Showing posts with label journalism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label journalism. Show all posts

Thursday, February 9, 2017

Trump Spokesman Sean Spicer on SNL

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Trump has the worst spokespeople in the known world, but especially Press Secretary Sean Spicer, who is a nervous wreck who raises his voice and can't seem to tell the truth. But last weekend Saturday Night Live took care of him. In a skit for the ages, Melissa McCarthy lampooned the dimwit shrieking at reporters and even attacking them with his podium.

Spicer accused SNL of being "mean" to him, while Trump was appalled that a woman played one of his cronies. The truth is, Spicer deserves every joke told about him. When you watch his actual press conferences and interviews, SNL hardly had to exaggerate reality to make him look ridiculous. Now there is talk of Rosie O'Donnell playing Steve Bannon and we can't wait to see it!













What the Real Spicer is Like - Can You Tell the Difference?











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Friday, February 27, 2015

The Further Fictional Adventures of Bill O'Reilly

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Previous Related Posts:
Falklands Drama: Cornered Narcissist Bill O'Reilly Lashes Out

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As the media casts a spotlight on his fake journalistic endeavors, Bill O'Reilly is becoming more and more unhinged. Last week he threatened to send David Corn of Mother Jones to a "Kill Zone," and this week he made threats against a writer for the New York Times.

He's a classic loud-mouth bully who can dish it out but can't take it, thin-skinned and violent. And why is he so defensive? Because he has been caught lying over and over again and there's no way out.

From New York Times
Mr. O’Reilly’s efforts to refute the claims by Mother Jones and some former CBS News colleagues occurred both on the air and off on Monday. During a phone conversation, he told a reporter for The New York Times that there would be repercussions if he felt any of the reporter’s coverage was inappropriate. “I am coming after you with everything I have,” Mr. O’Reilly said. “You can take it as a threat.”






"(O'Reilly is) the biggest Kahuna in all of cable news - a man who at any other news network would be in a fight for his professional life right now, but so far for him apparently no consequences."
~ Rachel Maddow






Statement from Fox News:

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But reporters are not backing down. If anything, they are digging deeper into O'Reilly's mountain of lies.

The Guardian is investigating O'Reilly's coverage of the Los Angeles Riots in the 1990s when he worked for Inside Edition.

From Talking Points Memo
Six former co-workers disputed O'Reilly's tale of being bombarded with concrete and bricks by rioters while covering the 1992 unrest in Los Angeles, according to the Guardian.

“They were throwing bricks and stones at us,” O’Reilly told an online interviewer in 2006, according to the Guardian.
“Concrete was raining down on us. The cops saved our butts that time," O'Reilly added.
O'Reilly repeated the story to conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt this month.
“We were attacked, we were attacked by protesters, where bricks were thrown at us,” he told Hewitt, the Guardian reported.

“It didn’t happen,” one colleague from "Inside Edition" told the paper. “If it did, how come none of the rest of us remember it?”

. . .

Hunter Walker of Business Insider points out that O'Reilly's "heroic" version of himself in Buenos Aires saving a cameraman in a combat zone during the Falklands War was included in a novel written by O'Reilly called "Those Who Trespass." When Art Imitates Ego! However, it is mostly fiction:

From Business Insider
In O'Reilly's novel the protest was broken up by soldiers, or as the author put it, "combat-ready shock troops dressed in full battle gear and armed with machine guns." At this point, Michaels, one of the characters described as O'Reilly's fictional "alter ego" realized he "had to get away" with his cameraman and soundman. As Michaels and his crew escaped, the soldiers let loose on the crowd.
"Without warning, they began firing directly into the crowd," O'Reilly wrote, adding, "Hundreds of people immediately fell onto the cement."
O'Reilly wrote that Michaels "saw one man take a bullet squarely in the right eye" and he "was killed instantly." He described "ten thousand tightly packed demonstrators ... desperately trying to get away from the gunfire any way they could."
These scenes written by O'Reilly contradict contemporaneous reports of the real-life protest, which do not describe widespread gunfire or any deaths.

