Greenwald, Glenn

not to be confused w/ robert, koch doc and whistleblowers.  Guardian UK

see bak

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jeez what happened to him?

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mma 10 25

• • • System Update with Glenn Greenwald, a show hosted by The Intercept’s co-founding editor and former author Glenn Greenwald. The Rumble show description claims the program is “for unencumbered analysis and investigative reporting, captive to no dogma or faction.” Other right-wing guests in 2025 include former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and conservative activist Chris Rufo, who led attacks on critical race theory and diversity, equity and inclusion. The interview with Fuentes earned at least 196,000 views on Rumble. Rumble, *System Update with Glenn Greenwald,*[9/29/25, 9/23/25, 5/7/25, accessed 9/30/25; The Intercept, accessed 9/30/25; The New York Times, The Daily, 4/11/25]

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The Trump-Russia Denialists Are Back

By David Corn June 4, 2024

President Donald Trump laughing it up with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, left, and Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak at the White House on May 10, 2017. Russian Foreign Ministry Photo via AP

President Donald Trump laughing it up with Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov (left) and Russian Ambassador to the US Sergey Kislyak at the White House on May 10, 2017. Russian Foreign Ministry Photo via AP

For years, I’ve been wondering why a handful of former lefty journalists—among them Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi—keep insisting that all talk of Russia’s attacks on the last two US presidential elections is a hoax concocted by hysterical liberals in league with the Deep State. We’ve seen evidence of Vladimir Putin’s clandestine information war with our eyes (such as Moscow’s 2016 hack-and-leak operation that boosted Donald Trump), and numerous investigations, government agencies, indictments, and bipartisan congressional reports have provided details about the Kremlin’s efforts to help Trump and damage the prospects of Hillary Clinton and, then, Joe Biden. Yet these dead-enders stick to the line that none of this happened and pooh-pooh any mention of current Russian disinformation efforts targeting US politics.

Why do they keep echoing Putin’s own dishonest denials? Do they despise Democrats or the intelligence community so much that they are reluctant to legitimize their concerns about Russian assaults on the United States? Are they blinded by their own-the-libs anti-anti-Trumpism that they refuse to give any credence to Trump’s opponents? Do they so loathe foreign policy hawks and neocons or so fear a new Cold War that they lie about Russia’s malfeasance to deny its critics any ammunition to deploy against Moscow? Do they see Vladimir Putin and Russia, the enemy of their enemy, as an ally or at least a useful check on US and Western power? Do they believe that any acknowledgement of Russian disinformation operations would undercut their own crusade against tech companies, liberals, academia, the intelligence community, and the media, which they feverishly (and, to my mind, absurdly) portray as a unified and diabolical censorship industrial complex? One could believe in this dark theory and still recognize that Putin is a bad-faith actor mounting cyber-plots against the West. Yet Greenwald, for instance, legitimizes Tucker Carlson, a documented liar and disinformationist (and Putin softie), and excoriates anyone who points to Russian information ops as a threat to the United States. Like me.

With Russian information warfare against the United States underway and perhaps intensifying as the presidential contest approaches E-Day, Putin’s intervention to boost Trump and the efforts to deny this could become a factor in a close race.

After I recently wrote a piece on Moscow’s current attempts to influence the Trump-Biden rematch, Greenwald weighed in on Twitter (a.k.a. X):

Hide your wife, hide your kids! The Russkies "are coming again" -- to get the Democrats again! So says the DNC activist masquerading as a reporter who became very wealthy by first introducing the Steele Dossier hoax into our politics.

Greenwald is very talented when it comes to dolloping out derision. Of course, he did not engage with—let alone refute—any of the facts in my article, which referenced government and journalistic sources reporting on the Kremlin’s ongoing operations aimed at the United States. Instead, he resorted to his and the Trump crowd’s go-to deflection: the Steele memos. I was indeed the first journalist to report on their existence, though I did not publish them. And whatever issues there were with their accuracy—they were never meant to be publicly released—these documents written by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele have no bearing on what did transpire during the 2016 election: documented Russian interference that aided Trump. The Steele memos, which, contrary to Trump’s rants and far-right talking points, did not trigger the FBI’s Trump-Russia inquiry, are a handy target for those who cannot handle the truth. And I’m pretty sure if you ask anyone at the Democratic National Committee, no one will say they consider me a DNC activist. Greenwald hides behind insults and lies.

In my response to his online missive, I tried to stick to the substance and asked Greenwald for his help, as I tried to puzzle out his stance:

So I guess Greenwald’s still sticking with the Putin-and-Trump disinformation line that there was no Russian attack on the 2016 election. No Democratic emails hacked and leaked, right? Why does he deny reality? There must be a reason.

Twitter

No surprise, Greenwald did not respond to this. But his sidekick Taibbi did:

David, he’s referring to one of the biggest hoaxes in the recent history of journalism, the Steele dossier, which you played a lead role in introducing. Glenn didn’t screw up—you did. And you still haven’t admitted it.

Once again, you can see the seams. Focus on the Steele memos, not the bigger and more consequential issue of Putin’s sabotage campaign against the 2016 election that helped Trump reach the White House, let alone the aiding-and-abetting role Trump played by relentlessly and falsely denying such an operation was underway.

Responding to Taibbi, I tried to be more explicit:

Answer a simple question I have asked you before: Did Russia intervene in the 2016 election to hurt Clinton and help Trump? Extra points if you answer this one: Did Trump aid & abet that operation by denying it was happening?

Twitter

Crickets.

Which brings me to where I began. Greenwald, Taibbi, and their ilk cannot engage in an honest dialogue about Russia and the 2016 election, or the 2020 election, in which Russian agents tried to smear Biden, or the current presidential election. Given that they refuse to concede that Putin did help Trump win the White House and strived to keep him there, they likely will not acknowledge that Russia-linked operations are currently occurring to exacerbate political divide in the US and assist Trump and will probably ratchet up in the months ahead. This week, the New York Times reported that someone created a deepfake showing State Department spokesman Matt Miller seeming to suggest Russian targets for a Ukraine attack. Was Moscow behind this move? That seems a good bet—or a pro-Kremlin actor. Russian media outlets and websites disseminated the forgery to inflame anti-American sentiment and boost Putin’s propaganda that the United States is propelling the Ukraine war. It seems obvious this sort of operation could be trained against the US election.

Why don’t Greenwald and Taibbi care about Russian assaults on US politics? I remain flummoxed. These dead-enders certainly are free to assail the Steele memos, which were inaccurate on key points but raised the important and largely unknown matter of Russian interference, and even criticize my reporting on them (though my main point at the time was that the FBI was investigating Steele’s allegations as part of a Trump-Russia inquiry not yet made public). Yet why fixate on that and refuse to deal with the bigger picture of the Kremlin’s war on America? I’m sorry I cannot provide you an explanation. I’m sure it’s a doozy.

Got anything to say about this item—or anything else? Email me at ourland@motherjones.com.

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https://www.alternet.org/2022/04/journalistic-fact-checking-not-doxxing/

The right-wing is throwing a predictable fit about the Post’s exposé of one of the most influential propaganda accounts on the internet.

Desperate to deflect from valid concerns that its reckless accusations of pedophilia are marking their targets for violence, the right-wing is now denouncing routine journalism as a form of doxxing.

Taylor Lorenz revealed that the author of the notoriously homophobic “Libs of TikTok” account is a woman named Chaya Raichik.

The Twitter feed curates videos of teachers speaking about sex and gender. She adds hateful commentary baselessly accusing them of being “groomers,” tagging their school districts, and openly agitating to get them fired. The creator gloats about destroying their lives.

“To me, the most powerful part of it is exposing the teachers,” Raichik told Fox in December 2021. “When there’s actually action taken, when a teacher gets fired or suspended, it’s a really great feeling.”

Lorenz backed up a damning digital trail establishing Raichik’s identity with shoe-leather reporting to confirm Raichik was indeed the woman behind the account. Faced with overwhelming evidence, Raichik admitted authorship and set about fundraising off her fake victimhood.

The facts are unassailable, so the rightwing can only launch frivolous attacks on her journalistic ethics for – wait for it – door-knocking.

This argument scarcely merits a response.

Lorenz’s critics know perfectly well that door-knocking is a standard reporting tactic. A slightly more sophisticated version of this argument is that door-knocking is OK in principle, but it was wrong to use it on Raichik. She’s just a humble Brooklyn realtor with a passion for homophobia, a private citizen who has the right to remain anonymous.

“Is it now permissible for journalists to investigate and expose the real identity of any anonymous social media user?,” tweeted Glenn Greenwald, a frequent Tucker Carlson guest. “Or is it just permissible if the anonymous social media user has a certain kind of politics?”

Raichik’s own words demolish that argument.

She told the New York Post in February she quit her job and moved to California to pursue Libs of TikTok full-time. In the same interview, she likened her project to that of the notorious operatives at Project Veritas, who wage ideological warfare with covertly recorded videos.

Like Veritas, Raichik has at times identified herself as a journalist and appeared repeatedly as a guest on Fox News prior to her unmasking.

