Showing posts with label snowden. Show all posts
Showing posts with label snowden. Show all posts

Monday, July 25, 2016

Trump and the Russian - DNC - Wikileaks Connection

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Some strange things going on between Donald Trump and the Russians, not to mention Wikileaks stirring up trouble for the Dems just before the Philadelphia Convention. Is Putin trying to help Trump get elected? Are Republicans okay with that?

On top of that, Berners are full of poutrage that Debbie Wasserman Schultz and the DNC discussed ways to stopping Bernie after he had clearly lost the race for the Democratic Nomination. Oh My God - how dare they be political about politics! At any rate, Wasserman-Schultz is banished from the Philadelphia Convention now, which is probably for the best since she is unpopular. But the way this is coming down goes beyond just partison politics - it's totally strange!





From DefenseOne
On Friday, Wikileaks published 20,000 emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee. They reveal, among other things, thuggish infighting, a push by a top DNC official to use Bernie Sanders’ religious convictions against him in the South, and attempts to strong-arm media outlets. In other words, they reveal the Washington campaign monster for what it is.
But leave aside the purported content of the Wikileaks data dump (to which numerous other outlets have devoted considerable attention) and consider the source. Considerable evidence shows that the Wikileaks dump was an orchestrated act by the Russian government, working through proxies, to undermine Hillary Clinton’s Presidential campaign.
“This has all the hallmarks of tradecraft. The only rationale to release such data from the Russian bulletproof host was to empower one candidate against another. The Cold War is alive and well,” Tom Kellermann, the CEO of Strategic Cyber Ventures told Defense One.
. . . The use of Wikileaks as the publishing platform served to legitimize the information dump, which also contains a large amount of personal information related to democratic donors such as social security and credit card numbers. This suggests that Wikileaks didn’t perform a thorough analysis of the documents before they released them, or simply didn’t care.









From Newsweek
Nearly 20,000 internal DNC emails from January 2015 to May 25, 2016, were released Friday by Wikileaks showing messages sent and received from the accounts of Communications Director Luis Miranda; National Finance Director Jordon Kaplan; Finance Chief of Staff Scott Comer; Finance Director of Data & Strategic Initiatives Daniel Parrish; Finance Director Allen Zachary; Senior Advisor Andrew Wright; and northern California Finance Director Robert Stowe. One message appears to suggest that Sanders, who drew establishment scorn for staying in the race past the end of the primaries, be questioned about his religious faith in an apparent attempt to hurt his candidacy in several states.
. . . The DNC leak couldn't come at a worse time for the Democratic party. Clinton and the Dems are looking to counter the Republican National Convention and Trump's vision of America as a Mad Max-style hellscape with the selection of Virginia's Kaine and the Democratic National Convention, which starts Monday. The uneasy truce between Clinton and Sanders, brokered with a progressive party platform and an endorsement by the Vermont senator, could reasonably be in jeopardy, and calls will continue for Schultz to be replaced as party chief. But the greatest danger is the leak feeds a narrative that doesn't have to actually be true for it to be damaging.





From Politico
Hillary Clinton campaign manager Robby Mook suggested Sunday that internal DNC emails leaked last week were an effort from the Russians to help Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.
“What’s disturbing to us is that experts are telling us Russian state actors broke into the DNC, stole these emails, and other experts are now saying that the Russians are releasing these emails for the purpose of actually of helping Donald Trump,” Mook said on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
“I don’t think it’s coincidental that these emails were released on the eve of our convention.”
. . . “This isn’t my assertion — there are a number of experts that are asserting this,” Mook said. “I think we need to get to the bottom of these facts. But that’s what experts are telling us. Experts are telling us it is, in fact, the Russians who hacked these emails.”













From Raw Story
In the days during and after the Republican National Convention last week, questions were raised regarding changes made by the Trump campaign to the Republican Party platform that appeared to be favorable to Russian strongman Vladimir Putin.
Trump surrogates and campaign spokesmen have attempted to quash rumors that the Republican nominee is quietly in support of Putin’s regime. The hacker or group of hackers that broke into the DNC servers goes by the name Guccifer 2 and represents itself as a private individual living in Romania.
However, Rich Barger — chief information officer cyber intelligence software firm ThreatConnect — told the Post, “We’ve been looking at this very closely from both the technical and non-technical spheres. Based on our analysis, we strongly feel Guccifer 2 is linked to a Russian information operations campaign and is not the independent Romanian hacker that he claims to be.”















