Janeiro, all is tranquil, bucolic even. A gurgling stream at the entrance frames the idyll.
And then the dogs notice the incursion. They bark, yap and yowl, and while it’s less “Heart of Darkness” than “101 Dalmatians,” the sheer volume is mind-erasing.
Should we be surprised that the house of Mr. Greenwald, the legendarily combative privacy and national security reporter, is surrounded by loud, barking defenders — or that they are actually pussycats once you get to know them, as is their rescuer?
The visit to Mr. Greenwald’s jungle redoubt about 15 minutes from the beaches of Rio last week was notable for its contradictions. He is among the most wired journalists on earth, but he lives and works in Brazil, a country with a notoriously flaky Internet infrastructure.
Political language… is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind. – George Orwell
George Orwell
We need you now,
more than ever, ever
to help us wade through
new words of war by wankers
high on high tech
& fudged perceptions
in a security bubble of insecurity
We need help, George,
penetrating acronyms
of government gone wild
of spies & lies
and the madness
of the overtly clever
and covertly maniacal
Hey, Hey, NSA
How many emails did you ‘process’ today?
How many calls did you convert
into acres of unread metadata
stored somewhere in Utah
until the big roundup
that’s coming soon
Hey, Hey, NSA, why do you play
with code names
coined with a clear intent
to maim
and restrain?… Read the rest
Abby Martin highlights a new report by The Intercept showing that the NSA is collecting and recording virtually every single phone call made on the island nation of the Bahamas and how this dangerous technology is usurping the rights of global citizens.
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Here’s infamous NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden’s custom video guide to using encryption tools when sending email, made for his journalist confidante Glenn Greenwald. The audio is intentionally altered if you think it sounds weird!
A Powerpoint presentation made available on journalist Glenn Greenwald’s web site, Firstlook.org, may just have revealed the Mirage Men – or at least one branch of their operations.
The presentation is called The Art of Deception, Training for a New Generation of Online Covert Operations and was given by GCHQ’s Human Science Operation Cell (HSOC), linked to the Joint Threat Research Intelligence Group (JTRIG), whose existence was uncovered by Greenwald via the documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
[Initially I won’t reproduce any of the presentation itself, but you can see the whole thing here]While the textual content of the presentation is not online, we can infer from the slides that the powerpoint outlines applied techniques for deploying psychology, deception, illusion, dissimulation, magic, religion and belief in their intelligence and counter-intelligence operations.… Read the rest
Clearly, there’s an officially sanctioned, if not supported, backlash underway to cast doubt on the those who are disseminating the information that Edward Snowden and other whistleblowers are exposing to the global public.
What better way to respond to the evidence of government overreach and criminality in the spying by the NSA and other agencies than to try to change the subject by smearing the people who are funding the reporting on it to us.
This latest round of the media battle should not be surprising. In fact, it’s all too predictable.
In the latest round, lawyer and journalist Glenn Greenwald, the point person/interpreter for the majority of the Snowden disclosures, came under attack by indirection with a high profile smear on Pierre Omidyar, the eBay billionaire funding his new venture, First Look Media.
Leading the charge publicly is one MarkAmes, who writes for Pando Daily, a rival news agency funded by another Silicon Valley tech moneyman.… Read the rest
Pic: Glenn Greenwald (CC)
New York Times writer (and former editor) Bill Keller printed a series of letters exchanged between him and muckraking journalist Glenn Greenwald. It’s a little long, but well worth reading.
… Read the restDear Glenn,
I don’t think of it as reporters pretending they have no opinions. I think of it as reporters, as an occupational discipline, suspending their opinions and letting the evidence speak for itself. And it matters that this is not just an individual exercise, but an institutional discipline, with editors who are tasked to challenge writers if they have given short shrift to contrary facts or arguments readers might want to know.
The thing is, once you have publicly declared your “subjective assumptions and political values,” it’s human nature to want to defend them, and it becomes tempting to omit or minimize facts, or frame the argument, in ways that support your declared viewpoint.
First Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos buys the Washington Post, now eBay founder Pierre Omidyar is chucking a quarter billion dollars at Glenn Greenwald to create a news organization that, presumably, will reflect the progressive politics that are Mr. Greenwald’s stock in trade.
Who will be the next Silicon Valley billionaire to buy his or her own major media presence? From Mr. Greenwald’s erstwhile employer, The Guardian:
… Read the restPierre Omidyar, the founder of eBay, has revealed more details of the media organization he is creating with journalist Glenn Greenwald.
Greenwald announced on Tuesday that he was leaving the Guardian, where he has broken a series of stories on the National Security Agency, based on documents from whistleblower Edward Snowden.
In an interview with Jay Rosen, media critic and NYU professor of journalism, Omidyar said he was committing an initial $250m to the as-yet-unnamed venture. Omidyar told Rosen the decision was fuelled by his “rising concern about press freedoms in the United States and around the world”.