Like most political operatives, Raichik would prefer to operate in the shadows, but the press has no obligation to keep her secrets. Indeed, the responsibility of journalists is to hold power to account.

Libs of TikTok wields power due to its stature in right-wing media and politics as well as its enormous social media footprint.The account has over 900,000 followers, as of this writing. Raichik has power not only over the lives and careers of teachers whom she has smeared as pedophiles, but also over our national discourse and even legislation.

The account serves as a clearinghouse for videos of teachers advocating for sex education and LGBTQ rights. These are a vital resource in the rightwing’s primary domestic policy agenda: demolishing LGBTQ rights as well as the very concept of public education by accusing people they don’t like of being pedophiles.

Libs of TikTik supplies an endless stream of pretexts for “Don’t Say Gay” bills, such as the one Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed into law last month. DeSantis’s press secretary Christina Pushaw promotes Libs of TikTok frequently from her official account.

Fox has effectively outsourced the grubby work of finding a new Main Character for each day’s culture war to Libs of TikTok. Fox regularly runs packages sourced to clips publicized by Raichik. Fox flagship host Tucker Carlson even proclaimed Raichik’s “journalism” more trustworthy than that of the Times.

Libs of TikTok is rightly criticized for exposing private citizens to harassment and potential violence. The right is trying to neutralize attacks by creating an equivalence between reporting on right-wing operatives and falsely accusing private citizens of being pedophiles.

It’d be funny if it weren’t so dangerous.

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an 621

Fox News personality Tucker Carlson on Friday returned to his debunked conspiracy theory that it was actually the FBI — not Trump and his supporters — who were responsible for the January 6th insurrection.

After Carlson interviewed Glenn Greenwald,the host wondered if maybe the FBI set up not just Donald Trump supporters, but also Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL).

"It does kind of make you wonder about Matt Gaetz, actually. Remember Matt Gaetz? He was engaged in child sex trafficking," Carlson said with a mocking voice.

"We know that Matt Gaetz kind of went after the national security state, repeatedly, and then they told us that he was a child sex trafficker — maybe he is, we don't know," Carlson said.

"But if he is, why hasn't he been charged yet?" Carlson asked. "Anyone wonder that?" [just askin']

"What is going on here?" he asked.

Watch:

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GG

https://theintercept.com/2020/10/10/new-documents-reveal-how-the-animal-agriculture-industry-surveils-and-punishes-critics/

ANIMAL AGRICULTURE INDUSTRY GROUPS defending factory farms engage incampaigns of surveillance, reputation destruction, and other forms of retaliation against industry critics and animal rights activists, documents obtained through aFOIA request from the U.S. Department of Agriculture reveal. That the USDA possesses these emails and other documents demonstrates the federal government’s knowledge of, if not participation in, these industry campaigns.

These documents detail ongoing monitoring of the social media of news outlets, including The Intercept,which report critically on factory farms. They reveal private surveillance activities aimed at animal rights groups and their members. They include discussions of how to create a climate of intimidation for activists who work against industry abuses, including by photographing the activists and publishing the photos online. And they describe a coordinated ostracization campaign that specifically targets veterinarians who criticize industry practices, out of concern that veterinarians are uniquely well-positioned to persuasively and powerfully denounce industry abuses.

One of the industry groups central to these activities is the Animal Agriculture Alliance, which represents factory farms and other animal agriculture companies — or, as they playfully put it, they work for corporations “involved in getting food from the farm to our forks!” The groupboasts that one of its prime functions is “Monitoring Activism,” by which they mean: “We identify emerging threats and provide insightful resources on animal rights and other activist groups by attending their events, monitoring traditional and social media and engaging our national network."

[ Agriculture Alliance website]

1. Indeed, the Alliance frequently monitors and infiltrates conferences of industry critics and activists, then provides reports to their corporate members on what was discussed. As The Intercept previously noted when reporting on**felony chargesbrought against animal rights activists with Direct Action Everywhere, or DxE, for peaceful filming and symbolic animal rescues inside one Utah farm that supplies Whole Foods and another owned by Smithfield — an action that showed how wildly at odds with reality is the bucolic branding of those farms — the Animal Agriculture Alliance issued a statement denouncing the activists for (ironically) harming their animals and urging law enforcement and “policymakers” to intervene on behalf of the industry against the activists.

In the emails obtained by the FOIA request, the Alliance and its allies frequently encourage their members to alert the FBI and Department of Homeland Security regarding actions by activists. In response to a project by DxE to create a map tracking factory farms, Lyle Orwig — chair of the agricultural company Charleston/Orwig, Inc. and a member of the Alliance board — proposed the retaliatory step of “taking photos of every DXE [sic] member” and posting them to the internet while accusing them of being “opposed to feeding the hungry.”...

[pigs suffocate covid surplus, she objected]

What alarmed Dr. Heath most was the emergence online of anonymous flyers which contained a “BEWARE” warning at the top, along with her photo and a string of accusations, some of which were false, that claimedshe harbors “an agenda that doesn’t include anything positive for our profession” and “expresses fondness” for “domestic terrorist organizations.” It warned that even allowing her access to the social media pages of veterinarians could be dangerous, and thus urged that she be blocked from all online forums, personal profiles, and social media groups....

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https://theintercept.com/2020/07/23/the-u-s-supported-coup-in-bolivia-continues-to-produce-repression-and-tyranny-while-revealing-how-u-s-media-propaganda-works/

U.S.-SUPPORTED MILITARY COUP in Bolivia has largely disappeared from western news outlets ever since the November 2019 massacres of pro-democracy protesters by the right-wing faction that seized power. But for Bolivians, the repression and tyranny that replaced their stable and thriving democracy endures. And, predictably, the “interim president” installed after the coup, Jeanine Áñez, continues to rule the country 10 months later, despite no possibility of being democratically elected, while she and her party plot how to prevent an election which all polls show will result in victory for the socialist party of toppled President Evo Morales.

What makes the coup in Bolivia and its aftermath so worthwhile to explore is not just the inherent importance of Bolivia itself: a country of 11 million people with a rich and unique ethnic, cultural and religious diversity, as well as an ample supply of the now-vital resource of lithium. It is also instructive because of how U.S. discourse evolved in support of the coup, with supposed “foreign policy experts” across the political spectrum — The Atlantic’s Yascha Mounk, Mother Jones’ Editor-in-Chief Clara Jeffery, former Obama official and Stanford Professor Michael McFaul, along with the Economist, the New York Times, and the Washington Post — spouting outright falsehoods to depict the destruction of Bolivian democracy as the salvation of it.

Since the coup last October, many of the key claims used to justify the ousting of Morales — most particularly claims by the Organization of American States that the election resulting in Morales’s victory was fraudulent — have been proven to have been lies. Yet not a single one of the foreign policy “experts” or media outlets have acknowledged their errors or even addressed these subsequent revelations, because they know that there are never any consequences for journalists and analysts as long as they remain subservient to the U.S. government agenda (while the New York Times reported on the studies proving the OAS claims to be baseless, they never acknowledged that their own reporting and editorializing treated those claims as true).

Bolivia is but the latest of a long line of thriving, stable democracies destroyed with the support if not the outright participation of the U.S. government, while jingoistic media figures disseminated the propaganda used to justify it all. And the suffering, violence, repression and tyranny left in its wake are then simply ignored by those who helped bring it about.

Today’s SYSTEM UPDATE, which debuts at 2:00 pm ET on, explores all of these issues, provides an update on post-coup Bolivia, and dissects the key role played by propaganda from U.S. political and media venues. I’m joined by two of the most knowledgeable specialists on Bolivia: Kathryn Ledebur, director of the Andean Information Network, who has lived and worked with coca farmers in Bolivia for the last 30 years, and Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic & Policy Research, the first group to debunk the OAS claims of election fraud. For so many reasons, Bolivia matters, not just to people in the region but also in the U.S. 

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https://theintercept.com/2019/03/18/jair-bolsonaro-family-militias-gangs-brazil/

no lnx pix many

BRAZIL’S PRESIDENT JAIR BOLSONARO is in Washington to meet U.S. President Donald Trump at the White House on Tuesday. While the trip officially is focused on the joint efforts of the U.S. and Brazil to change the government of Venezuela, it is being billed by the Bolsonaro government as a “restart” of his presidency and image after multiple, serious scandals crippled the first three months of his presidency.

But when it comes to recreating his image, the timing of this trip could hardly be worse. Key news events of the last several weeks — including the arrests of two former Rio de Janeiro police officers for the March 2018 assassination of Rio City Council Councilor Marielle Franco — have highlighted the most damaging and, to many, most terrifying revelations about Bolsonaro and his three politician sons: their extensive, direct, multilayered, and deeply personal ties to the paramilitary gangs and militias responsible for Brazil’s most horrific violence.