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When Coulter is on your side, um...




























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Sunday, June 1, 2014

Questions Remain about the #Snowden Interview

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The Inside Snowden interview on NBC didn't put anything to rest so the debate continues about whether the man is a Heroic Patriot, a conniving Putin-Loving traiter or merely a naive Wikileaks dupe. We may never know the whole truth, but interviewer Brian Williams didn't help shed any light because he avoided hard questions such as "Did Glenn Greenwald first suggest that you should steal documents? and "How many lies did you tell in order to get hired at Booz Allen?"

Instead, Williams let his subject ramble on about his sad life as an exile trapped in a foreign land by the United States, as if Joe Biden put him on that plane to Moscow and buckled his seatbelt for him. If you read the quotations below, it is clear that Snowden isn't really "trapped" in Russia.

So Snowden got to say whatever he felt like saying, and the Snowdenistas thought that was just wonderful, as their tweets of support display. But to most people who have followed this story from the beginning, as well as some who knew nothing about him, Snowden's behavior and statements seemed overly rehearsed, slightly arrogant, possibly dishonest, naive (or faux-naive), and maybe just a little crazy.

My previous post about #InsideSnowden:
Snowden Jumps the Shark with NBC Interview

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Snowden said he didn't hurt anyone with his release of documents, and many took him to task for that, since obviously Snowden's actions have reverberated around the globe. But the U.S. can hardly give a public list admitting the damage done to their intelligence capabilities, and Snowden knows this.

Michael Leiter, a former director of the National Counterterrorism Center, on NBC

I find it naive and pretty gravely mistaken, this belief that what has already come out, (Snowden) can't identify a single individual who was hurt, hence there's been no harm. I think the way the U.S. intercepts information about Syria and Iraq, these terrorist groups in Syria and Iraq, how the U.S. intercepts information about the Syrian military, the Russian military, the way the U.S. protects its spies overseas from operating and not being covered by foreign powers - I can't give you the names of people who have been harmed by that, but I think it's really hard if not impossible to say that there hasn't been harm. I think he's both mistaken and naive.

Former National Security Agency director Michael Hayden on CBS "Face the Nation"
"Unquestionable, irreparable, irreversible harm," Hayden said Sunday morning, responding to an interview that Snowden did last week — the former NSA contractor's first in the year since he leaked the documents.
. . . "There is no way that the United States can reveal — without creating far greater harm — what it is we have lost," Hayden said. "What is it he wants us to do? To go out publicly with a list of all of the terrorist targets now that we're no longer covering because of the information that he revealed?"

One of Snowden's casualties might be the security service TrueCrypt that he used for his documents, starting with the so-called "Crypto-Party" in Hawaii before he fled to Taiwan. As of yesterday the website had stopped working all of a sudden. The CIA is probably deconstructing the whole operation:
Forbes: Encryption Tool Endorsed by Snowden Abruptly Shuts Down
TrueCrypt has, for more than a decade, been the program of choice for many security-conscious people, even Edward Snowden. In December 2012, Snowden organized an event – called a CryptoParty – in Hawaii where he talked about how one can use TrueCrypt to keep information safe from prying eyes; a business traveler might use TrueCrypt to protect sensitive files when traveling to make sure that if the computer gets stolen, someone can’t go through their files without the password to unlock them. Today’s advisory comes as a shock to the security community, though no one has been able to confirm its authenticity so far.
. . . The user interface has a similar warning added to it; “WARNING: Using TrueCrypt is not secure.” A quick analysis of the software did not reveal any malicious behavior, though a deeper dive could perhaps provide different results. Older versions of the software would ask users to consider making a donation at the end of the installation process, but this request has since been removed. Additionally, the user manual is no longer included with the software. It seems this new version can only be used to decrypt data and migrate existing encrypted storage volumes, not create new ones.

