Careful readers who saw something in all my Fuck The Guardian posts beyond envy-fueled animus against He Who Must Never Be Criticized In The Same Way He Criticizes, surely could guess that I wasn’t even slightly surprised when I saw this, from second string Leak Keeper Barton Gellman of the Washington Post:
For those who don’t know, Manhattan’s Upper East Side has among the highest concentrations of wealth in the world and the men-only Knickerbocker is among New York’s most exclusive clubs. So what Gellman described is nothing less than a representative sample of the people on whose behalf the government, the mainstream media, and the security apparatus are mostly supposed to work — applauding both Mr. Snowden and The Debate™ he kicked off.
Feel free to congratulate the gatecrashing Leak Keepers for so deftly infiltrating platforms that even serious third party candidates and advocates of single payer health care can barely touch, and marvel at how quickly they have brought certain elites around on how yes, we really must talk about this NSA business. Alternatively, you might join me in thinking a little harder on stuff I wrote that’s gotten lost in a lot of talk about drips and dumps and proper pleb-to-celeb protocol:
It’s rather naive, and maybe even grandiose for people on the left to think that on the rare occasions when their concerns land on successive front pages of The New York Times and on CNN, this is due to the supernatural savvy of a Greenwald, rather than that people in high places are very ok with certain information getting out and certain debates taking place….maybe we’re having this debate because people in high places want us to. (original post)
…In [NYU Journalism Professor Jay] Rosen’s view, the cascade of events he attributes to the Snowden Effect followed inevitably from Snowden’s disclosures. In mine, Snowden, like every other news event protagonist, is just the raw material with which people with genuine control of the news cycle tell us the the things they think we should hear in the ways they think we should hear them. (original post)
Someone accused me of wearing a ‘tin foil hat’ for insisting that there are no gatecrashers on television news. The proof is in the television news, but there is no conspiracy. It’s powerful decision-makers owning a few carriers, stacking the deck with largely non-unionized, like-minded people and doling out rewards and punishments in accordance with compliance. This is why the ‘national conversation’ is such a toxic waste dump. To recognize this is to take nothing away from the talent and courage of the people who do the best they can within the constraints of this system. But their talent and courage do not oblige an analytical person to mythologize what is actually going on, including the steps people take and the qualities they have (or don’t), that keep them inside the margins.
Now, to observe that elites are aiding and abetting The Snowden Effect is not to say all of them are. But many of them clearly are, so the question is why. Well, it depends on which elites we’re talking about.
On the same day obscenely wealthy men on Manhattan’s Upper East Side applauded Snowden’s name, a few blocks south, Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff gave a speech at the UN excoriating the United States for NSA surveillance in her country, as disclosed by Snowden-based stories in the Brazilian press. Rousseff expressed her concern for human rights and made clear which humans she meant:
Corporate information – often of high economic and even strategic value – was at the centre of espionage activity.
Also, Brazilian diplomatic missions, among them the permanent mission to the UN and the office of the president of the republic itself, had their communications intercepted.
The day before, also in Manhattan, the increasingly comedic Leak Keeper Editor/computer smasher, Alan Rusbridger, gave a speech about the leaks in which he disclosed that Obama and David Cameron are ‘nice’, made banal allusions to Orwell, then risibly paraphrased the message of Edward Snowden as ‘Look, wake up. You are building something that is potentially quite alarming.’ He then worried aloud over one alarmed billionaire, an emphasis his paper reproduced in the write-up of his speech:
If you are Mark Zuckerberg and you are trying to build an international business, this is dismaying to you,” Rusbridger said.
Zuckerberg recently criticized the Obama administration’s surveillance apparatus. “Frankly I think the government blew it,” he told TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco.
The Facebook founder was particularly damning of government claims that they were only spying on “foreigners”.