Watch our video report on the growing, multilevel, personal, and highly disturbing links between Bolsonaro and his family on the one hand, and the country’s most violent, lawless, and murderous paramilitary gangs on the other:

Just consider how, even before the arrests of Franco’s killers last week, so many deep ties had already emerged between Bolsonaro and his sons, who won office principally on an anti-crime and anti-corruption platform, and the paramilitary gangs composed of current and former military police officers and military members. Bolsonaro himself is a former army captain who served during Brazil’s military dictatorship and left in the 1980s amid allegations of misconduct; yet, even now as the president, he still has his friends and aides address him as “Captain.”

In January, the Rio de Janeiro police executed a full-scale raid against the city’s most dangerous militia, the one that houses within it the terrifying murder-for-hire team known as “the Crime Office.” That assassin team is composed of highly trained police officers who use their specialized knowledge of investigations and assassin skills to carry out murders with very little possibility of detection, and they have long been the leading suspects in Franco’s assassination, given how professional and frighteningly efficient that murder was carried out.

The January raid resulted in the arrest of five of the top six commanders of the militia. The only one who escaped, and is still a fugitive, was the chief of that militia: ex-police captain Adriano Magalhães da Nóbrega (pictured right, from a prior arrest). Wanted for other murders, and subject to an Interpol arrest warrant, he has presided as the leader of Rio’s most terrifying militia, the one that police concluded carried out Franco’s assassination with such chilling precision.

That raid led to a shocking revelation: Unbeknownst to the public, the mother and wife of Nóbrega — one of Brazil’s most notorious gangsters — were both receiving salaries from the state. That’s because both of them were formally employed by Flávio Bolsonaro, Jair Bolsonaro’s oldest son, for the entire last decade as he served as a state representative in the Rio de Janeiro state legislature. When Jair Bolsonaro was elected president last November, Flávio moved up to the Federal Senate as a result of winning his election in Rio with a massive vote total.

Shortly after this highly incriminating connection was revealed, a dam collapsed in the interior of Brazil and tragically killed more than 200 people, understandably replacing news coverage of virtually all other events. That resulted in far less attention being paid to Flávio’s close connections to Nóbrega’s family than was deserved. So just reflect on that: Jair Bolsonaro’s son had on his official government payroll the mother and wife of one of the country’s most notorious and psychopathic paramilitary leaders, the fugitive chief of the militia responsible for the assassination of Marielle Franco, among countless other murders.

In February, Flávio’s direct and intimate ties to militias became even more glaring. Checks were found issued in the name of his campaign account signed by the sister of two twin-brother militia members, Alan and Alex Rodrigues de Oliveira, arrested in a large-scale police raid last August. Just months prior to the arrest of these two militia brothers, Flávio posted to his Instagram a photo of himself and his father, then a presidential candidate, at a birthday party for the two militia twins, congratulating them and heaping praise on the family.

IN RETROSPECT, that Flávio had such close personal connections to Rio’s militias that he put the mother and wife of its most notorious chief on his payroll should not have been surprising. As a state legislator, he twice bestowed on the top militia leaders, then police officers, formal awards and honors, praising them for their civil service to their communities.

Far worse, in 2011, Brazilian Judge Patricia Acioli, who, along with Brazil’s left-wing PSOL party, was overseeing a sweeping criminal investigation into militias and heroically sent numerous high-ranking police officers to prison, was brutally murdered outside her home, horrifying not just Brazil but the world. While all Brazilian politicians expressed horror and disgust at this brazen attack on the rule of law — showing that militias could just murder whoever they wanted, even judges sending their leaders to prison — Flávio posted a tweet that basically blamed her for her own murder, criticizing her for provoking the militias:

Jair Bolsonaro himself has a history of multiple ties to Brazil’s militias and several of its key leaders. He has twice, on the floor of the Congress, explicitly praised their death squads as good for the country’s security and crime problems. On one occasion, after various members of Congress from the northern region of Brazil warned of the growth of death squads and extrajudicial murders carried out by growing police-composed militias, Bolsonaro stood to explicitly praise them as crime-fighting patriots and declared them “welcome” in Rio de Janeiro.

Since then, those militias have taken over huge swaths of Brazil’s most critical cities, including Rio. A January investigation from The Intercept Brasil found that militias have virtually taken over the entire city.

In sum, the Bolsonaro movement has been fixated on Brazil’s crime epidemic, and anger over growing violence was arguably one of the two main factors in the rise of that movement (the other being anger over systemic political corruption). But when Bolsonaro and his family speak of crime, they almost always try to focus attention on the primarily black drug traffickers who live in the city’s poor favelas, and virtually never speak of the far more menacing, serious, and terrifying source of criminality carried out by the Bolsonaros’ ideological companions and heroes of the country’s sophisticated and skilled militias:

That Bolsonaro — despite how central his anti-crime posture is to his political popularity — is eager to praise, rather than condemn and combat, militias is not hard to understand. Those militias are ruled by his friends, neighbors, comrades, and closest associates.

The militia member who worked as Flávio’s driver for the last decade and whose large money movements — including one into the account of Jair Bolsonaro’s wife — triggered the first scandal of his presidency, ex-police Officer Fabrício Queiroz, is one of Bolsonaro’s oldest and closest friends. When police sought to question him about those money movements to the Bolsonaro family, he unsurprisingly went into hiding in the precise neighborhood, Rio das Pedras, most notorious for being commanded most thoroughly by Rio’s most violent militia.

WHEN TWO OF FRANCO’S KILLERS were finally apprehended last week, just two days shy of the one-year anniversary of her assassination, nobody was surprised that they had both been members of Brazil’s military police. The extreme professionalism with which that murder was carried out, including the still-unexplained coincidence that numerous public security cameras on the path they chose to pursue her had been turned off in the days before the assassination, left no doubt that militias were responsible.

But almost immediately after the police announced the identity of the two assassins they arrested, ties to Bolsonaro emerged. The shooter himself, police Sgt. Ronnie Lessa, lives on the same street as Bolsonaro’s Rio house, in an exclusive gated community: an extreme coincidence given how massive and sprawling of a city Rio de Janeiro is. In other words, one of Franco’s assassins — the man who pumped four bullets into her head — turned out to be Bolsonaro’s neighbor, both of whom lived in close proximity in a very rich neighborhood despite working their entire adult lives on the public payroll.

Shortly thereafter, a photo emerged of Lessa and Bolsonaro together, posted to Lessa’s social media account. Police then confirmed that Bolsonaro’s 20-year-old son and Lessa’s daughter had been dating. While none of those facts are close to dispositive in terms of linking Bolsonaro to Franco’s murder, those are a lot of coincidental connections to have between a three-decade member of Congress and the current president of the Republic, on the one hand, and the murderers who pumped four bullets into the skull of one of Rio de Janeiro’s most prominent and inspiring left-wing politicians on the other.

As part of the police search of the assassins’ properties, the police apprehended the single largest collection of armaments in the history of Brazil’s democracy: 117 M-16 automatic rifles. Notably, they were apprehended not in the favelas on which the Bolsonaros obsessively fixate when talking about crime, but in a luxury condominium owned by a former police officer who is part of the militia that assassinated Franco and which has multiple ties to the Bolsonaro family:

m16-1552922172Armaments seized from the house of one of the accused assassins of Marielle Franco, including 117 M-16 automatic rifles, from Rio de Janeiro. Photo: Rio Civil Police]

Days later, the police — despite still not having apprehended the people who ordered and paid for Franco’s assassination — insinuated a political motive to her killers. Consistent with Bolsonaro’s denunciation of the sweeping investigation of militias led by Franco’s political mentor, Marcelo Freixo of the left-wing PSOL party (the same party of Jean Wyllys, the gay congressperson who last month fled Brazil and gave up his congressional term under highly specific death threats), reports emerged that Franco’s assassins were overt Bolsonaro supporters.

The police also indicated that they had seized the computers and other electronic devices of the two killers, and discovered that, subsequent to Franco’s assassination, the murderous militia pair had searched and monitored the movements of numerous human rights activists, left-wing journalists, and politicians (one of those specified by the police was my husband, David Miranda, now a congressperson from the same left-wing party as Freixo, Franco, and Wyllys).

All of this mounting evidence — most of which has been unearthed just in the 10 weeks since Bolsonaro’s January 1 inauguration — paints a deeply disturbing and dangerous picture. Brazil — the world’s fifth-largest country, with massive oil reserves and the world’s most critical environmental region in the Amazon that the current government wants to sell off to the highest industrial bidders — is in the hands of a family with multiple, close, and growing connections to the country’s most murderous, criminal, and sociopathic death squads and paramilitary forces.

As Bolsonaro meets Trump at the White House tomorrow, that meeting should be understood first and foremost within this context. Bolsonaro has quickly elevated himself to the top echelon of the world’s most thuggish, violent, and dangerous leaders. And given the stakes raised by Brazil — geopolitically, culturally, economically, environmentally, and militarily — this is clearly one of the most profoundly disturbing developments of the last year. Whatever else is true, the media focus on Bolsonaro’s presence in the White House should feature these facts prominently and centrally if the reporting is to accurately reflect who he is and what he represents.