Snowden insisted to Brian Williams that he was "trained as a spy" in the interview, and indeed he has called himself a spy before in a Guardian UK article, but
National Security Adviser Susan Rice says Snowden was NOT a spy
"He was not trained as a spy," Rice said. "We have no idea where that assertion comes from. And has Edward Snowden done damage? He's done immense damage to the national security of the United States in ways that I wish I could describe in public but I cannot. But indeed the revelations, the illegal unauthorized revelations of Snowden have given our enemies, particularly terrorists, including al-Qaeda, insights into how we gain information and intelligence on them that have enabled them to change the way they operate and be much more difficult to track. That's just one example."

And someone with even more knowledge chimed in to debunk Snowden - a real spy:
Actual Spy Blows Snowden's Bullshit Cover Story
Actual former spy Lindsay Moran (also author of the book Blowing My Cover: My Life as a CIA Spy), who has actually supported Snowden's actions felt compelled enough by the stink of Snowden's attempt to hitch his wagon to true American heroes that she came out to call him out.
I think he's really, unfortunately giving amunition to his detractors and his critics here, because to me this reads as this kind of typical spy-wannabe claims. For sure he didn't go through the tradecraft training and paramilitary operations training that everybody who's in the clandestine service which is the operative branch of the CIA did.
. . . His claim that he used aliases, I find that very dubious. He wasn't in the Directorate of Operations, he wasn't a human collector of intelligence, and I have never before heard of someone who was in an IT or analyst position using aliases that way or operating the way that actual spies did.
. . . The kind of training that you receive to become a spy is very specific. It's tradecraft training, it takes place at the CIA's top secret training facility, and it's not offered to analysts and certainly not to IT specialists.
(Author of the article for The People's View, Spandan Chakrabarti, adds: If all it takes for him to go off the deep end like this is someone calling him a low-level hacker - that is, if his skin is this thin - just exactly how easy is he to manipulate? And was Snowden - motivated by ego, spotlight and revenge - manipulated by Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras and the gang to steal the information he later revealed? Was there more than just information falling into "journalists' " laps? I think you have to ask that question.

Snowden also said he had "no contact" with the Russian government and he is "not a spy" - meaning, I presume, "their spy" given his insistence that he is, indeed, some kind of spy. On the other hand, Snowden isn't in much of a hurry to leave Russia, which is a bothersome detail. His story is that he is stuck there, the victim of the United States Government which revoked his passport. But wait . . .

Michael McFaul, former Ambassador to Russia, via NBC
Why Moscow, why was he there? I note the passive tense, the structure of the sentence, right? "I was stopped in Moscow." But he wasn't stopped in Hong Kong with the same status of passport, I remember that very vividly. So when he (Snowden) is saying "Ask the State Department," well I used to work for the State Department when he showed up in Moscow so I found that very mysterious. If they let him get on the plane in Hong Kong without a valid passport, then why was he forbidden from going on, and who was forbidding him? Right?
Russia's a sovereign country, let me tell you, (after) two years of living there as an Ambassador - they do things their own way. They abide by their own rules and their own laws, and if they want to give him the ability to fly on to Havana they most certainly could have done that. So that was the first piece that struck me.
The second piece was his discussion of his relationship with the government... "I have no relationship to the Russian Government." Well, that's just not true. You don't get to go on a call-in show with the President of Russia and have no relationship with the Russian Government. And by the way, just to remind you, on that call-in show, he asked somewhat naively, "Mr. Putin, do you listen in to telephone conversations of Russian citizens?" But (Snowden) told (NBC) "I know they have a very professional service." So that's rather strange to say you have no relationship to the government yet that kind of interaction happened.
. . . And I would just remind the viewers that his lawyer, when he arrived - Kucherena is his name - somebody well-known to us, is very close to the Russian Government.









