OMNI
SNOWDEN NEWSLETTER #5, MAY 25, 2014.
Compiled by Dick Bennett for a
Culture of Peace, Justice, and Ecology. (#1 July 9, 2013; #2 Nov. 1, 2013; #3 Feb.
15, 2014; #4 April 15, 2014)
Snowden is a defender of
democracy. And don’t forget Manning.
My blog:
War Department/Peace Department
War Department/Peace Department
Newsletters
See
newsletters on National Security State (NSS), Pentagon, Secrecy, Surveillance,
and many more.
Index:
An informed,
vocal, insistent citizenry—preeminently our hero whistleblowers--is the best
defense of our democracy, not ten U.S. Navy carrier strike groups.
Nos. 1-4 at end
Contents Snowden Newsletter #5
Greenwald, His
New Book on Snowden, NSA, and US Corporate Mainstream
Media:
No Place to Hide, Publisher’s
Description
Greenwald’s Reply to Kinsley’s Review
of No Place to Hide
Greenwald,
Earliest Events in the Meeting of Snowden and Greenwald/Poitras
Snowden and Greenwald
on TV
PBS, Frontline,”The
USA
Amy Goodman, Democracy Now Interview of Greenwald
Greenwald’s New
Website, The Intercept
Hussain, John
Yoo Attacks Pulitzer Prize
Contact
President Obama
Recent Related
Newsletters
Contents Nos.
1-3
Edward Snowden: We're All Being Spied On
Associated Press. Reader Supported News, May 3, 2014.
Excerpt: "The US intelligence whistleblower Edward Snowden has warned that entire populations, rather than just individuals, now live under constant surveillance."
READ MORE
Associated Press. Reader Supported News, May 3, 2014.
Excerpt: "The US intelligence whistleblower Edward Snowden has warned that entire populations, rather than just individuals, now live under constant surveillance."
READ MORE
NO PLACE
Edward Snowden, the
NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State
Glenn
Greenwald
Metropolitan
Books/Macmillan, 2014.
AVAILABLE FORMATS
In May 2013, Glenn Greenwald set out
for Hong Kong to meet an anonymous source who
claimed to have astonishing evidence of pervasive government spying and
insisted on communicating only through heavily encrypted channels. That source
turned out to be the 29-year-old NSA contractor Edward Snowden, and his
revelations about the agency’s widespread, systemic overreach proved to be some
of the most explosive and consequential news in recent history, triggering a
fierce debate over national security and information privacy. As the arguments
rage on and the government considers various proposals for reform, it is clear
that we have yet to see the full impact of Snowden’s disclosures.
Now for the first time, Greenwald fits
all the pieces together, recounting his high-intensity ten-day trip to Hong
Kong, examining the broader implications of the surveillance detailed in his
reporting for The Guardian,
and revealing fresh information on the NSA’s unprecedented abuse of power with
never-before-seen documents entrusted to him by Snowden himself.
Going beyond NSA specifics, Greenwald
also takes on the establishment media, excoriating their habitual avoidance of
adversarial reporting on the government and their failure to serve the
interests of the people. Finally, he asks what it means both for individuals
and for a nation’s political health when a government pries so invasively into
the private lives of its citizens—and considers what safeguards and forms of
oversight are necessary to protect democracy in the digital age. Coming at a
landmark moment in American history, No
Place to Hideis a fearless, incisive, and essential contribution to our
understanding of the U.S.
See Newsletter #1 for a review of Luke
Harding’s The Snowden Files, which
covers much of the same story. –Dick
May 24, 2014
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|
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Glenn Greenwald. (photo: AP)
“A Response to Michael
Kinsley”
By Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept, 23 May 14
n 2006, Charlie Savage won the Pulitzer
Prize for his series of articles in The Boston Globe exposing the Bush administration’s use
of “signing statements” as a means of ignoring the law. In response to
those revelations, Michael Kinsley–who has been kicking around Washington
journalism for decades as the consummate establishment “liberal” insider–wrote
a Washington Post op-ed defending the Bush practice (“nailing Bush simply for stating his
views on a constitutional issue, without even asking whether those views are
right or wrong, is wrong”) and mocking concerns over it as overblown (“Sneaky!
. . . The Globe does
not report what it thinks a president ought to do when called upon to enforce
or obey a law he or she believes to be unconstitutional. It’s not an easy
question”).