RELATED

A makeshift memorial is pictured during a protest of Brazilian expats against the killing of Rio de Janeiro's left councilwoman and activist Marielle Franco in Berlin, Germany on March 18, 2018. Marielle Franco, who criticised openly racism and police brutality, was shot with his driver Anderson Pedro Gomes in the city center of Rio de Janeiro in the evening of March 14, 2018. (Photo by Emmanuele Contini/NurPhoto via Getty Images)Who Killed Marielle Franco? An Ex-Rio de Janeiro Cop With Ties to Organized Crime, Say Six Witnesses in Police ReportTOPSHOT - Brazil's newly sworn-in President Jair Bolsonaro is pictured during his inauguration ceremony, at the Congress in Brasilia on January 1, 2019. - Bolsonaro takes office with promises to radically change the path taken by Latin America's biggest country by trashing decades of centre-left policies. (Photo by NELSON ALMEIDA / AFP)        (Photo credit should read NELSON ALMEIDA/AFP/Getty Images)Jair Bolsonaro’s First 53 Days as President of Brazil Have Been a Resounding, Scandalous FailureThe president-elect of Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro (C), arrives for a press conference on the appointment of the ministers of Citizenship, Tourism and Regional Development at the headquarters of the transitional government in Brasilia on November 28, 2018. (Photo by Sergio LIMA / AFP)        (Photo credit should read SERGIO LIMA/AFP/Getty Images)Jair Bolsonaro Promised to End Corruption in Brazil — Then He Appointed an Extremely Corrupt CabinetJair Bolsonaro, far-right lawmaker and presidential candidate for the Social Liberal Party (PSL), gives thumbs up to supporters, during the second round of the presidential elections, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil on October 28, 2018. - Brazilians will choose their president today during the second round of the national elections between the far-right firebrand Jair Bolsonaro and leftist Fernando Haddad (Photo by MAURO PIMENTEL / AFP)        (Photo credit should read MAURO PIMENTEL/AFP/Getty Images)Jair Bolsonaro Is Elected President of Brazil. Read His Extremist, Far-Right Positions in His Own Words.

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1219

At a high-profile event in Brazil where I was recently invited to speak about The Intercept’s work, organizers were so concerned about threats of violence that they required me to arrive by a small boat, rather than by land.

As we arrived, we had fireworks shot at us by supporters of right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro. This continued throughout my speech, and one firework landed in the crowd of 3,000 people and lit a flag on fire.

This is only the latest physical violence targeting me in retaliation for a series of exposés published in The Intercept revealing corruption at the highest levels of the Brazilian government. Since The Intercept began this reporting, neither my husband nor I have left our house once without a team of armed security guards and an armored vehicle.

Attacks on The Intercept’s journalists are escalating. We’re not backing down, despite threats to our physical safety. To do so would risk our press freedoms and democratic rights.

But the growth in security, legal, and technology costs this year has been staggering. We rely on reader support to continue our reporting — and right now, we’re still $240,000 short of our fundraising goal for 2019.

You may have read about how I was physically assaulted last month by a pro-Bolsonaro pundit at a TV studio in São Paulo while we were live on the air. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

During the last six months of The Intercept’s reporting on Bolsonaro’s government, the right-wing leader has not only repeatedly and publicly threatened me with prison, but also explicitly accused me and my husband of having a sham marriage, and adopting Brazilian children as a fraud, in order, he claimed, to avoid being deported.

The threats are not just against me: The entire Intercept team in Brazil has had to take unprecedented security precautions.

Make no mistake: Members of the Bolsonaro movement target us because they know that transparency and free discourse are the primary obstacles to returning Brazil back to the dark days of military dictatorship.

==

...The documents we received revealed serious, systematic, and sustained improprieties by the very same judicial officials who cast themselves as apolitical crusaders when they imprisoned former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva — and thereby paved the way for the election of far-right authoritarian Jair Bolsonaro.

As the revelations of corruption grew, these officials resorted to the usual tactics employed by governments everywhere: They tried to distract attention from their own misconduct by attacking the journalists who revealed their wrongdoing.

President Bolsonaro himself has publicly threatened me with prison and accused me of marrying a Brazilian citizen and adopting Brazilian children in order to avoid deportation. (That would’ve been quite a long game on my part: I’ve been married for 14 years.) 

The risk is so dire that on Wednesday, a minister of the Brazilian Supreme Court issued a ruling barring the Bolsonaro administration and Justice Minister Sergio Moro from investigating The Intercept and me for doing our jobs as journalists. This was a great victory for press freedom in Brazil. However, we know the fight has only just begun.

...

---

greenwald519

Glenn Greenwald’s shameful performance on Fox News shows how he’s betraying his own values

Fox News

written by Cody Fenwick    May 3, 2019

The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald has been on a crusade since the 2016 election to thoroughly combat the extensive reporting and analysis linking the Russian government and intelligence agencies to the…

The Intercept’s Glenn Greenwald has been on a crusade since the 2016 election to thoroughly combat the extensive reporting and analysis linking the Russian government and intelligence agencies to the interference in the 2016 election. Since the release of the Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s final report, which concluded without establishing that there had been any conspiracy between President Donald Trump’s campaign hand the Russian government, Greenwald has vociferously declared victory and claimed that he has been vindicated and those who have covered the story have been shown to be con artists.

And on Fox News Thursday night, Greenwald joined host and hero to white supremacists Tucker Carlson to continue his victory lap. But despite claiming to be a leftist, he gratuitously devoted himself to smearing Democrats and the media while playing directly into Trump’s public relations strategy — all while lying on numerous counts.

“The Democrats have put all their eggs in one basket, which is that they’ve insisted the central theme of the Trump presidency is that he was a Russia agent who collaborated with the Kremlin in the election, and they all agreed that Robert Mueller was going to be empowered to get to the bottom of this, and we were all going to accept whatever it was the Mueller found,” Greenwald told Carlson. “And what Mueller found was that the entire conspiracy theory was a hoax. That there was no evidence to establish that it was true.”

    If you still take this guy seriously, seek help pic.twitter.com/lGhsLiy4UH

    — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) May 3, 2019

This is flagrantly wrong on many levels, so it fits in well on Fox News. First, it’s just not true that “Democrats have put all their eggs in one basket” and that that basket was the Russia investigation. In 2018, the Democrats running across the country almost uniformly ran on health care. Russia wasn’t even a secondary issue, except insofar as Trump’s bizarre praise of President Vladimir Putin and other dictators shows his corruption — but many Democrats didn’t campaign against Trump at all, preferring to focus on issues relevant to their constituencies. Not a single 2020 Democratic presidential candidate has spent much time at all discussing the Russia investigation unless reporters ask. Much of 2017 was focused on a fight over health care and taxes, public relations battles that Democrats have arguably won.

And House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — the most powerful Democrat and the party’s de facto leader — has fought Trump on border wall funding and the government shutdown. When asked about impeachment, she said she was uninterested unless Mueller’s conclusions really changed the circumstances — but she never acted as if that was an inevitable possibility.

And, of course, Mueller’s report didn’t prove that the Russia investigation was based on a hoax. It found extensive connections between the Trump campaign and Russia, including a business deal from the Trump Organization to potentially build a Trump Tower Moscow that was ongoing ahead of the election. Trump’s personal lawyer later sentenced for engaging in a criminal coverup of this deal. Trump’s Campaign Chair Paul Manafort and Deputy Campaign Chair Rick Gates were found to have been Ukrainian agents, and they were also working to pass internal polling data along to a Russian oligarch during the campaign during the election via someone Gates believed to be a Russian “spy.” There are many more suspicious contacts. Mueller didn’t conclude any of these amounted to a conspiracy, but he certainly didn’t find that any suspicion of such a conspiracy was a “hoax.”

To be fair, Greenwald is right that some in the media got out over their skis and predicted conclusions of the Mueller probe that turned out to be unfounded. That’s true, and that inevitably happens, and maybe some or most of such people were even acting irresponsibly. But while this is a legitimate complaint and debate to have, Greenwald wildly inflates the claim to indict all Democrats and much of the mainstream media, when in fact there were many different writers with varying opinions about the matter throughout the investigation. Many media figures have been skeptical that a conspiracy would ever be found, even while finding Trump’s behavior regarding Russia duplicitous and objectionable. And much of the reporting on the Mueller investigation was solid, credible, and informative — and ultimately confirmed, not disproven, by the report. This includes many reports that Trump and Fox News called “fake.”

Greenwald also doesn’t acknowledge that there are many questions left open in Mueller’s report, and many Russia-related questions that weren’t addressed at all. Obviously, this doesn’t mean we should conclude there was a conspiracy or that Trump was compromised after all — but it means our conclusions about what there wasn’t should be much more tempered. In this way, Greenwald is guilty of the overreach that he accurately points out in others.

It’s also important to acknowledge that Greenwald himself has gotten key developments in this story wrong. He was long a skeptic of the claims that Russia was involved in the 2016 election at all. At this point, such skepticism seems completely untenable, unless you believe that Mueller completely fabricated out of whole cloth the events detailed in his indictments of the GRU (Russian intelligence) hackers and the Internet Research Agency social media trolls. But Greenwald rarely is candid enough to admit this grievous error — a mistake that just happened to echo Trump’s deceitful rhetoric.