In another book, O'Reilly claimed that he saw some war action in Northern Ireland and El Salvador in addition to Buenos Aires, but under scrutiny he is backing off.

From Washington Post
In his 2013 book, “Keep It Pithy,” the Fox News host recounted,“I’ve seen soldiers gun down unarmed civilians in Latin America, Irish terrorists kill and maim their fellow citizens in Belfast with bombs.”

On another occasion, he said, “I’ve covered four wars,” and ticked off El Salvador’s civil war in the 1980s, the 1982 Falklands conflict, Northern Ireland and an unspecified conflict in Israel. “I’ve seen the best and the worst.”
. . . O’Reilly traveled to Northern Ireland in 1984 to research a book about the Troubles, according to Fox News. The book was never finished, and it’s not clear whether he covered the conflict for any news organization. At the time, he was working for a Boston TV station, WCVB, but his then-boss, Philip S. Balboni, said that O’Reilly covered only local news and did commentary for the station.
O’Reilly didn’t mention seeing any terrorist bombings in Northern Ireland during a radio interview with syndicated host Hugh Hewitt last week. Instead, he told a milder story: “We went on a raid in Divis Flats with the police. And it was a pretty intense situation. There was stuff being thrown, arrests being made, all of that.”
“Were you in fear of physical harm?” Hewitt asked.
No, O’Reilly replied.

O'Reilly also tried to use photographic evidence to "prove" that he saw nuns being shot in El Salvador. He doesn't seem to understand the difference between "seeing" a picture of something and "seeing" something in person, yet he always uses first person when he talks.

From Talking Points Memo
“While in El Salvador, reporters were shown horrendous images of violence that were never broadcast, including depictions of nuns who were murdered," he told Mediaite.

During a Dec. 14, 2012 episode of "The O'Reilly Factor," O'Reilly talked about the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. He compared it to something he said he'd seen earlier in his career.

"I was in El Salvador and I saw nuns get shot in the back of the head," O'Reilly said, according to Media Matters.

He explained to Mediaite on Wednesday that he brought up El Salvador while discussing the Sandy Hook shooting to talk about "evil."

"I used the murdered nuns as an example of that evil," O'Reilly told the website. "That’s what I am referring to when I say ‘I saw nuns get shot in the back of the head.’ No one could possibly take that segment as reporting on El Salvador.”

Media Matters also pointed to a Sept. 27, 2005 episode of O'Reilly's radio show in which he said, "I've seen guys gun down nuns in El Salvador."


Media Matters also found a good example of O'Reilly claiming that he covered a dramatic story in person when actually he was several states away at a TV station.

George de Mohrenschildt was a Russian emigre who befriended Kennedy assassin Lee Harvey Oswald and testified before the Warren Commission investigating the Kennedy assassination. On March 29, 1977, the same day he was contacted by the House Select Committee on Assassinations, he committed suicide at his daughter's home in Florida. At the time, O'Reilly was a reporter for Dallas' WFAA-TV who regularly reported on stories related to the Kennedy assassination.
O'Reilly has bizarrely inserted himself into de Mohrenschildt's story, claiming in books and on Fox News that he was outside the house seeking to interview de Mohrenschiltd at the time of his death.

. . . In his 2012 best-selling non-fiction book Killing Kennedy, O'Reilly writes on page 300 that as a "reporter knocked on the door of de Mohrenschildt's daughter's home, he heard the shotgun blast that marked the suicide of the Russian ... that reporter's name is Bill O'Reilly."

. . . "Bill O'Reilly's a phony, there's no other way to put it," said Tracy Rowlett, a former WFAA reporter and anchor who worked at the station with O'Reilly. "He was not up on the porch when he heard the gunshots, he was in Dallas. He wasn't traveling at that time."
Byron Harris, a reporter at WFAA for the past 40 years, agreed that O'Reilly had not traveled to Florida for the story and accused him of stealing his reporting on de Mohrenschildt's suicide from a newspaper.
According to Harris, O'Reilly "was in Dallas. He stole that article out of the newspaper. I guarantee Channel 8 didn't send him to Florida to do that story because it was a newspaper story, it was broken by the Dallas Morning News."