Bob Cesca found "13 Bizarre Things in the Snowden Interview" among them this gem:
NSA can observe people drafting a document online and "watch their thoughts form as they type." Let's assume for a second this is true. Reading your thoughts (IEEEEE!!!) is a hyperbolic internet-age method of essentially describing a wire-tap. A police detective can get a court order to have a suspect's phone tapped and listen to that suspect forming thoughts on the phone, too. But to call it a "wire-tap" is too ordinary and familiar, so Ed went with mind-reading.
and more importantly this:
Snowden said he destroyed his documents before going to Russia. This is really strange. I have no idea whether he really destroyed his NSA files, but he did in fact meet with Russian officials in Hong Kong, when he reportedly celebrated his birthday at the Russian consulate. Did he still have his documents at that point?
Earlier, he said his goal was to fly to Latin America, so why did he anticipate being in Russia to the point where he destroyed his documents to prevent Russians from acquiring them? These are all follow-up questions that a journalist who was informed about the details of Snowden's timeline would've asked. Williams was not and therefore did not.

From Benjamin Wittes on Lawfare:
Snowden—earnestness and all—utterly failed to explain certain stubborn, inconvenient facts that make it hard to accept him as the figure he claims to be. Some of these facts he did not challenge at all, as they are too clearly true to brook contest. Some he challenged only weakly. And some Williams did not bother to ask him about at all. The result is a haze over the noble portrait the fugitive paints of himself.
. . . You see, Snowden explains in the interview, the law he violated doesn’t allow the defense he would want to put on. So he’d likely be convicted and serve a very long prison sentence—to which we learn he is not quite so eager to subject himself as Greenwald once admiringly thought. Snowden, of course, explains that he has an entirely selfless reason for not wanting to spend decades in prison. It’s not that he fears it, you understand. But it might scare other whistleblowers out of following his example. Whatever the reason, when push came to shove, Snowden chose not to martyr himself but to flee.
And where did flee? He ran to Moscow. On this point, Snowden’s explanation is particularly obtuse. Ask the State Department why he’s there, Snowden suggests. He was just trying to transit through Russia. It wasn’t his fault that he got stuck in Moscow; this happened because the U.S. government revoked his passport.
The passport revocation is not, in fact, why Snowden is stuck in Moscow. For one thing, the government revoked Snowden’s passport before he ever left Hong Kong. Moreover, it does not mean that he must stay in Moscow. It’s at most the reason why he has a choice between remaining in Moscow and coming back to the United States and facing arrest and lacks the option of finding non-Russian safe haven. He chooses, in other words, to remain in Moscow because he prefers the protection of the dictator there to trial at the hands of his own government.

But WHY did he want to go to Russia in the first place? Iceland and other countries were begging him to be their guest. Well, maybe his relationship with Russia goes back further than he will admit. That's the interesting question posed by John Schindler of 20Committee:
When did Snowden go over to the Russians? by John Schindler
. . . What can be dismissed out of hand is the notion that, while staying in Hong Kong a year ago, Ed met with Russian spies – sorry, “diplomats” – at their consulate there and, all of a sudden, decided to hop a flight to Moscow. Espionage simply does not work that way, folks. We can only guess at what was on Ed’s mind, but those who know the Russian “special services” understand that such a scenario is so implausible that it can be ruled out altogether. The Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) simply does not allow American intelligence personnel they’ve just met to jump on a flight to Mother Russia. That never happens.
. . . Letting Edward Snowden move to Moscow was a major decision for the Kremlin, one with huge political ramifications. We can be certain that such a decision was not made by a mid-grade SVR officer in Hong Kong, neither was such a choice made quickly by the Russians, particularly under a president who understands counterintelligence very well. The reality is that Edward Snowden’s relationship with Russian intelligence, whatever it exactly is, predated his arrival in Moscow on June 23, 2013, probably by a considerable margin. It did not begin in Hong Kong, but before, possibly long before. It cannot be ruled out that the SVR (or possibly GRU, Russian military intelligence, which is a formidable espionage service its own) initially dealt with Ed in a false-flag operation, masking their true identity for a time, but experts who are acquainted with Russia’s “special services” understand that the Official Narrative, that Ed just up and moved to Moscow, cannot be true.