And this is where Greenwald’s lies and victory laps get particularly disturbing. It’s fine to have a perspective on a story, and it’s fine to feel vindicated if you think the conclusion of that story vindicates your perspective. But as I’ve argued, Greenwald isn’t just claiming he was right, he’s lying wildly and grossly mischaracterizing the view of others. And all this lying has a singular effect: feeding Trump’s public relations effort around the Mueller investigation and his attacks on Democrats. He is, willingly or not, a part of the Trump re-election effort.

There’s no obvious reason why Greenwald should want to lie for Trump’s benefit. If he were just a leftist who didn’t like the way the Russia story was covered, that would be a reasonable position to hold. But while it might justify penning some critiques of the media and sniping at fellow reporters, it would never justify going on Fox News — an unabashed racist propaganda network devoted to promoting the president — and lying about the Democratic Party. A credible leftist might reasonably argue “The media botched this story and missed many other important topics” – but the reasonable response is to then cover those other topics.

Instead, Greenwald can’t let the Russia story go.

And as someone who portrays himself as particularly concerned with government overreach and the punitive nature of law enforcement, Greenwald seems largely uninterested in some of the key revelations from the Mueller report that bear on this topic. He’s not defending Hillary Clinton, who, the Mueller report reveals, Trump demanded his attorney general investigate even after she had been exhaustively investigated. And he’s not critiquing Trump’s wild abuses of power and obstruction of justice, even as Attorney General Bill Barr argues for a grotesquely extended vision of presidential authority.

Indeed, even while he admitted back in April that Trump is “amoral” and “willing to corruptly abuse his power to protect himself,” Greenwald defended Trump on obstruction of justice, saying: “He was [trying] to stop the investigation because he thought it was a sham all along, and therefore, even though he lied and acted improperly, it doesn’t rise to the corrupt intent needed to charge him with obstruction, which is stopping an investigation to prevent your own wrongdoing from being uncovered.”

This is, again, just wrong on the facts and the law.

So why does Greenwald spend so many of the hours of his life doing PR for a right-wing president? And why do so many of his lies, or more generously, mistakes, just happen to support Trump’s interests? The most natural suggestion, that he secretly loves and supports Trump, is pretty silly and difficult to believe.

There are two more plausible explanations, both of which may be true. He knows he was a part of Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 election, spreading hacked emails from the Russian sock puppet Guccifer 2.0. He’s been in a defensive crouch ever since, which also stems from his ideological alliance with WikiLeaks. And second, he hates the Democratic Party so much that he’s been warped into playing a role in the right-wing media’s defense and promotion of Trump.

In effect, he’s betraying the values he says he wants to protect. But he really doesn’t seem to care.

---

gr grreenwald has a piece up at the Intercept declaring that Julian Assange’s tenure at Ecuador’s London embassy may be coming to an end very soon.

Ecuador’s President Lenin Moreno traveled to London on Friday for the ostensible purpose of speaking at the 2018 Global Disabilities Summit(Moreno has been confined to a wheelchair since being shot in a 1998 robbery attempt). The concealed, actual purpose of the President’s trip is to meet with British officials to finalize an agreement under which Ecuador will withdraw its asylum protection of Julian Assange, in place since 2012, eject him from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, and then hand over the WikiLeaks founder to British authorities.

Now it is Glenn Greenwald, so take it with an appropriately large grain of salt, but apparently this has been in the works for some time.

A source close to the Ecuadorian Foreign Ministry and the President’s office, unauthorized to speak publicly, has confirmed to the Intercept that Moreno is close to finalizing, if he has not already finalized, an agreement to hand over Assange to the UK within the next several weeks. The withdrawal of asylum and physical ejection of Assange could come as early as this week. On Friday, RT reported that Ecuador was preparing to enter into such an agreement.

---

capt 318

partner detained airport terrorism 9 hrs

intel comm house denounced, as did clapper?

polk award

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wiki:

On the weekend of February 5–6, 2011, Aaron Barr, the chief executive of the security firm HBGary Federal, announced that his firm had successfully infiltrated the Anonymous group, and although he would not hand over details to the police, he would reveal his findings at a later conference in San Francisco. In retaliation for Aaron Barr's claims, members of the groupAnonymous hacked the website of HBGary Federaland replaced the welcome page with a message stating that Anonymous should not be messed with, and that the hacking of the website was necessary to defend itself. Using a variety of techniques, including social engineering and SQL injection,^[109]Anonymous also went on to take control of the company's e-mail,dumping 68,000 e-mails from the system, erasing files, and taking down their phone system.^[110] The leaked emails revealed the reports and company presentations of other companies in computer security such as Endgame systems who promise high quality offensive software, advertising "subscriptions of $2,500,000 per year for access to 0day exploits".^[111]

Among the documents exposed was aPowerPoint presentation entitled "The Wikileaks Threat", put together by HBGary Federal along with two other data intelligence firms forBank of America in December.^[112] Within the report, these firms created a list of important contributors to WikiLeaks; they further developed a strategic plan of attack against the site. As TechHerald explains, "the plan included pressing a journalist in order to disrupt his support of the organization, cyber attacks, disinformation, and other potential proactive tactics." The report specifically claims that Glenn Greenwald's support was key to WikiLeaks' ongoing survival

==

https://www.alternet.org/media/glenn-greenwald-facebook-operating-arm-israeli-state-removing-palestinian-posts

Facebook is being accused of censoring Palestinian activists who protest the Israeli occupation. This comes as Israeli Justice Minister Ayelet Shaked reportedly said in December that Tel Aviv had submitted 158 requests to Facebook over the previous four months asking it to remove content it deemed “incitement,” and said Facebook had granted 95 percent of the requests. We speak with Pulitzer Prize winner Glenn Greenwald about his new report for The Intercept headlined “Facebook Says It Is Deleting Accounts at the Direction of the U.S. and Israeli Governments.”

...

==

==

hhmn but links to art'ls on fusion of corp/govt

http://www.waronwethepeople.com/hunton-williams/

---

https://theintercept.com/2017/02/14/the-leakers-who-exposed-gen-flynns-lie-committed-serious-and-wholly-justified-felonies/

 TRUMP’S NATIONAL security adviser, Gen. Michael Flynn, was forced to resign on Monday night as a result of getting caught lying about whether he discussed sanctions in a December telephone call with a Russian diplomat. The only reason the public learned about Flynn’s lie is because someone inside the U.S. government violated the criminal law by leaking the contents of Flynn’s intercepted communications.

In the spectrum of crimes involving the leaking of classified information, publicly revealing the contents of SIGINT — signals intelligence — is one of the most serious felonies. Journalists (and all other nongovernmental citizens) can be prosecuted under federal law for disclosing classified information only under the narrowest circumstances; reflecting how serious SIGINT is considered to be, one of those circumstances includes leaking the contents of intercepted communications, as defined this way by 18 § 798 of the U.S. Code:

Whoever knowingly and willfully communicates … or otherwise makes available to an unauthorized person, or publishes … any classified information … obtained by the processes of communication intelligence from the communications of any foreign government … shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both.

That Flynn lied about what he said to Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak was first revealed by Washington Post columnist David Ignatius, who has built his career on repeating what his CIA sources tell him. In his January 12 column, Ignatius wrote: “According to a senior U.S. government official, Flynn phoned Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak several times on Dec. 29, the day the Obama administration announced the expulsion of 35 Russian officials as well as other measures in retaliation for the hacking.”

That “senior U.S. government official” committed a serious felony by leaking to Ignatius the communication activities of Flynn. Similar and even more extreme crimes were committed by what the Washington Post called “nine current and former officials, who were in senior positions at multiple agencies at the time of the calls,” who told the paper for its February 9 article that “Flynn privately discussed U.S. sanctions against Russia with that country’s ambassador to the United States during the month before President Trump took office, contrary to public assertions by Trump officials.” The New York Times, also citing anonymous U.S. officials, provided even more details about the contents of Flynn’s telephone calls.

That all of these officials committed major crimes can hardly be disputed. In January, CNN reported that Flynn’s calls with the Russians “were captured by routine U.S. eavesdropping targeting the Russian diplomats.” That means that the contents of those calls were “obtained by the processes of communication intelligence from the communications of [a] foreign government,” which in turn means that anyone who discloses them — or reports them to the public — is guilty of a felony under the statute.

Yet very few people are calling for a criminal investigation or the prosecution of these leakers, nor demanding the leakers step forward and “face the music” — for very good reason: The officials leaking this information acted justifiably, despite the fact that they violated the law. That’s because the leaks revealed that a high government official, Gen. Flynn, blatantly lied to the public about a material matter — his conversations with Russian diplomats — and the public has the absolute right to know this.

This episode underscores a critical point: The mere fact that an act is illegal does not mean it is unjust or even deserving of punishment. Oftentimes, the most just acts are precisely the ones that the law prohibits.

That’s particularly true of whistleblowers — i.e., those who reveal information the law makes it a crime to reveal, when doing so is the only way to demonstrate to the public that powerful officials are acting wrongfully or deceitfully. In those cases, we should cheer those who do it even though they are undertaking exactly those actions that the criminal law prohibits.