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Sunday, November 9, 2014

The Uppity Stranger ~ Chuck Todd's Book Slams President Obama

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Previous Related Posts:
Chuck Todd Admits That Truth Isn't Part of His Job Description
Chuck Todd Shills for Mitch McConnell after Slamming Alison Grimes
Jealous Clown Todd Wonders Why Obama Isn't an Alpha Dog

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Chuckles the Todd, who was recently chosen as the new host of NBC's flagship "Meet the Press," has written a poison-pen screed against President Obama. The so-called journalist who famously said it "wasn't his job" to truth-check the GOP on Obamacare now thinks it IS his job to 'splain all of the Obama-fail.

It's enough to make a Tea Partier weep with joy. And those are Chuck Todd's people. He has done them proud.

Let him tell you something about The Negro, just like Cliven Bundy.

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. . . if The Stranger is revelatory, it’s not in the way Todd intended. For all his strengths (and they are myriad), Todd has written a disappointing book, a slab of pedestrian punditry marbled with occasional insight. The Stranger purports to tell the story of a president who couldn’t transcend his environment. The story it ultimately—and unwittingly—tells is of the perceptive political geek who couldn’t escape Beltway groupthink.
~ Elbert Ventura, Columbia Journalism Review

Six years in, our 44th president remains a cipher, someone “everyone is still trying to get to know,” as Mr. Todd writes. Particularly vexing is a basic irony that this book seeks to address: “How does one of the most successful politicians in American history . . . appear to be so bad at practicing the basics of politics in the backrooms of Washington, whether on Capitol Hill, on K Street, or at the Pentagon?”
. . . To that nagging question about how someone so intellectually advanced could be so politically stunted, the author’s final answer is that Barack Obama’s “arrogance got the better of him.” As a novel twist on this familiar theme, Mr. Todd theorizes that Mr. Obama’s happy experience as editor of the Harvard Law Review “gave him a false self-confidence that burns in him—and burns him—to this day.”
~ via Wall Street Journal Book Review

Todd’s attempts to peer deep inside Obama as an individual don’t take us far. “As is the case for many Americans, the president’s unusual upbringing shaped him to be the person he is today,” is not an encouraging start. Todd makes much of the fact that Obama’s mother was an anthropologist, which somehow transmitted to her only son “instinctive observational skills that allowed him to read and understand folks better than most politicians.” At the same time, being biracial “infused in him the temperament and patience that have marked his presidency both positively and negatively.” As a politician, Obama is described as “passive and arrogant,” and at times he is “all telescope and zero microscope.”
. . . As befitting a political junkie chronicle, the book is generous with political cliches. Throughout “The Stranger,” field days are had, rocky shoals are navigated, skies pose limits, writing appears on walls, fuel is added to fires, dies are cast, and collective sighs of relief are breathed. And there are sentences like this one: “Early on, there were signs the Republicans wouldn’t follow the presidential Pied Piper to postpartisanship.”
~ Washington Post Review of The Stranger
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Tuesday, October 21, 2014

NBC's Chuck Todd Shills for Mitch McConnell Against Alison Grimes

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Previous Related Posts:
Chuck Todd Admits that Truth Isn't Part of His Job Description
Jealous Clowns Brooks and Todd Question Obama's Manhood as the Alpha Dog
John Stewart Invents #McConnelling
Kentucky Zingerfest: Grimes Vs. McConnell at Fancy Farm

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NBC recently decided to replace the dreadful David Gregory as host of their Sunday "Meet the Press" show. Lo and behold, they chose Chuck Todd, who is so much like Gregory that news watchers everywhere predicted instant failure. Just a few weeks later, Todd is caught up in a political web that fulfills the expectations of his non-fans (including myself).