“Oh, wonderful: that’s really helpful to companies trying to serve people around the world, and that’s really going to inspire confidence in American internet companies,” said Zuckerberg
So, to summarize, we know that certain wealthy, important people around the world are concerned about the NSA because:
- Their own emails and phone calls are being monitored by the NSA
- The NSA is engaging in corporate espionage
- NSA spying interferes with profitable internet business by impeding customer trust
Certainly there is some grandstanding for the rubes going on here with Rousseff and Zuckerberg, but those Upper East Side bluebloods applauding Snowden amongst themselves must surely reflect some genuine anxiety in all of these people, and no wonder. Undoubtedly the one percenters like surveillance like they like their justice system and everything else: two-tiered. The NSA system is two-tiered, certainly, but the tiers don’t split neatly along the usual line of wealth and melanin. They divide along the lines of who’s in and who’s out with the NSA, which, with its network of private contractors and thousands of analysts empowered to extract troves of data with a single email address, poses a kind of risk elites can’t buy their way out of.
If you don’t think that alone is reason enough to allow The Debate, consider also the interests of elites within the security establishment, like within The CIA and its own network of private contractors. This crowd must surely be on the easiest of terms with any debate about the security state so steeply skewed toward the Bad Apple-ing of only one agency rather than thorough-going scrutiny of the Intelligence Community as a whole.
With this in mind I went poking around to see what the CIA’s been up to besides incinerating rights-free humans, and found this fascinating presentation given in March at a Big Data conference by The Agency’s CTO, Gus Hunt. Hunt is surprisingly frank in describing the opportunities presented by all the data people expose to ‘sentiment analysis’ via social media and simply as bodies moving through a ‘sensor-connected world.’ A world in which ‘someone can know where you are at all times’ and ‘you can be 100% identified by your gait.’ ‘We are at high noon in the information age’ he says. ‘it is ‘nearly in our grasp to compute on all human generated information.’ Of course to do all that computing, you need all the information:
The value of any piece of information is only known when you can connect it with something else that arrives at a future point in time. Since you can’t connect dots you don’t have, it drives us into a mode of, we fundamentally try to collect everything and hang on to it forever.
There is a whole lot that’s interesting (and chilling) about this presentation but two things stick out for me. One is that Hunt is presaging the next phase of signals intelligence, where machines connecting the dots of all the data that is just out there will make PRISM look primitive. The other is that the CIA seems to be making a play for dominance in signals intelligence — which has traditionally been the NSA’s speciality — as its ‘investment focus shifts from missiles to big data. (source).’ This means that the CIA could win big if the NSA loses credibility and funding without tainting the CIA in the process. As Snowden’s leak of the black budget revealed, the Agency is certainly in empire-building mode, having surged past the NSA as the most lavishly funded agency in the Intelligence Community, largely by growing covert operations (its third ‘business line’ in Hunt’s words) into a paramilitary force.
The message here really is that people attempting to ‘reform’ the NSA are, whether they acknowledge it or not, in a tactical alliance with a lot of shady people who are in the fight for very different reasons and who have considerable means to make it go a certain way. This is why the Leak Keepers have been given a berth that surprises even them. That doesn’t mean the debate is a fraud or a total loss, though by virtue of its tight circumscription, I find it increasingly banal and pointless. Those who remain transfixed should at least be far more analytical than various starry-eyed reformists, self-mythologizers and sycophants are encouraging you to be. If nothing else, people who call for Clapper’s head because ‘he lied to Congress ‘ — who are, unsurprisingly, the same people that insisted Obama would change everything in 2008 — will be increasingly good for laughs as the narcotic of increased access makes them progressively more giddy. But as the beginning and the end of The Debate, The NSA is a red herring.
UPDATE 6
Wowsy wow wow.
https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/408996184263364609
UPDATE 5
Oops. Not #Winning???