Far
more notable was Kinsley’s suggestion that it was journalists themselves–not
Bush–who might be the actual criminals, due both to their refusal to reveal
their sources when ordered to do so and their willingness to publish
information without the permission of the government:
It’s wrong especially when contrasted with another current fever
running through the nation’s editorial pages: the ongoing issue of leaks and
anonymous sources. Many in the media believe that the Constitution contains a
“reporter’s privilege” to protect the identity of sources in circumstances,
such as a criminal trial, in which citizens ordinarily can be compelled to
produce information or go to jail. The Supreme Court and lower courts have
ruled and ruled again that there is no such privilege. And it certainly is not
obvious that the First Amendment, which seems to be about the right to speak,
actually protects a right not to speak. . . .
Why
must the president obey constitutional interpretations he disagrees with if
journalists don’t have to?
Last
Sunday, same day as the Globe piece, The
New York Times had a
front-page article about the other shoe waiting to drop in these leak cases.
The Bush administration may go beyond forcing journalists to testify about the
sources of leaks. It may start to prosecute journalists themselves as
recipients of illegal leaks. As with the Globe story,
this turns out to be a matter of pugnacious noises by the Bush administration.
Actual prosecutions of journalists for receiving or publishing leaks are
“unknown,” the Times article
concedes. But this could change at any moment.
Well,
maybe. And maybe journalists are right in their sincere belief that the
Constitution should protect them in such a case. But who wants to live in a
society where every citizen and government official feels free to act according
to his or her own personal interpretation of the Constitution, even after the
Supreme Court has specifically said that this interpretation is wrong?
President Bush would actually top my list of people I don’t want wandering
through the text and getting fancy ideas. But why should he stay out of the “I
say what’s constitutional around here” game if his tormentors in the media are playing
it?
This is the person whom Pamela Paul, editor
of The New York Times Book Review, chose to review my book, No
Place to Hide, about the NSA reporting we’ve done and the leaks of
Edward Snowden: someone who has expressly suggested that journalists should be
treated as criminals for publishing information the government does not want
published. And, in a totally unpredictable development, Kinsley then used
the opportunity to announce his contempt for me, for the NSA reporting I’ve
done, and, in passing, for the book he was ostensibly reviewing.
Kinsley
has actually done the book a great favor by providing a vivid example of so
many of its central claims. For instance, I describe in the book the process
whereby the government and its media defenders reflexively demonize the
personality of anyone who brings unwanted disclosure so as to distract from and
discredit the substance revelations; Kinsley dutifully tells Times readers that I “come across as so
unpleasant” and that I’m a “self-righteous sourpuss” (yes, he actually wrote
that). I also describe in the book how jingoistic media courtiers attack anyone
who voices any fundamental critiques of American political culture; Kinsley
spends much of his review deriding the notion that there could possibly be
anything anti-democratic or oppressive about the United States of America
But
by far the most remarkable part of the review is that Kinsley–in the very
newspaper that published Daniel Ellsberg’s Pentagon Papers and then fought to
the Supreme Court for the right to do so (and, though the review doesn’t
mention it, also published some Snowden documents)–expressly
argues that journalists should only publish that which the government permits
them to, and that failure to obey these instructions should be a crime (emphasis
mine):
The question is who decides. It seems clear, at least to me,
that the private companies that own newspapers, and their employees, should not
have the final say over the release of government secrets, and a free pass to
make them public with no legal consequences. In a democracy (which, pace
Greenwald, we still are), that decision must ultimately be made by the
government. No
doubt the government will usually be overprotective of its secrets, and so the
process of decision-making — whatever it turns out to be — should openly tilt
in favor of publication with minimal delay. But ultimately you can’t square
this circle. Someone gets to decide, and that someone cannot be Glenn
Greenwald.
Greenwald’s notion of what constitutes suppression of dissent by the established media is an invitation to appear on “Meet the Press.” On the show, he is shocked to be asked by the host David Gregory, “To the extent that you have aided and abetted Snowden…why shouldn’t you, Mr. Greenwald, be charged with a crime?” Greenwald was so stunned that “it took a minute to process that he had actually asked” such a patently outrageous question.