While Snowden tried to exude an air of honesty, he failed on several counts:
From Nick Morgan, a body language expert, via Business Insider:
"As a body-language expert, I'd say this is a disingenuous performance, which surprised me."
. . . The pitch of Snowden's natural voice is probably a tenor, Morgan said, "and the pitch [during the interview] is lower to sound more authoritative. The result, to me, is fake ... manufactured."
. . . A particularly telling moment came when Brian Williams asked Snowden, "What is your relationship with the host government?" Morgan, who didn't previously know that Snowden's Moscow lawyer is a Putin loyalist linked to the FSB, was struck by Snowden's lack of eye contact and the slowing of his voice as he denied having any relationship with the Kremlin.
"He was obviously lying," Morgan said.
. . . "I wouldn't trust anything the man said," Morgan told Business Insider. "There is something else going on here."

But you don't have to be an expert to see through Snowden's facade:
From "Edward Snowden: Hipster Whistleblower" by Christine Sisto
I could not shake the feeling that Snowden is pretty pleased with himself. And I do not mean “pleased” in the way he intends when he says that he is “comfortable” because he can “sleep at night” knowing he did the right thing for his country. He seems pleased with himself in a pompous way. He reminds me of a hipster traipsing around Brooklyn, superbly proud of himself for having a dictionary-like knowledge of the different varieties of kale, knowledge he obtained in college while seeking a degree in women’s studies.
. . . In conclusion, to those who herald Edward Snowden as a whistleblower-god among men, I would say, be careful about what you believe from this guy.

Snowden's attention-seeking and avoidance of consequences are all we need to know according to James E. Lukaszewski of the Minneapolis Star-Tribune
. . . rather than find ways to safely return to the United States and face the consequences of his actions, he has become a media celebrity, complete with advocates, defenders and even co-conspirators who are all in the public view.
Snowden’s NBC interview with Brian Williams is one more step in the Snowden Effect, canonizing the conspirator and minimizing the damage done, while expanding his image as a patriot.
At this writing, the country seems split on the patriot-vs.-traitor question. Neither view can be confirmed until he shows up to face his fate here in the United States.
Two things come to mind. What would a real patriot do (“WWRPD” on a bright red wrist band)? And the example set by Nathan Hale, who was executed as a U.S. spy by the British during our Revolutionary War. “I only regret,” he famously said, “that I have but one life to lose for my country.”
In Snowden’s case, his reframing language is on blaming, demeaning and insulting the United States as the causal factors for what he did. Frankly, I would prefer a little regret from him and his zealous America-hating supporters.


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Thursday, May 29, 2014

#Snowden Jumps the Shark With NBC Interview - Updated

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Brian Williams of NBC is the first major network news person to interview Edward Snowden in Moscow. Reviews are mixed so far, but I think it's safe to say that a wider audience isn't going to work out too well for the ultra-spy-in-exile. The more he talks the deeper the hole, so to speak. As this interview was obviously timed to coincide with the release of Glenn Greenwald's book about Snowden, it may not have the boost in sales that they were looking for.

Snowden seems to be jumping the shark, although I'm sure the Libertarian Wikileaks Anonymous crowd will swoon over his sexy snake-oil voice and geek-martyr persona.

Previous Related Posts:
Snowden Can Make Himself "Unrecognizable"
Critics Go To War Over Sourpuss Glenn Greenwald's Book
All Hail the Snowden Pulitzer
Crime or Punishment? Snowden Remains Stuck in Moscow Airport
Snowden: Messages from Moscow
Edward Snowden Releases NSA Secrets
Edward Snowden: Hero or Villain