So the asshole who has worked tirelessly to confine the leaks safely to a ‘Debate’ about public policy — and gotten vastly wealthier and more influential in the process — is now lamenting the entirely predictable result.
https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/399943359172591616
UPDATE 4
Now Glenn’s pal, Andy Sullivan, is coming around. Someone took issue with Glenn’s approving tweet (below) and a little kerfuffle ensued. TBH the worst thing about that little dust-up is the way ostensible anti-authoritarians tiptoe around His (barely) Liberal Highness after yet another sneer at ‘radicals’. Where would we be without Glenn’s trusty, self-effacing radical elves? Under surveillance, that’s where!
https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/395567114892746752
UPDATE 3
Every little charade helps. I feel less surveilled already
https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/394977093609472001
UPDATE 2
#Winning
https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/392628320510042113
Once you understand what an acute case of heat vampirism afflicts Greenwald and his moronic cult, the laughs never stop. I recommend it. My buddy Arthur Silber has some thoughts.
UPDATE 1
Quoting myself from above: ‘increasingly good for laughs as the narcotic of increased access makes them progressively more giddy.’
‘Fascinating…Revealing’ LOL
https://twitter.com/ggreenwald/status/385025311579992065
Related
Another Snowden News Story, Another Lesson in Proper Whistleblowing
Greenwald Tries To Settle A Score, Fails
Dr. Rosen and The Snowden Effect
My reply to Glenn Greenwald’s Comments on Take Your Drip and Stick It
The Rancid Honeytrap 
Very welcome elaboration of your points.
Always wise to refuse to be channeled into the debate PTB want to have.
There are a lot of directions in which to take the info already provided. An important focus to me is on the use/abuse of existing stores of sucked-up info against ppl’s 1st and 4th amdmt rights by other arms of govt in cooperation with NSA (or sometimes not), reinforcing the already multi-tier legal/prison system.
Reblogged this on The Time is Nigh.
“It’s powerful decision-makers owning a few carriers, stacking the deck with largely non-unionized, like-minded people and doling out rewards and punishments in accordance with compliance. This is why the ‘national conversation’ is such a toxic waste dump.”
This reminds me of something I’ve heard Chomsky address often in various venues. Those inside the margins bristle at being told that there are certain stories they cannot cover; certain perspectives they cannot represent.
“I cover what I want to cover. No one scares me off covering a story in a particular way because it’s dangerous to established power.”
One doesn’t arrive inside the margins unless those who do the hiring have vetted the person and decided that she is of a like mind. Those who are not likeminded are marginalized well before the microphones and broadsides of major media outlets are within reach. It’s been attributed to Nietsche, but I couldn’t find the actual source, so who knows? But, “A politician divides mankind into two classes: tools and enemies.” If Jimmy Carter is mouthing the same concerns that you’re mouthing in the same general manner that you’re mouthing them, what are the chances that you’re actually an enemy?
“But their talent and courage does not oblige an analytical person to mythologize what is actually going on, including the steps people take and the qualities they have (or don’t), that keep them inside the margins.”
And that seems to be where all this blowback you’re experiencing is coming from: you’re refusing to mythologize.
And that is a violation that cannot be countenanced. Even by “radicals.”
Exactly. I’m stunned at how left media critique is just thrown out the window so they can have their little Captain Planet Goes To Washington Via Rio Drama.
I don’t have much to add here other than I really enjoy your work. You make great points. Your writing is incisive and lively and keeps me coming back for more. I don’t really have the energy to do a critical analysis or try to argue about anything right now, but I don’t think I need to either. Thank you, and keep it up!
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Great post and agree with it. I think the elites are okay with some of this conversation being aired to the extent that what is going on may impact them. I think facebook etc were funded by the same venture firms that also receive large funding from the govt for private companies that do a lot of the nsa etc dirty work. The line between these corps and govt is very thin, and if Mark is upset about the leaks it is only to the extent it might impact his business. that said goven the amount of money and power behind these corps it makes it almost impossible for real competitors to rise up. In fact the whole point of creating these massive corps and then passing laws and countless regulations is to make it impossible for smaller companies to succeed and thrive.