This Flynn episode underscores another critical point: The motives of leakers are irrelevant. It’s very possible — indeed, likely — that the leakers here were not acting with benevolent motives. Nobody with a straight face can claim that lying to the public is regarded in official Washington as some sort of mortal sin; if anything, the contrary is true: It’s seen as a job requirement.

Moreover, Gen. Flynn has many enemies throughout the intelligence and defense community. The same is true, of course, of Donald Trump; recall that just a few weeks ago, Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer warned Trump that he was being “really dumb” to criticize the intelligence community because “they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.”

It’s very possible — I’d say likely — that the motive here was vindictive rather than noble. Whatever else is true, this is a case where the intelligence community, through strategic (and illegal) leaks, destroyed one of its primary adversaries in the Trump White House.

But no matter. What matters is not the motive of the leaker but the effects of the leak. Any leak that results in the exposure of high-level wrongdoing — as this one did — should be praised, not scorned and punished.

IT IS, OF COURSE, bizarre to watch this principle now so widely celebrated. Over the last eight years, President Obama implemented the most vindictive and aggressive war on whistleblowers in all of U.S. history. As Leonard Downie, one of the editors at the Washington Post during the Watergate investigation, put it in a special report: “The [Obama] administration’s war on leaks and other efforts to control information are the most aggressive I’ve seen since the Nixon administration.”

It’s hard to put into words how strange it is to watch the very same people — from both parties, across the ideological spectrum — who called for the heads of Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, Tom Drake, and so many other Obama-era leakers today heap praise on those who leaked the highly sensitive, classified SIGINT information that brought down Gen. Flynn.

It’s even more surreal to watch Democrats act as though lying to the public is some grave firing offense when President Obama’s top national security official, James Clapper, got caught red-handed not only lying to the public but also to Congress — about a domestic surveillance program that courts ruled was illegal. And despite the fact that lying to Congress is a felony, he kept his job until the very last day of the Obama presidency.

But this is how political power and the addled partisan brain in D.C. functions. Those in power always regard leaks as a heinous crime, while those out of power regard them as a noble act. They seamlessly shift sides as their position in D.C. changes.

Indeed, while Democrats have suddenly re-discovered the virtues of illegal leaking, Trump-supporting Republicans are insisting that the only thing that matters is rooting out the criminal leakers. Fox News host Steve Doocey and right-wing radio host Laura Ingraham today both demanded to know why the leakers weren’t being hunted, while congressional Republicans are vowing investigations to find the leakers. And Trump himself today — echoing Obama-era Democrats — said that “the real story” isn’t the lies told by his national security adviser but rather the fact that someone leaked information exposing them ... When asked to investigate pro-union websites and WikiLeaks, Barr turned immediately to his social media toolkit and was ready to deploy personas, Facebook scraping, link analysis, and fake websites; he also suggested computer attacks on WikiLeaks infrastructure and pressure be brought upon journalists like Glenn Greenwald.

His compatriots at Palantir and Berico showed, in their many e-mails, few if any qualms about turning their national security techniques upon private dissenting voices. Barr's ideas showed up in Palantir-branded PowerPoints and Berico-branded "scope of work" documents. "Reconnaissance cells" were proposed, network attacks were acceptable, "target dossiers" on "adversaries" would be compiled, and "complex information campaigns" involving fake personas were on the table.

Critics like Glenn Greenwald contend that this nexus of private and public security power is a dangerous mix. "The real issue highlighted by this episode is just how lawless and unrestrained is the unified axis of government and corporate power," he wrote last week.

Especially (though by no means only) in the worlds of the Surveillance and National Security State, the powers of the state have become largely privatized. There is very little separation between government power and corporate power. Those who wield the latter intrinsically wield the former.

The revolving door between the highest levels of government and corporate offices rotates so fast and continuously that it has basically flown off its track and no longer provides even the minimal barrier it once did. It's not merely that corporate power is unrestrained; it's worse than that: corporations actively exploit the power of the state to further entrench and enhance their power.

arstechnica

---

Glenn Greenwald unleashed both barrels of his own, claiming that "what is set forth in these proposal... quite possibly constitutes serious crimes. Manufacturing and submitting fake documents with the intent they be published likely constitutes forgery and fraud. Threatening the careers of journalists and activists in order to force them to be silent is possibly extortion and, depending on the specific means to be used, constitutes other crimes as well. Attacking WikiLeaks' computer infrastructure in an attempt to compromise their sources undoubtedly violates numerous cyber laws."

---

= 

Intimidating The Press In The Age Of Leaks

Guardian journalist and Snowden liaison Glenn Greenwald's partner being detained is only the latest move on press freedoms.

By Mint Press News Desk | August 20, 2013

In the latest chapter of the unfolding National Security Agency (NSA) leak saga, authorities at London Heathrow Airport detained David Miranda, the partner of Guardian reporter Glenn Greenwald, for roughly 9 hours, confiscating his cellphone, laptops and memory sticks.

Greenwald has received intense U.S. government scrutiny since he broke the story of widespread government spying through the National Security Agency earlier this summer. He reported the story after he received documents from Edward Snowden, a former Booz Allen Hamilton employee who now resides in Russia after receiving approval for a one-year stay.

Snowden is wanted in the U.S. for crimes that include violating the 1917 Espionage Act, butGreenwald, a reporter who was doing his job as an investigative journalist, has also been targeted by some members of the Senate Foreign Intelligence Committee for reporting the news.

It went a step further when The Associated Press reported that Greenwald’s parter was held under anti-terror legislation at Heathrow Airport, triggering claims from his supporters that British authorities are trying to interfere with Greenwald’s work as a journalist.

“This is obviously a rather profound escalation of their attacks on the news-gathering process and journalism,” Greenwald said in a post on the Guardian website. “It’s bad enough to prosecute and imprison sources. It’s worse still to imprison journalists who report the truth. But to start detaining the family members and loved ones of journalists is simply despotic.”

The attacks against what many consider legitimate investigative journalism began shortly after the leak, with some members of Congress calling for Greenwald’s arrest. “I’m talking about Greenwald,” said Peter King (R-NY) during an interview in June. “Greenwald, not only did he disclose this information, he has said that he has names of CIA agents and assets around the world, and they’re threatening to disclose that. The last time that was done in this country, we saw a CIA station chief murdered in Greece … Yes, there has to be … legal action taken against him.”

Greenwald flatly denied that he revealed the names of CIA agents around the world and has consistently maintained that his reports are well within the parameters of legally sanctioned free speech.

Greenwald isn’t the only journalist who has faced blowback for reporting controversial stories in recent years. Barrett Brown, a journalist who revealed leaked emails from Stratfor could face 105 years in prison for doing his job. Reporters Without Borders, a free speech advocacy organization, says that Brown hasn’t committed any crimes and shouldn’t be targeted.

“Barrett Brown is not a hacker, he is not a criminal” stated Reporters Without Borders General Secretary Christophe Deloire, “He did not infiltrate any systems, nor did he appear to have the technical expertise to do so. Above all, Barrett was an investigative journalist who was merely doing his professional duty by looking into the Stratfor emails, an affair of public interest.

“The sentence of 105 years in prison that he is facing is absurd and dangerous, given that Jeremy Hammond who pleaded guilty for the actual hack on Stratfor is only facing a maximum of 10 years in prison. Threatening a journalist with a possible century-long jail sentence is a scary prospect for journalists investigating the intelligence government contractor industry.”

http://www.mintpressnews.com/intimidating-the-press-in-the-age-of-leaks/167290/

==

==

http://glenngreenwald.net/

Glenn Greenwald is the author of several bestsellers, including How Would a Patriot Act? and With Liberty and Justice for Some. Acclaimed as one of the 25 most influential political commentators by The Atlantic, one of America’s top 10 opinion writers by Newsweek, and one of the Top 100 Global Thinkers for 2013 by Foreign Policy, Greenwald is a former constitutional law and civil rights litigator. He was a columnist for The Guardian until October 2013 and is now a founding editor of a new media outlet, The Intercept.. He is a frequent guest on CNN, MSNBC, and various other television and radio outlets. He has won numerous awards for his NSA reporting, including the 2013 Polk Award for national security reporting, the top 2013 investigative journalism award from the Online News Association, the Esso Award for Excellence in Reporting (the Brazilian equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize), and the 2013 Pioneer Award from Electronic Frontier Foundation. He also received the first annual I. F. Stone Award for Independent Journalism in 2009 and a 2010 Online Journalism Award for his investigative work on the arrest and detention of Chelsea Manning. In 2013, Greenwald led the Guardian reporting that was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for public service. - See more at: http://glenngreenwald.net/#sthash.Ep24sqt3.dpuf

==

Glenn Edward Greenwald (born March 6, 1967) is an American lawyer, journalist and author. He was a columnist for Guardian US from August 2012 to October 2013.^[2][3][4] He was a columnist for Salon.com from 2007 to 2012, and an occasional contributor to The Guardian.^[5][6][7] Greenwald worked as a constitutional and civil rights litigator. At Salon he contributed as a columnist and blogger, focusing on political and legal topics.^[8] He has also contributed to other newspapers and political news magazines, including The New York Times,^[9][10][11] the Los Angeles Times,^[12] The American Conservative,^[13] The National Interest^[14] and In These Times.^[15][16] In February 2014 he became, along with Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill, one of the founding editors of The Intercept.^[17]

Greenwald was named by *Foreign Policy* magazine as one of the Top 100 Global Thinkers of 2013.^[18] Four of the five books he has written have been on *The New York Times* Best Sellers list. Greenwald is a frequent speaker on college campuses, including Harvard Law School, Yale Law School, the University of Pennsylvania,Brown University, UCLA School of Law, the University of Wisconsin and the University of Maryland. He frequently appears on various radio and television programs.