He has always been negative towards Democrats and especially President Obama, saying it "wasn't his job to sell Obamacare" and implying that the President failed when ACA was actually a roaring success. But this time he went on Morning Joe and said that Dem candidate Alison Grimes had "disqualified herself" from the job of Kentucky Senator by downplaying the fact that she voted for the President, as if he suddenly thinks the world of Pres. Obama - yeah, right. Of course, he doesn't explain how it would HELP Grimes to admit close ties to Obama in a state where she is vying for every crossover GOP vote. Every Democrat in a Red State has to do this at times to survive, so Todd put way too much emphasis on what she said.

The cringeworthy crew on Morning Joe discuss Alison Grimes as cringeworthy.



Now to be fair, many Dems also criticized Grimes for her position on that day, and even agreed with Todd - at first. But when it became clear that Grimes was just speaking like a careful politician, while Todd seemed to be shilling for McConnell, the picture was clear.

And believe me, the Mitch McConnell team saw a golden opportunity in Todd's dismissal of Grimes (almost as if it was planned, cough, cough), and immediately used the clip in one of his campaign ads.

From Washington Post
. . . the harshest critique probably came from "Meet the Press" host Chuck Todd, who appeared on "Morning Joe" on Friday to discuss Grimes's weird reply. "I think she disqualified herself," Todd told host Joe Scarborough — an extremely strong statement.
Miss that segment? Well, don't worry, Kentucky. The campaign of Grimes's opponent, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R), will be putting it into heavy rotation with its new ad, titled "Disqualified."



Todd, meanwhile, denies that any of it matters, he's not partisan, he's not helping the GOP. And anyone who thinks so is not living in reality, apparently - or as Todd defines reality, whatever the Beltway pundits are saying at the moment. You gotta hand it to Todd - he is a consistent toady. But once again he is insulting our collective intelligence if he thinks he can at once be a "fair" judge of politics while bashing a major candidate trying to overturn a GOP leader in a Red State. He pounced on that one line and ignored how well Grimes is doing in every major poll (except on Fox News, of course, where they are always right - oh wait).

From Facebook via politicusUSA
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Right - if people choose to vote for Grimes they are "cheerleading," but if Todd sends a great quote to McConnell he is being "realistic." Riiiight.







And he went even further, blaming Grimes herself and taking no responsibility for what he said:

Via Daily Kos
How does Chuck Todd respond to this journalistic mistake? He blames the candidate. "I think that is one of those situations where she invited this on herself," Chuck Todd said. "It feels like she had a lot of consultants whispering in her ear, 'Whatever you do don't give Mitch McConnell a line for a TV ad.'" Alison Lundergan Grimes did her part. Chuck Todd failed as a journalist. He became the news. He gave Mitch McConnell a line for a TV ad.

And a disclaimer: I'm not here to be "fair" to Todd. I think he is an ambitious warped individual who started out as a numbers guy and he's risen to a nice level of incompetence due to the Groupthink at MSNBC, where they routinely let go of any talented person who questions the GOP (Martin Bashir, Goldie Taylor, etc). I have been a critic of Todd on Twitter, and was recently blocked from retweeting or responding on his account right after having this conversation, which seems legit considering some of us saw Gregory as a loser for YEARS before NBC gave his job to Todd. Maybe they should listen to us now.



It seems as if Alison Lundergan Grimes is going to get the last laugh on both Todd and McConnell, as she is leading in the polls now. Which I'm sure he will say is incorrect, or just more cheerleading. Whatever!







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Thursday, January 30, 2014

Rep. Michael Grimm R-NY Threatens Reporter With Bodily Harm

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This happened after the State of the Union Speech on Tuesday night: a reporter for the New York One station named Michael Scotto was interviewing Representative Michael Grimm R-NY, asking about a political donor scandal that has been in the news for months. Grimm flipped out and went completely thug, threatening to hang the reporter by his bootstraps or worse:




From NY1 News
Grimm: "Let me be clear to you, you ever do that to me again I'll throw you off this f-----g balcony."

Scotto: "Why? I just wanted to ask you..."

[[cross talk]]

Grimm: "If you ever do that to me again..."