What i wonder about Snowden was did he give Glenn documents that showed certain powerful people were being spied on and maybe even blackmailed to vote a certain way, or alter their judicial opinion. The reason I wonder is that while the information Snowden gave is explosive, because of the volume impact he created, the information was out there. In fact, I just read a trashy thriller written long before snowden that details pretty much everything we know about the NSA from Snowden documents. I looked at his source material, and a lot of it was from articles etc detailing what NSA was up to. I bring this up because Snowden seems smart, and to paraphrase Hersh from yesterday, he can not believe what has been published so far would truely be enough to really move the needle. I mean the NSA has spent billions in building Utah center they are hardley looking to scale back. If he was really going to push the needle you would think he would have also downloaded evidence of powerful american citizens being spied on for nefarious purposes, or did he just limit that to places like Brazil. If the latter, why? If he could access information on brazil’s leaders and corporations being spied on. Surely he could get it on US politicans, judges, CEO’s.
I’ve had thoughts similar to Trish’s. Among the thousands of documents Snowden leaked, surely some of them must show specific cases where individuals have been spied on. If Snowden’s access and ability to cover his tracks were so great, he could have tapped in, spied and gathered data on someone (perhaps a pro Natsec politician) himself to prove their capabilities and dig up some dirt in the process. I find it difficult to believe that among all those docs he ever-so-carefully read, filtered and leaked, the best they could come up with is revelations of shit anyone with half a fucking brain already knew the government was doing anyway.
Trish, Paley:
I don’t know if the documents have shown anyone notable being spied on and blackmailed but according to Greenwald’s rant here a few posts back, the docs give up the names of spied upon individuals:
I share your lack of wonder at what’s been reported so far, though a lot of people do seem to be surprised and horrified. Still, whatever value there has been in the Snowden leaks to date, it’s to a large extent as incontrovertible proof of what other people have already said, as the source list for Trish’s trashy novel suggest. As narrow and tightly controlled as this ‘debate’ is — a narrowness that guides not just the heavily vetted disclosures but the single-minded focus on one arm of the gigantic security octopus — I don’t think there is a really good reason for serious people to remain engaged much longer, except to jeer as it metamorphoses into a spectacle of heroic journalism (without any real heroism) and anodyne calls for ‘reform.’ I think the uncritical captivation of a lot of people calling themselves radical is quite possibly the most disappointing thing about it. My biggest complaint about The Snowden Effect may be how NOT left, how very NOT dissident it all is. It’s turning everyone into a rube.
It’s possible that all the explosive stuff is in the book. If so, we can debate the ethics of holding onto it for so long when it drops. No doubt the usual suspects will applaud the tactical deftness of publishing everything that matters in such a way that, by happy coincidence, also maximizes profits. .
I think Paley’s and my point was Snowden seems smart, and knows much of what he gave Glenn has been covered, not the detail or breadth he provided, but covered. He also saw what happened with the wikileaks information. You would think in addition to giving Glenn docs on “how and ways in which they spy” he would have included some showing them doing it to US politicians, CEO’s and major judges. That would certainly move the needle.
It seems odd to me that he would have given Glenn docs showing the Brazil leaders were spied on, along with their corporations, leading to brazil cancelling their state visit and not providing similar information on US based powerful entities. Spying on foreign leaders, even friendly, is not going to shake up many people in the US. but if they learned that US politicians and high level judges were being spied on and maybe as a result being blackmailed etc that would send deep shockwaves, and be very hard for even fascist like Feinstein to defend.
So i guess this is a rather long way of saying. Snowden can not be that daft and only gave docs to show they can spy, and with the exception of brazil so far, didn’t think to provide docs showing them actually doing it to major power players here in the US.
He, snowden seems very meticulous and thought a lot of this through. Don’t you find it a bit strange that he didn’t bother to download docs that show who they were spying on? For example, nobody would think justice roberts was a terrorist, so if he was being spied on why?
i am not saying Glenn has these docs just wondering why not?