Greenwald has received awards including the first Izzy Award for independent journalism, in 2009,^[19] and the 2010 Online Journalism Award for Best Commentary.^[20]

In June 2013 Greenwald became widely known after The Guardian published the first of a series of reports detailing United States and British global surveillanceprograms, based on classified documents disclosed by Edward Snowden.^[21][22] The series on which Greenwald worked along with others won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.^[23][24]

His reporting on the National Security Agency (NSA) won numerous other awards around the world, including top investigative journalism prizes from the George Polk Award for National Security Reporting,^[25] the 2013 Online Journalism Awards,^[26] the Esso Award for Excellence in Reporting in Brazil for his articles in O Globo on NSA mass surveillance of Brazilians (becoming the first foreigner to win the award),^[27] the 2013 Libertad de Expresion Internacional award from Argentinian magazinePerfil,^[28] and the 2013 Pioneer Award from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.^[29]

His work on the NSA files was in part the subject of the film Citizenfour, which won the 2014 Academy Award for Best Documentary. Greenwald appeared onstage at the Oscar ceremony with the film's director, Laura Poitras, as she accepted the award.^[30]

Greenwald lives in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, the hometown of his partner, David Michael Miranda.^{[31][32][33][34][35]} Greenwald has stated that his residence in Brazil is the result of an American law, the Defense of Marriage Act, barring federal recognition of same-sex marriages, which prevented his partner from receiving a visa to reside in the United States with him.^[32] Greenwald has also cited fears of arrest should he move back to the U.S.^[36]

Contents

  [hide] 

• 1 Early life
• 2 Career
  • 2.1 Litigation attorney
  • 2.2 *Unclaimed Territory*
  • 2.3 Salon
  • 2.4 *The Guardian*
  • 2.5 First Look Media and *The Intercept*
  • 2.6 Guest appearances
  • 2.7 Books

• 3 Global surveillance disclosure
  • 3.1 Contact with Edward Snowden
  • 3.2 Media publications
  • 3.3 Detention of David Miranda
  • 3.4 Testimony
    • 3.4.1 National Congress of Brazil
    • 3.4.2 European Parliament

• 4 Political views
• 5 Religious views
• 6 First Look Media
• 7 Reception
• 8 Awards
• 9 Books
• 10 See also
• 11 References
• 12 Further reading
• 13 External links

Early life[edit]

Greenwald was born on March 6, 1967, in New York City to Arlene and Daniel Greenwald.^[37] Shortly after his birth, Greenwald moved with his family to Lauderdale Lakes, Florida.^[8][31][38] While a senior in high school, at 17, he ran unsuccessfully for the city council.^[38] After graduating from high school, Greenwald enrolled in George Washington University where he majored in philosophy. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1990. He then attended the New York University School of Law, earning a Juris Doctor in 1994.^[8]

Career[edit]

Litigation attorney[edit]

Greenwald practiced law in the Litigation Department at:{ Wachtell, Lipton,:(style="background-color:#ffff66ff"):}:Rosen & Katz:{ (1994–1995); in 1996 he co-founded his own litigation firm, called Greenwald Christoph & Holland (later renamed Greenwald Christoph PC), where he litigated cases concerning issues of U.S. constitutional law and civil rights.}:^[8][31]:{ }::{One of his higher-profile cases was the representation of white supremacist Matthew F. Hale.^[39] About his work in First Amendment speech cases, }::{Greenwald told }:Rolling Stone:{, "to me, it's a heroic attribute to be so committed to a principle that you apply it not when it's easy...not when it supports your position, not when it protects people you like, but when it defends and protects people that you hate".}:^[40]

Later, according to Greenwald, "I decided voluntarily to wind down my practice in 2005 because I could, and because, after ten years, I was bored with litigating full-time and wanted to do other things which I thought were more engaging and could make more of an impact, including political writing."^[31]

In the early 2000s Greenwald was a partner in an LLC.^[41]

Unclaimed Territory[edit]

In October 2005, he started his blog Unclaimed Territory focusing on the investigation pertaining to the Plame affair, the CIA leak grand jury investigation, the federal indictment of Scooter Libby and the NSA warrantless surveillance (2001–07) controversy. In April 2006, the blog received the 2005 Koufax Award for "Best New Blog".^[8]

Salon[edit]

In February 2007, Greenwald became a contributing writer at Salon.com, and the new column and blog superseded Unclaimed Territory, though Salon.com prominently features hyperlinks to it in Greenwald's dedicated biographical section.^[42][43]

Among the frequent topics of his Salon articles were the investigation of the 2001 anthrax attacks, and the candidacy of former CIA official John O. Brennan for the jobs of either Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (D/CIA) or the next Director of National Intelligence (DNI) after the election of Barack Obama. Brennan withdrew his name from consideration for the post after opposition centered in liberal blogs and led by Greenwald.^{[44][45][46][46][47][48]} Brennan took up the leadership position at the CIA again, in March 2013.

The Guardian[edit]

Greenwald left Salon.com on August 20, 2012 for The Guardian, citing "the opportunity to reach a new audience, to further internationalize my readership, and to be re-invigorated by a different environment" as reasons for the move.^[49]

On June 5, 2013, Greenwald scooped the story on the top-secret United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court order requiring Verizon to provide the National Security Agency with telephone metadata for all calls between the US and abroad, as well as all domestic calls.^[50][51][52]

Further information: Verizon Communications: NSA Collection of Phone Records

First Look Media and The Intercept[edit]

On October 15, 2013, Greenwald announced and The Guardian confirmed that he was leaving to pursue a "once-in-a-career dream journalistic opportunity that no journalist could possibly decline".^[4][53] Reutersreported that the philanthropist providing the financial backing for the new venture was Pierre Omidyar, the eBay founder.^[54]

That news organization, First Look Media, launched its first online publication, called The Intercept on February 10, 2014.^[55] Greenwald serves as editor, alongside Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill.

Guest appearances[edit]

Greenwald has appeared as a round table guest on ABC's Sunday morning news show This Week, HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher, Comedy Central's The Colbert Report, NPR's All Things Considered, as well as numerous times on C-SPAN's Washington Journal; Pacifica Radio's syndicated series Democracy Now! with Amy Goodman;^[56] on Public Radio International's To the Point; MSNBC's Rachel Maddow Show, Morning Joe, The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell, Up with Chris Hayes, and Dylan Ratigan's Morning Meeting; Fox News' Special Report with Brit Hume;.^[57] Greenwald has been a regular guest on the Hugh Hewitt Show (and was a friend and favorite guest of Hewitt's frequent guest host, Dean Barnett[citation ^needed]) and on PBS's Bill Moyers Journal.^[58][59][60] On 15 September 2014, he was a headline speaker at Kim Dotcom'sMoment of Truth town hall meeting held in Auckland, New Zealand.^[61]

Books[edit]

Greenwald's first book, How Would a Patriot Act? Defending American Values From aPresident Run Amok, was published by Working Assets in 2006. It was a *New York Times* bestseller,^[62] and ranked #1 onAmazon.com both before its publication (due to pre-orders based on attention from 'UT' readers and other bloggers) and for several days after its release, ending its first week at #293.^[63]

A Tragic Legacy, his second book, examines the presidency of George W. Bush "with an emphasis on his personality traits and beliefs that drove the presidency (along with an emphasis on how and why those personality traits have led to a presidency that has failed to historic proportions)."^[64] Published in hardback by Crown (a division of Random House) on June 26, 2007, and reprinted in a paperback edition by Three Rivers Press on April 8, 2008, it too was a New York Times Best Seller, also ranking #1 for a day on Amazon.com's Non-Fiction Best Seller List and #2 the next day (also due to heavy "discussions and promotions by blogs—a campaign catalyzed by Jane Hamsher [at FireDogLake]", according to Greenwald).^[65]

His third book, Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics, was published by Random House in April 2008, the same month that Three Rivers Press reissued A Tragic Legacy in paperback.^[66][67]

His fourth book, With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful, was released by Metropolitan Books in October 2011.