Scotto: "Why? Why? It’s a valid question."

[[cross talk]]

Grimm: "No, no, you're not man enough, you're not man enough. I'll break you in half. Like a boy."

In a statement, Grimm said,

“I was extremely annoyed because I was doing NY1 a favor by rushing to do their interview first in lieu of several other requests. The reporter knew that I was in a hurry and was only there to comment on the State of the Union, but insisted on taking a disrespectful and cheap shot at the end of the interview, because I did not have time to speak off-topic. I verbally took the reporter to task and told him off, because I expect a certain level of professionalism and respect, especially when I go out of my way to do that reporter a favor. I doubt that I am the first Member of Congress to tell off a reporter, and I am sure I won’t be the last.”

What was Grimm so ticked-off about? Well . . . he's in hot water:







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Tuesday, November 12, 2013

Lara Logan and the Bogus Benghazi Report

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Media Matters for America, 11-03-13
On October 27, CBS' 60 Minutes featured "Morgan Jones," -- The Washington Post later revealed his real name, Dylan Davies -- a supposed "eyewitness" of the September 2012 attack on U.S. diplomatic facilities, who claimed that during the attack he scaled a wall of the compound, personally struck a terrorist in the face with his rifle butt, and later went to the Benghazi hospital to see Ambassador Chris Stevens' body.
The story he told CBS wildly diverged from the account he gave his superiors in an incident report that was obtained by The Washington Post.

New York Times
Ms. Logan said that Dylan Davies, one of the main sources for a two-week-old piece about the attack on the American diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya, had misled the program’s staff when he gave an account of rushing to the compound the night the attack took place. “It was a mistake to include him in our report. For that, we are very sorry,” Ms. Logan said.
The apology lasted only 90 seconds and revealed nothing new about why CBS had trusted Mr. Davies, who appeared on the program under the pseudonym Morgan Jones. Off-camera, CBS executives were left to wonder how viewers would react to the exceptionally rare correction.

From Lara Logan, 60 Minutes Reporter in charge of Fake Benghazi Story
LOGAN: We end our broadcast tonight with a correction on a story we reported October 27 about the attack on the American special mission compound in Benghazi, in which Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans were killed. In the story, a security officer working for the State Department, Dylan Davies, told us he went to the compound during the attack and detailed his role that night.
After our report aired, questions arose about whether his account was true, when an incident report surfaced. It told a different story about what he did the night of the attack. Davies denied having anything to do with that incident report and insisted the story he told us was not only accurate, it was the same story told the FBI when they interviewed him.
On Thursday night, when we discovered the account he gave the FBI was different than what he told us, we realized we had been misled, and it was a mistake to include him in our report. For that, we are very sorry. The most important thing to every person at 60 Minutes is the truth, and the truth is, we made a mistake.



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It took two weeks to have that apology on 60 Minute. The piece aired at the end of October and there were questions raised almost immediately about it. So I think the question is now and the thing that media writers will be writing about this week are, what took so long and what is 60 Minutes doing to make sure this doesn’t happen again?
. . . This wasn’t a story that was breaking news, this was a story that they worked on for a year. And that’s why I think people wonder, did they come in with an agenda?
~ NY Times writer Brian Stelter on CNN via Raw Story

This evening's 60 Minutes response was wholly inadequate and entirely self-serving. The network must come clean by appointing an independent commission to determine exactly how and why it fell prey so easily to an obvious hoax.
~ David Brock, founder of Media Matters for America

(Media Matters) has been right about Benghazi for 13 months now. We have been fact-checking this story to death. And when CBS decided 'we want a piece of that pie, we want a piece of that right-wing narrative,' saying there are lingering questions when there are none . . . when they decided they wanted to key into that buzz machine . . . the next day on Fox News a Senator spent two hours talking about it. How do you know you hit a home run? When a senator's talking about your story. They couldn't resist it. But the story didn't add up.
There were no lingering questions. The conflict of interest should have stopped them. The discrepencies in the narrative should have stopped them. They should have apologized a week ago! This whole thing is a train wreck!
~ Eric Boehlert on MSNBC's All In with Chris Hayes