Gotcha. Yeah, it seems weird. One of the earlier NSA whistleblowers, I think it was Russell Tice said that Obama as Senator and Justice Scalia were both spied on.
Two points:
1. This reads beautifully.
2. I saw a twitter exchange between Greenwald and some other folks from yesterday (you dropped in long enough to sigh). Greenwald’s remarks left me wondering about the leverage he and Poitras, et al., might have convinced themselves they were holding against harassment, prosecution, permanent exile, or worse, by virtue of not sharing more of what Snowden took. But then Miranda happened. For how long after reprisals begin against one or one’s family is a journalist expected to continue taking bullets to keep the entirety of the cache provided by the leaker under wraps? A leaker, moreover, whose identity–a matter journalists have ostensibly gone to jail to protect–everyone already knows? Has the US really calculated Greenwald would never do it, and thus they’re free to abuse him as much as they like? I doubt it. If the abuse became intolerable, it seems there’d come a time when Greenwald could just say fuck it, here’s everything, and let the chips fall where they may. From the perspective of NATSEC players, in other words, instances of measured harassment might seem to be the better strategy, to keep Greenwald’s missives at drip stage and dissuade him from sharing with others. But a point I’ve gleaned from your previous posts is that even in the absence of actual or threatened government reprisal there’s reason to suspect Greenwald would still be dripping. And if that was your point, I agree.
Well so long as he continues to monopolize the story, he will always be dripping because there are only so many hours in the day. He’s a bottleneck and we’re being told that that’s a great thing because news cycle, attention spans blah blah. The justifications fall completely flat when you place them into an international context, where it is neither tactically prudent nor ethical to keep this stuff entirely to oneself until one partners directly with a foreign journalist and writes a story.
It is quite possible that the shakedown of Miranda was intended to put just enough fear into Greenwald to render him paralyzingly risk averse. In which case, we have a whistleblowing event where the US and UK intelligence communities are more or less dictating the terms. In other words, we are no longer having a true whistleblowing event, where information is used to inflict as much damage on a malevolent enterprise as possible.
To me, that’s the most important thing: that this is becoming a lot of smoke and not much else. I don’t think critics who observe this are obliged to figure out why it’s been so tightly circumscribed, though, since we’ll never really know. Whatever the case, the result is certainly showing the tactical foolishness of sharing leaks with only a small number of risk averse media people, a point I attempted to make when Alan Rusbridger smashed his computers and kicked this discussion off.
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think it is not hyperbolic to conclude that all info published so far from the greenwald clique is legally OK and functions as a critique aiming to a normative integration of the totalitarian apparatus.
greenwald said when asked: im not gonna help other states built a spying apparatus for their citizens. that is a bloody stupid alibi in front of the fact that the only global apparatus we know of to now has no competitor. i really hope, other countries will be able to compete the us-appratus even without the documents greenwald withholds.
and i really hope snowden is not just some obama of the surveillance guantanamo.
Yeah, I think that’s how it’s going to function, too, though I would put it in less emphatic terms, as I don’t think most of the key players, like Greenwald and Poitras, for instance, have any idea that that’s what they’re up to. I think Greenwald really does believe his own myth and, between his timidity, reformism, and imperial arrogance, is quickly metamorphosing into the most useful idiot the security establishment ever had.
I don’t think it’s fair to blame Snowden for any of this, just yet, since he is marooned in Russia and sworn to do nothing more that might harm the US. Greenwald has basically taken over, and speaks for him in ways that are at odds with things Snowden said during the brief period he was talking. For instance, on the matter of making information available to other states, he said in this non-Guardian interview:
This comment seems to contradict both Greenwald’s method for distributing the leaks to foreign countries and Greenwald’s assessment of risks, and also Greenwald’s insistence that responsibility for risk assessment belongs to him and Snowden. More and more, I think we are looking at a Greenwald effect — that is, the effect of a controlling, self-serving, paternalistic, reformist liberal who holds all the keys — not a Snowden effect.