And what was so outrageous? . . . As the news media struggles to expose government secrets and the government struggles to keep them secret, there is no invisible hand to assure that the right balance is struck. So what do we do about leaks of government information? Lock up the perpetrators or give them the Pulitzer Prize? (The Pulitzer people chose the second option.) This is not a straightforward or easy question. But I can’t see how we can have a policy that authorizes newspapers and reporters to chase down and publish any national security leaks they can find. This isn’t Easter and these are not eggs.
Greenwald’s notion of what constitutes suppression of dissent by the established media is an invitation to appear on “Meet the Press.” On the show, he is shocked to be asked by the host David Gregory, “To the extent that you have aided and abetted Snowden…why shouldn’t you, Mr. Greenwald, be charged with a crime?” Greenwald was so stunned that “it took a minute to process that he had actually asked” such a patently outrageous question.
And what was so outrageous? . . . As the news media struggles to expose government secrets and the government struggles to keep them secret, there is no invisible hand to assure that the right balance is struck. So what do we do about leaks of government information? Lock up the perpetrators or give them the Pulitzer Prize? (The Pulitzer people chose the second option.) This is not a straightforward or easy question. But I can’t see how we can have a policy that authorizes newspapers and reporters to chase down and publish any national security leaks they can find. This isn’t Easter and these are not eggs.
Let’s
repeat that: The New York Times just published a review of No
Place to Hide that
expressly argues on the question of what should and should not get reported “that decision must ultimately be made by the
government.” Moreover,
those who do that reporting against the government’s wishes are not journalists
but “perpetrators,” and whether they should be imprisoned “is not a
straightforward or easy question.”
Barry Eisler, Erik Wemple, and Kevin Gosztola all have excellent replies to all of
that, laying bear just how extremist it is. After reading Kinsley’s review,
Ellsberg had a couple questions for him:
But
there’s a broader point illustrated by all of this. Reviews of No
Place to Hide internationally
(the book has been published in more than two dozen countries, in nine
languages) have, almost unanimously, been extremely positive. By stark
contrast, reviews from American writers have been quite mixed, with some recent
ones, including from George Packer and now Kinsley, attempting to savage
both the book and me personally. Much of that is simply an expression of the
rule that Larry Summers imparted to Elizabeth Warren upon her arrival in Washington
Larry Summers took Warren out to
dinner in Washington
My
book, and my writing and speaking more generally, usually criticizes insiders,
and does so harshly and by name, so much of this reaction is simply a ritual of
expulsion based on my chronic violation of Summers’ rule. I find that a relief.
But
even the positive reviews of the book in the U.S.
(such as from the Times‘ book critic Michiko Kakutani) took
grave offense to its last chapter, which argues that the U.S. media are too close and subservient to the U.S. U.S.
But
here, it wasn’t just Kinsley who mounted an argument for the criminalization of
journalism when done against the government’s wishes. Almost instantly, other
prominent journalists–NBC’s David Gregory, The
Washington New York ’s Jonathan Chait–publicly
touted and even praised Kinsley’s review.
So let’s recap: The
New York Times chose
someone to review my book about the Snowden leaks who has a record of
suggesting that journalists may be committing crimes when publishing
information against the government’s wishes. That journalist then proceeded to
strongly suggest that my prosecution could be warranted. Other prominent
journalists —including the one who hosts Meet the Press–then heralded that review
without noting the slightest objection to Kinsley’s argument.
Do I
need to continue to participate in the debate over whether many U.S. journalists are pitifully obeisant to
the U.S.
Glenn
Greenwald's new website
launches with fresh NSA revelations
The Intercept one of several sites to be launched by
new media company First Look, started by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. http://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/feb/10/the-intercept-glenn-greenwald-nsa-revelations
Glenn Greenwald's New Website, The Intercept, Is Now Live. The Huffington Post | by Jack Mirkinson.
Posted: 02/10/2014 8:28 am EST Updated: 02/10/2014 8:59 am EST
o
Pierre OmidyarThe InterceptLaura PoitrasJeremy ScahillFirst Look MediaGlenn Greenwald WebsiteGlenn Greenwald
The first digital venture co-led by Glenn Greenwald is now live.
The Intercept, an online magazine
edited by Greenwald and fellow journalists Laura
Poitras and Jeremy Scahill and backed by billionaire Pierre Omidyar, made its much-anticipated debut early Monday
morning. Its first article was written by Greenwald and Scahill, and looked at the NSA's role in the U.S.
The piece was, of
course, based on documents leaked by Edward Snowden. The magazine is just one
of the multiple sites being created by First
Look Media, the Omidyar-funded organization providing the cash for
Greenwald and his colleagues.