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Selected Quotes from #InsideSnowden
. . . when they say I’m a low-level systems administrator, that I don’t know what I’m talking about, I’d say it’s somewhat misleading.
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I was trained as a spy in sort of the traditional sense of the word, in that I lived and worked undercover overseas, pretending to work in a job that I'm not, and even being assigned a name that was not mine.
But I am a technical specialist. I am a technical expert. I don't work with people. I don't recruit agents. What I do is I put systems to work for the United States. And I've done that at all levels from, from the bottom on the ground all the way to the top. Now, the government might deny these things, they might frame it in certain ways and say, "Oh well, you know, he's -- he's a low level analyst."
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I think it's important to remember that people don't set their lives on fire. They don't walk away from their extraordinarily, extraordinarily comfortable lives for no reason.
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I think the most important idea is to remember that there are times throughout American history where what is right is not the same as what is legal. Sometimes to do the right thing you have to break the law.
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I have no relationship with the Russian government at all. I've never met the Russian President. I'm not supported by the Russian government. I'm not taking money from the Russian government. I'm not a spy.
I personally am surprised that I ended up here. The reality is I never intended to end up in Russia. I had a flight booked to Cuba onwards to Latin America, and I was stopped because the United States government decided to revoke my passport and trap me in the Moscow airport.
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If I could go anywhere in the world, that place would be home.

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UPDATE: One part of the interview has been debunked today by the NSA:

From the Interview:
Snowden: I actually did go through channels, and that is documented. The NSA has records, they have copies of emails right now to their Office of General Counsel, to their oversight and compliance folks from me raising concerns about the NSA’s interpretations of it – legal authorities. I reported that there were real problems with the way the NSA was interpreting its legal authorities. And I went even further in this, to say that they could be unconstitutional, that they were sort of abrogating our model of government in a way that empowered presidents to override our statutory laws. And this was made very clear. And the response was, more or less, in bureaucratic language, was, ‘You should stop asking questions.’

The U.S. Government Replied today by releasing one email exchange from Snowden, which they say is the only one received asking questions of the General Counsel to the NSA:
Read Snowden's Email and NSA Reply Here

From ABC News:
The NSA said in statement that Snowden’s email “did not raise allegations or concerns about wrongdoing or abuse, but posed a legal question that the Office of General Counsel addressed.”
“There was no additional follow-up noted,” the NSA said. “There are numerous avenues that Mr. Snowden could have used to raise other concerns or whistleblower allegations. We have searched for additional indications of outreach from him in those areas and to date have not discovered any engagements related to his claims.”
Snowden told NBC News that he also raised his concerns with his co-workers and superiors, many of whom he said were “shocked” at the programs he described. In December 2013, Snowden similarly told The Washington Post he brought his misgivings to four supervisors in two departments.
“I asked these people, ‘What do you think the public would do if this was on the front page?’” Snowden told the Post. “How is that not reporting it? How is that not raising it?”
In the Washington Post report, an NSA spokesperson said the agency had not found “any evidence” to support Snowden’s claims about raising concerns internally. Then, the NSA did not note the email it published online today.

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Responses to #InsideSnowden













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On Snowden's Persona







































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From Russia, With Love













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Snowden Has Fans - "He's a Patriot!"













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He's a Spy, Dammit!

























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What about Glenn Greenwald?





















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John Kerry's Opinion



















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What Does Snowden Watch on TV?
 











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Wednesday, May 28, 2014

Snowden Can Make Himself "Unrecognizable" According to Greenwald

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Previous Related Posts:
Critics Go to War over "Sourpuss" Greenwald's Book
All Hail the Snowden Pulitzer
Snowden Evolves into Max Headroom
Edward Snowden: Hero or Villain?

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According to the Greenwald-Poitras book about Snowden, the man can change his appearance like a chameleon. This has led to some levity on Twitter.

Book Quote Via Business Insider
While in Hong Kong, Edward Snowden claimed to be able to change his appearance such that he would be unrecognizable.
According to an excerpt Glenn Greenwald's new book, Snowden made the claim when discussing concern about leaving the Mira hotel without being noticed by reporters:
I conveyed these concerns to the lawyers. "Does he have any ideas how to prevent that?" one of them asked.
I passed the question on to Snowden.
"I'm in the process of taking steps to change my appearance," he said, clearly having thought about this previously. "I can make myself unrecognizable."











Via Instagram
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Critics Go to War Over "Sourpuss" Glenn Greenwald's Book

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Glenn Greenwald's book No Place to Hide was released this week. It's a regular cavalcade of details about the exiled spy - sorry, whistleblower - Edward Snowden, as well as the involvement of authors and Pulitzer winners Greenwald and Laura Poitras, plus the Wikileaks crowd. But Greenwald has run afoul of several book critics, for which he immediately lambasted them for the freedom of speech he says that Snowden is fighting for. Hypocrisy Much?