Journalism 101: You have a single source, and you have a self-interested source because he is trying to sell books. And then you have a story that is a political hot potato that can be red meat to certainly one side of the argument. And it seems to me that raises the bar and makes it even more crucial to do your due diligence. And I didn't hear anything in the explanation of 'what we did to vet' that lends credibility to the argument that 'we were fooled.' You shouldn't have been fooled.
Steven Reiner, former 60 Minutes Producer and now Professor of Journalism at Stony Brook

In a narrow sense, Lara Logan did say she was "sorry." But the entire 90 seconds was aimed at obfuscating what happened.
Logan said 60 Minutes had found out Thursday that they had been "misled and it was a mistake to include him in our report."
Include him in their report? He was the report. And even in conceding that her team had been "misled", Logan tiptoed around the real news, which is that it seems clear that Davies' entire story was a fabrication.
He wasn't there. So none of the stuff he did could have happened and he cannot have witnessed any of what he claimed to describe.
. . . There was yet another red flag that Davies book (the publication of which has now been canceled) was published by the publisher best known for publishing Glenn Beck, Mark Levin and Jerome Corsi.
I don't know the players involved enough to know whether this happened because of bias, indifference, arrogance or wild sloppiness. But you can't screw up much bigger than this. At a minimum there needs to be some detailed explanation of how this big a screw could have happened.
~ Josh Marshall of Media Matters












































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Thursday, September 19, 2013

Chuck Todd Admits that Truth Isn't Part of His Job Description

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On ACA Obamacare:
Republicans have successfully messaged against it. They don't repeat the other stuff because they haven't even heard the Democratic message.
What I always love is people say, ‘Well, it’s your folks’ fault in the media.’ No, it’s the President of the United States’ fault for not selling it.
~ Chuck Todd of MSNBC on Morning Joe

Chuck Todd: It's Not Media's Job To Correct GOP's Obamacare Falsehoods
. . . During a segment on "Morning Joe," former Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell (D) speculated that most opponents of the Affordable Care Act have been fed erroneous information about the law. Todd said that Republicans "have successfully messaged against it" but he disagrees with those who argue that the media should educate the public on the law. According to Todd, that's President Barack Obama's job.
~ Talking Points Memo

Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley and Edward R Murrow turn in their graves.
~ JosephE. on TPM

So, Rocky the Flying Squirrel believes he should just repeat whatever the Teabaggers tell him. Got it.
~ Trippin on TPM

What a disgusting and scathing indictment of the Press by Chuck Todd. The media has no intention of ever doing their job, let alone reporting on the truth! Yet we knew all this already. That's why the media's number's are just slightly above those of Congress.
~ DocRock on TPM

It's sad that NBC's White House correspondent thinks his job is merely to convey politicians pronouncements, with no care about whether they are true or false. In fact, scrutinize claims, particularly those from powerful officials, is an essential part of journalism. It's embarrassing to have to cite elementary principles to one the nation's most influential reporters, but Todd should consider reviewing the Society of Professional Journalists' Code of Ethics, where, under the heading "Seek Truth and Report It," the very first tenet implores journalists to "test the accuracy of information from all sources."
~ Steve Rendall on Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting

Truly: Todd’s quote reads to these eyes like a resignation letter. If you can’t rouse yourself to meet the minimum requirement of a cub reporter covering a school council meeting — ask if that thing Councilmember Doe just said, was, you know, actually true? — then perhaps you should take a bit more time with your family.
Or rather:
Yo! Chuck: you’re stealing paychecks from the Peacock and wasting everyone else’s time. Go home.
~ Tom Levenson on Balloon Juice

Todd’s point is that he is only here to let each side put their message out there, and the best message wins. What Todd described isn’t journalistic neutrality. It’s laziness and indifference to factual reporting.
. . . Todd is the political director for NBC News. His attitude about the letting Republican lies slide guides the political coverage at NBC News.
~ Jason Easley on PoliticusUSA