In a blog post on the site, Greenwald, Scahill and
Poitras said that The Intercept was "the first of what will be numerous
digital magazines published by FLM."
Speaking to
"Democracy Now" on Monday, Greenwald said that the site had launched
as quickly as it did because "we feel a serious obligation to get up and
running," given the many documents from Snowden that are yet to be
released. He added that First Look Media was "slowly and inexorably
expanding the range of topics we cover."
Scahill, who was also appearing on the program, added that recent comments by intelligence officials suggesting
journalists could be "accomplices" in criminal activity for
publishing classified material had also pushed the site to speed up its
activities.
Note: Omidyar is CEO of Honolulu
Civil Beat, which partnered with The Huffington Post to create HuffPost Hawaii
PBS,
FRONTLINE, “The USA
The
engrossing story of the post-9/11 struggle within the government over the
legality of the massive electronic surveillance urged by V-P Cheney and ordered
by President Bush. Focuses
on the whistleblowers in the NSA and CIA who tried to stop the post-9/11
unconstitutional trawling of messages from and to US public, and the Bush and
Obama administrations’ crackdown.
Additional importance: explains
why Snowden chose to reveal all the secret government correspondence. Since the efforts by earlier whistleblowers
produced no result, several were forced to “retire,” and one was prosecuted
(Drake), Snowden realized he must present the US
GOODMAN’S
DEMOCRACY NOW
A PBS Frontline interview of Glenn Greenwald on Snowden’s decision to
expose the government’s secret correspondence, his struggle to disseminate the
information via the Guardian magazine
and Greenwald and Poitras, and how and why he ended up in Russia US Fayetteville
Glenn Greenwald | The Snowden Saga Begins
TomDispatch , Reader Supported News, May 14, 2014
Story of the first encounters in the saga of Snowden and Greenwald/Poitras.
TomDispatch , Reader Supported News, May 14, 2014
Story of the first encounters in the saga of Snowden and Greenwald/Poitras.
Greenwald concludes: "Not since Daniel Ellsberg leaked
the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War has a trove of documents revealing
the inner workings and thinking of the U.S.
READ MORE
READ MORE
John Yoo Trashes Pulitzer Over Snowden Files Awards
Murtaza Hussain, Salon, Reader Supported News, April 19, 2014
Hussain reports: "How depraved and incompetent do you have to be before people in America stop asking your opinion about things?"
READ MORE
Murtaza Hussain, Salon, Reader Supported News, April 19, 2014
Hussain reports: "How depraved and incompetent do you have to be before people in America stop asking your opinion about things?"
READ MORE
CONTACT THE PRESIDENT, YOUR
REPRESENTATIVES, YOUR COLLEGE (if it and the faculty are silent), buy related
books (support pro-transparency and democracy publishers and book sellers),
protest all who advocate or defend totalitarian methods.
From the White House: Write or Call [TAKE HIM UP
ON THE OFFER. Find one official and
continue to call.]
President
Obama is committed to creating the most open and accessible administration in
American history. That begins with taking comments and questions from you, the
public, through our website.
Call
the President
PHONE NUMBERS
Comments:
202-456-1111Switchboard: 202-456-1414
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Write a letter to
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July 13: Ellsberg, Why Snowden Had to Flee US
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Contents Snowden Newsletter #2
Snowden’s
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Amy Goodman,
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Snowden on
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Ray McGovern:
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Risen and
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Rendall and
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Ridgeway and
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Oliver Stone,
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Contents Snowden Newsletter #3
PETITIONS from Roots Action
The Leaked Documents
Copy of
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The Leaker Snowden
Weisbrot, “An
American Hero”
Reitman,
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Smale, No
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Avaaz, Asylum
for Snowden
Savage, Snowden
Honored by Freedom of the Press Foundation
Contexts
McGovern,
Snowden’s “Freedom” in Russia
Snowden Joins
Board of Press Group Founded by Ellsberg
Sirota,
Snowden’s “Freedom” in the US
Radyuhin,
Snowden Asks Russians for Protection
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Petition to Give Snowden Nobel Peace Prize
Luke Harding, The Snowden Files
Hightower: NSA and Snowden, “ Why He Matters”
Richard
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END
CITIZEN SNOWDEN NEWSLETTER # 5
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