Critic Wars erupted, and as with all-things-Greenwald, people have to take sides.



Previous Related Posts:
All Hail the Snowden Pulitzer
Was David Miranda a Mule or a Journalist?
Greenwald Threatens to Spill UK Secrets
UK Detains Greenwald's Partner, Twitter Erupts
Define Spy For Us: Greenwald and Snowden
Greenwald Threatens America

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The Guardian, which shared a Pulitzer with Greenwald and Poitras, had a mostly glowing review of the book. But of course they wish he had mentioned their newspaper more in the text because they validated and helped Greenwald when no one else would.

Henry Porter in The Guardian UK
I think the book does a disservice to my colleagues at the Guardian, which after all is established media. The author tips his hat occasionally but does not really acknowledge the importance of the seasoned reporter Ewen MacAskill's work in Hong Kong, or the team that assembled to sift the documents, decode their inner secrets, prioritise information, gain reaction, shape the stories and provide analysis.
It was one of the most impressive journalistic operations I have ever seen and without it Glenn Greenwald would have floundered and, indeed, have been dismissed more easily as an activist journalist. He has done a great job of exposition and advocacy and for that he should be praised, but credit should be shared.

Two reviews in particular seemed problematic for Greenwald mainly because they were NOT glowing and they questioned his motives. Please don't ever do that, reviewers! Criticism should not be critical, but should be left up to experts like Greenwald.

From George Packer in The Prospect
. . . It’s the only account we have by one of the main characters, an ex-litigator for whom prose narrative is another form of political combat.
. . . But the book’s greatest interest lies in what it reveals about dissent and the dissenter in an age when democratic institutions are in disarray. Greenwald and Poitras have a clear political agenda, which is why Snowden, with his deep distrust of the institutional press, chose them.
Greenwald has no use for the norms of journalism. He rejects objectivity, as a reality and an ideal. “‘Objectivity’ means nothing more than reflecting the biases and serving the interests of entrenched Washington,” he writes. “All journalism serves one faction’s interest or another’s.” This is hardly a new notion, but it’s also a destructive one.
. . . Greenwald and Poitras “vowed to each other repeatedly and to Snowden” that their actions would honour Snowden’s choice. So Poitras is outraged when the Guardian violates Snowden’s wishes by sharing his files with the New York Times, as if the Guardian were a vehicle for Snowden’s purposes. And Greenwald attacks the New York Times, which had received thousands of documents from Wikileaks, for highlighting Julian Assange’s troubling behaviour, as if the paper owed its source the benefit of clergy rather than its readers a full picture. Greenwald treats his source as inviolate.
. . . The sense of oppression among Greenwald, Poitras, and other American dissenters is only possible to those who have lived their entire lives under the rule of law and have come to take it for granted.








Excerpts from Now-Infamous and Scathing New York Times Book Review by Michael Kinsley
. . . Greenwald? In his mind, he is not a reformer but a ruthless revolutionary — Robespierre, or Trotsky. The ancien régime is corrupt through and through, and he is the man who will topple it.
. . . Greenwald doesn’t seem to realize that every piece of evidence he musters demonstrating that people agree with him undermines his own argument that “the authorities” brook no dissent. No one is stopping people from criticizing the government or supporting Greenwald in any way.
. . . What kind of poor excuse for an authoritarian society are we building in which a Glenn Greenwald, proud enemy of conformity and government oppression, can freely promote this book in all media and sell thousands of copies at airport bookstores surrounded by Homeland Security officers?
. . . 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.
. . . Someone gets to decide, and that someone cannot be Glenn Greenwald.
. . . 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 took umbrage with both Packer and Kinsley and wrote a scathing rebuttal - how can these reviewers be against him? How? They must be political tools for Obama:

Glenn Greenwald in The Intercept
. . . 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 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.
. . . 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.
. . . Do I need to continue to participate in the debate over whether many U.S. journalists are pitifully obeisant to the U.S. government? Did they not just resolve that debate for me?