Thank you for reminding me Snowden´s words. I agree that Greenwald is contradicting what Snowden articulated. And Greenwald also is not willing to discuss points that have to do with his handling. But i disagree with you, Tarzie, in the interpretation of his motivation: I believe he is less more afraid than his will to power is. BUT: If he believes he will survive this tempest without the help of those who just do not have another choice than betting the whole surface, he just did not pay much attention the last 500 years. His ten minutes of fame are gone.
Can you clarify this a little?
i mean: greenwald is not even a reformer, because a reformer, in this moment, can not avoid being compared to wikileaks. what greenwald does is annulating the impact of such a medium than wikileaks. therefore he cant be driven by a will to enlightment. and we know from nietzsche: there are only two options.
(loved this sentence: “most useful idiot the security establishment ever had”)
Does anyone know of any other paid writer for a major outlet whose embedded links, link to other articles that mention himself more than does Greenwald?
Ha ha. Maybe Andrew Sullivan.
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As much as I’ve loved Glenn on Droning, I have to finally say UUUUUGHHHHHH ….and Omydar/eBay /etcetera, etcetera etcetera ……my, what an unbelievable stench.
I imagine that Glenn is maybe sitting on data that Sly Con Valley’s Historic Newspaper (why is it never questioned that center of technology – i.e. ‘surveillance partners’ – does not, never has had, have a ‘Newspaper’ as predominant as the New York Times?), the San Jose Mercury News, has been infiltrated by DOD Gate Keepers, such as Herhold (I just lurve that name, as Sly Con Valley is absolutely one of the worst places to be stuck if one is female, of a feminine persuasion, or sympathetic with the concept of nurture (such as, perhaps the hispanic Mercury writer who literally gutted himself (Ramires, was his last name, as I recollect, and good luck ‘searching it’ it has been thoroughly wiped)) who likes to pretend he’s just a home grown mick local boy, who adores Bellarmine and really really cares about those homeless encamped along San Ho’s Guadulpe river trickle (when he’s not sticking his tongue up the ass of those who created the conditions for those humans to become ‘homeless’)), Mike Cassidy, and the two white boyo tech writers whose names currently escape me. …….
Somehow, when all youth who don’t buy into The Cloud!!!!!!™, and every other middle aged male in Sly Con Valley has lost their shirts ( and all of the previous middle aged females who wrote for the Murky have long since been Let Go!!!!!™, ….. Herhold, Cassidy and those two ass licking, white boyo, tech writers Maintain!!!!!™ licking Zuckerberg, et al, Cum, at the end of the day.
It does not augur well. But I think what the rulers are discovering is that The System can absorb almost any shock simply by co-option. So it’s possible that there might be some good journalism coming out of this. But underneath all his froth, Greenwald is a run-of-the-mill liberal, so alongside the possibly more investigative-y journalism we’ll not have any apple cart toppling. Greenwald is always happy to make with the political endorsements and homages to debate and policy change. It’s become quite evident that there is a huge audience that just wants to almost fetishistically contemplate how shitty things are and wring their hands, pausing to occasionally applaud some largely meaningless spectacle of dissent like the one Greenwald is now shrewdly parlaying into a fortune and personality cult. He will be a news entrepreneur for people that paradoxically take flight from overwhelming powerlessness by contemplating the architecture of their prison and doing nothing else. It is likely to be wildly successful.
Oh, and how could I forget Dan Gilmore [sp?], of previous Sly Con Valley, Murky Nooz fame , apparently connected at the hip with Glenn, and now at the UK Guardian, with his shirt fully intact.
I contacted Ma$ter Gilmore in 2004, person to person, (he would recollect as to the quote: “which would you rather be, the spider and the fly” recording I informed him of) re something rather pertinent as to our financial Ma$ters of the univer$e.
The fucker totally blew me off, and who knows who he forewarned of potential whistle blowing.
These are interesting comments. You might want to consider commenting over on my most recent post, where there is an update on the Omidyar deal. You’ll catch more eyeballs over there.
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