It’s true that it’s not the press’s job to “sell” White House initiatives, but it absolutely is the job of the press to separate fact from fiction and communicate the truth of any matter as opposed to simply being a dutiful stenographer who reports, word-for-word, each side’s spin and calls it objectivity.
~Chez Pazienza on The Daily Banter

Holy mother of mercy, is my man Chuck Todd really saying if a lie is unusually successful, it must eventually be accepted as something like the truth, and that the job of journalism is to stand by and let that happen? (Someone should write a book.) If he is actually saying that, then my man Chuck Todd should be fired because he doesn't know sweet fk-all about journalism....
~ Charles P. Pierce on Esquire

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Monday, September 9, 2013

Greenwald Poutrage: Reuters is "Pro-US-Government Activist Ring"


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Friday, August 30, 2013

Miranda was carrying Passwords when Stopped in UK

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Previous Related Posts:
Was David Miranda a Mule or a Journalist?
Guardian Editor Alan Rusbridger Spins Away
Smashing Hard Drives: the Miranda - Snowden - Guardian Saga Continues
Glenn Greenwald Threatens to spill UK Secrets
UK Detains Greenwald's Partner, Twitter Wars Erupt

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'Which person,' she [Professor McGonagall] said, her voice shaking, 'which abysmally foolish person wrote down this week's passwords and left them lying around?'
There was utter silence, broken by the smallest of terrified squeaks.
Neville Longbottom, trembling from head to fluffy-skippered toes, raised his hand slowly in the air.
~ from Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, chapter "Flight of the Fat Lady"

From "Extraordinary Court Statement via @davidbarrett and @joshuafoust
  • Statement from senior Cabinet Office civil servant to #miranda case says material was 58000 ‘highly classified UK intelligence documents’
  • Police who seized documents from #miranda found among them a piece of paper with the decryption password, the statement says
  • This password allowed them to decrypt one file on his seized hard drive, adds Oliver Robbins, Cabinet Office security adviser #miranda
  • The Govt believes Edward Snowden, the NSA ‘whistleblower’, “indiscriminately appropriated material in bulk” #miranda
  • The material contains personal information that would allow British intelligence staff to be identified, inc some overseas, it adds #miranda
  • The Govt has had to assume Snowden data is now in the hands of foreign governments, since his travel abroad (to HK and Russia) #miranda
  • Statement specifically says UK but they haven’t finish decrypting yet
  • It is “impossible” for Glenn Greenwald or any other journalist to determine which info could damage UK national security: Robbins statement
  • “The claimant & his associates have demonstrated very poor judgment in their security arrangements with respect to the material…”#miranda
  • “…rendering the appropriation of the material, or at least access to it by other, non-State actors, a real possibility” #miranda
  • “The fact that…the claimant was carrying on his person a handwritten piece of paper containing the password for one of the encrypted files recovered from him is a sign of very poor information security practice,” says Govt statement #miranda
  • Statement implies GCHQ as well as Scotland Yard are working on the electronic media seized from #miranda

From Telegraph UK
David Miranda accused of carrying secrets that threatened spies' lives. This looks bad for Glenn

. . . The Government's accessed just a small portion of an astonishing 58,000 pages of intelligence documents and, according to a witness statement by Oliver Robbins, deputy national security adviser to the Cabinet, it includes: "personal information of UK intelligence officers, any compromise of which would result in a risk to their lives and those of their family members." Robbins argued that if this data had got into the public sphere then it would have made spies and their loved ones vulnerable to attack or recruitment by hostile forces.

. . . Miranda's lawyer said in reply that, "Mr Miranda does not accept the assertions they have made." Presumably, this means that he does not accept the assertion that the data he was carrying threatened UK national security and even the lives of its operatives. Yet this somewhat contradicts something Miranda told The Guardian two weeks ago. Back then, he said, "I don't look at documents. I don't even know if it was documents that I was carrying." So if he didn't look at the documents, how can he know that they didn't include the kind of information that the UK Government alleges?












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