Margaret Sullivan, Public Editor for the New York Times, agreed with Greenwald and published a rebuttal of Kinsley
. . . Here’s my take: Book reviews are opinion pieces and — thanks to the principles of the First Amendment — Mr. Kinsley is certainly entitled to freely air his views. But there’s a lot about this piece that is unworthy of the Book Review’s high standards, the sneering tone about Mr. Greenwald, for example; he is called a “go-between” instead of a journalist and is described as a “self-righteous sourpuss.” (I’ve never met Mr. Greenwald, though I’ve written about his work, as Mr. Kinsley notes.)
But worse, Mr. Kinsley’s central argument ignores important tenets of American governance. There clearly is a special role for the press in America’s democracy; the Founders explicitly intended the press to be a crucial check on the power of the federal government, and the United States courts have consistently backed up that role. It’s wrong to deny that role, and editors should not have allowed such a denial to stand. Mr. Kinsley’s argument is particularly strange to see advanced in the paper that heroically published the Pentagon Papers, and many of the Snowden revelations as well. What if his views were taken to their logical conclusion?











After her own motives (and sympathies for Greenwald/Snowden) were questioned on Twitter and in the NYT comment section, Ms. Sullivan rolled back her criticism of the critic somewhat.
I think there is no reason in this case to distrust Mr. Kinsley or to suspect that he did not read the book, digest its material and write a review based on his own judgment. As part of our editorial process, we made sure that Mr. Kinsley’s characterization of the work was backed up by material in the book itself. By that standard, the review was certainly fair and accurate.
To take on but one specific criticism of the review: At no point did Mr. Kinsley call Mr. Greenwald a sourpuss. The actual text reads as follows: “Maybe he’s charming and generous in real life. But in ‘No Place to Hide,’ Greenwald seems like a self-righteous sourpuss, convinced that every issue is ‘straightforward,’ and if you don’t agree with him, you’re part of something he calls ‘the authorities,’ who control everything for their own nefarious but never explained purposes.” For a reviewer to address how a writer comes across, particularly in a memoir or first-hand account, is entirely fair game for a book review, and by no means an ad hominem attack.

More critiquing the critics and their critics:

The Tone and Thought Police at the New York Times
Kinsley, truth to tell, is unkind to Snowden, and that is where the trouble begins. Sullivan thinks Kinsley’s “sneering tone” is “unworthy of the Book Review’s high standards.” Kinsley says, among other things, that Greenwald, whatever he may really be like, comes across as a “self-righteous sourpuss” in the book. Never mind that the New York Times would not have an op-ed section if sneering were ruled out of bounds. Although Kinsley gives us Greenwald’s own words to back up his assertion, it is too much for Sullivan, who apparently thinks that Kinsley should have found a way to indicate that Greenwald’s authorial voice is that of a self-aggrandizing blowhard without being insulting.
. . . Here, then, are the standards the public editor of the New York Times applies in investigating “matters of journalistic integrity” in the book review section.
. . . Reviewers who express views that, however plausible, are considered out of bounds by Times staff should be compelled to recant if they wish to get published.
~ Jonathan Marks in Commentary

Greenwald's haters, exposed
. . . both Kinsley and Packer at least give lip service to the idea that what Greenwald and Snowden have revealed is valuable and troubling. But in their predictable desire to distance themselves from the kind of fundamental and, yes, radical attack put forward by the NSA leakers, Kinsley and Packer are defending the national security state as flawed rather than corrupt, in need of reform rather than reconstruction. And if you think that sounds crazy, maybe you’re another Robespierre or Trotsky, too.
~ Elias Isquith on Salon

I predict that Packer's attitude toward Snowden will one day seem as absurd as someone insisting that MLK would be worthy of condemnation if he hadn't gone to jail, or that the activists who stole FBI files proving improper spying ultimately harmed the rule of law by never turning themselves in.
Like Michael Kinsley, another moderate liberal journalist who made dubious claims in a review of Greenwald's book, something about Packer's relationship to the establishment causes him to understate the radicalism of the international security state and to overstate the radicalism of its critics.
~ Conor Friedersdorf on The Atlantic
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