No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State was released in May 2014.^[68] It spent 6 weeks on the New York Times Bestseller List,^[69] and was named one of the 10 Best Books of 2014 by Amazon^[70] and Best NonFiction Books of 2014 by Amazon.^[71]

Global surveillance disclosure[edit]

Main article: 2013 Global surveillance disclosure

Contact with Edward Snowden[edit]

Greenwald was first contacted by Edward Snowden, a former contractor of the U.S. National Security Agency, in late 2012.^[72] Snowden contacted Greenwald anonymously and said he had "sensitive documents" that he would like to share.^[73] Greenwald found the measures that the source asked him to take to secure their communications too annoying to employ.^[72] Snowden then contacted documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras about a month later in January 2013.^[74]

According to The Guardian, what originally attracted Snowden to both Greenwald and Poitras was a Salon article penned by Greenwald detailing how Poitras' controversial films had made her a "target of the government".^[73][75] Greenwald began working with Snowden in either February^[76] or in April after Poitras asked Greenwald to meet her in New York City, at which point Snowden began providing documents to them both.^[72]

Media publications[edit]

Detention of David Miranda[edit]As part of the global surveillance disclosure, the first of Snowden's documents were published on June 5, 2013, by Glenn Greenwald in Britain's The Guardian. According to Greenwald, Snowden's documents exposed the "scale of domestic surveillance under Obama".^[77]

Greenwald described his partner's detention as "clearly intended to send a message of intimidation to those of us who have been reporting on the NSA and GCHQ".^[82]Miranda was detained for nine hours and his laptop and other items were seized. He has since attempted to sue the Metropolitan Police for misuse of their powers. According to The Guardian, the claim, "challenging controversial powers used under schedule 7 to the Terrorism Act 2000, maintains that Miranda was not involved in terrorism and says his right to freedom of expression was curtailed".^[83]In August 2013 the Metropolitan Police detained Greenwald's partner David Miranda at London's Heathrow Airport under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000, while he was traveling home from Berlin.^[78][79][80] His belongings were seized, including an external hard drive said to be containing sensitive documents relevant to the Greenwald's reporting which were encrypted with software called TrueCrypt.^[81]

According to a later article in The Guardian, Miranda was found to have been carrying an external hard drive containing 58,000 highly classified UK intelligence documents, and his detention was ruled lawful by the UK High Court, which accepted that Miranda's detention and the seizure of computer material was "an indirect interference with press freedom" but said this was justified by legitimate and "very pressing" interests of national security.^[84]

Members of the Joint Committee on Human Rights (JCHR) in the UK Parliament said that allowing police to stop and search suspects at airports without suspicion was “not inherently incompatible” with human rights. MPs and peers said they agreed anti-terror officers should be able to “stop, question, request documentation and physically search persons and property” even when they did not have reasonable suspicion that an offence had been committed, but urged the government to introduce new restrictions on powers such as strip-searches, detentions and searches of the contents of electronic devices such as laptops and smartphones, and said that these "more intrusive" measures should take place only when officers had reasonable suspicion that someone was involved in terrorism.^[85]

In December 2013, Greenwald and Miranda openly advocated for asylum in Brazil for Edward Snowden in exchange for the fugitive leaker's cooperation in investigating the NSA.^[86] Brazil responded by saying that it was not interested in investigating the NSA.^[87]

Testimony[edit]

National Congress of Brazil[edit]

In a statement delivered before the National Congress of Brazil in early August 2013, Greenwald testified that the U.S. government had used counter-terrorism as a pretext for clandestine surveillance in order to compete with other countries in the "business, industrial and economic fields".^[88][89][90]

European Parliament[edit]

On 18 December 2013, Greenwald told the European Union's Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs that "most governments around the world are not only turning their backs on Edward Snowden but also on their ethical responsibilities".^[91] Speaking via a video link, Greenwald asserted that "It is the UK through their interception of underwater fibre optic cables, that is a primary threat to the privacy ofEuropean citizens when it comes to their telephone and emails". According to a statement given to the European Parliament by Greenwald:

The ultimate goal of the NSA, along with its most loyal, one might say subservient junior partner the British agency GCHQ – when it comes to the reason why the system of suspicion of surveillance is being built and the objective of this system – is nothing less than the elimination of individual privacy worldwide

—Glenn Greenwald^[92]

Political views[edit]

Bush's election to the U.S. presidency "changed" Greenwald's previous uninvolved political attitude toward the electoral process "completely", and in 2006 he wrote:Greenwald is critical of actions jointly supported by Democrats and Republicans, writing: "The worst and most tyrannical government actions in Washington are equally supported on a fully bipartisan basis."^[93] In the preface to his first book, How Would a Patriot Act? (2006), Greenwald opens with some of his own personal political history, describing his 'pre-political' self as neither liberal nor conservative as a whole, voting neither for George W. Bush nor for any of his rivals (indeed, not voting at all).^[94]

Over the past five years, a creeping extremism has taken hold of our federal government, and it is threatening to radically alter our system of government and who we are as a nation. This extremism is neither conservative nor liberal in nature, but is instead driven by theories of unlimited presidential power that are wholly alien, and antithetical, to the core political values that have governed this country since its founding"; for, "the fact that this seizure of ever-expanding presidential power is largely justified through endless, rank fear-mongering—fear of terrorists, specifically—means that not only our system of government is radically changing, but so, too, are our national character, our national identity, and what it means to be American."^[94]

Believing that "It is incumbent upon all Americans who believe in that system, bequeathed to us by the founders, to defend it when it is under assault and in jeopardy. And today it is", he says: "I did not arrive at these conclusions eagerly or because I was predisposed by any previous partisan viewpoint. Quite the contrary."^[94]

Resistant to applying ideological labels to himself, he emphasizes that he is a strong advocate for U.S. constitutional "balance of powers"^[16] and for constitutionally-protected civil and political rights in his writings and public appearances.^[8]

Greenwald frequently writes about the War on Drugs and criminal justice reform. He is a member of the advisory board of the Brazil chapter of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition.^[95][96] Greenwald was also the author of a 2009 white paper published by the Cato Institute titled Drug Decriminalization in Portugal: Lessons for Creating Fair and Successful Drug Policies, exploring the role of drug policy of Portugal.^[97]

He criticized the policies of the Bush administration and those who supported it, arguing that most of the American "Corporate News Media" excused Bush's policies and echoed the administration's positions rather than asking hard questions.^[34][56]

Regarding civil liberties during the Obama presidency, he elaborated on his conception of change when he said, "I think the only means of true political change will come from people working outside of that [two-party electoral] system to undermine it, and subvert it, and weaken it, and destroy it; not try to work within it to change it."^[98] He did, however, raise money for Russ Feingold's 2010 Senate re-election bid,^[99] Bill Halter's 2010 primary challenge to Democratic Sen. Blanche Lincoln,^[100] as well as several Congressional candidates in 2012 described as "unique".^[101]

Greenwald is critical of Israel's foreign policy and influence on U.S. politics,^[102] a stance for which he has in turn been the subject of criticism.^[103][104]

He is critical of what he calls the distorted version of "Godwin's law" to prima facie reject any comparison to Nazism. He believes there are instances where such comparisons are warranted.^[105]

Greenwald criticized the prison conditions in which U.S. Army Private Chelsea Manning, the accused WikiLeaks leaker then known as Bradley, was held after Manning's arrest by military authorities.^[106] As a supporter of Manning, describing her as "a whistle-blower acting with the noblest of motives", and "a national hero similar to Daniel Ellsberg."^[107]

Religious views[edit]

Greenwald came from a Jewish background, albeit largely non practicing, and was never Bar Mitzvahed, stating that "My parents tried to inculcate me a little bit into organized Judaism, but they weren't particularly devoted to that, and my grandparents were, but it just never took hold." He says that he does believe in "the spiritual and mystical part of the world", including practicing yoga, but his moral precepts "aren't informed in any way by religious doctrine or, like, organized religion or anything."^[108]

First Look Media[edit]

Main article: First Look Media

In October 2013, Greenwald announced that he was joining with eBay founder and PayPal owner Pierre Omidyar on a new independent news venture named First Look Media.^[109][110] Omidyar has said that he was committing an initial $250m to the venture. Omidyar told media critic Jay Rosen that the decision was fuelled by his "rising concern about press freedoms in the United States and around the world." Greenwald along with his colleagues Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill were initially working on creating a place online to support independent journalism, when they were approached by Omidyar who was looking to start his own media organization. The new venture will be a for-profit one (rather than a non-profit charity) and it will be funded by Omidyar personally instead of through the Omidyar Network.^[111]

Reception[edit]

Greenwald has been placed on numerous "top 50" and "top 25" lists of columnists in the United States.^{[112][113][114][115][116][117][118][119][120]} In June 2012, Newsweek magazine named him one of America's Top 10 Opinionists, saying that "a righteous, controlled, and razor-sharp fury runs through a great deal" of his writing, and: "His independent persuasion can make him a danger or an asset to both sides of the aisle."^[121]

According to Nate Anderson, writing in Ars Technica, around 2010/2011 Aaron Barr of HBGary and Team Themis planned to damage Greenwald's career as a way to respond to a potential dump of Bank of Americadocuments by WikiLeaks, saying that "Without the support of people like Glenn WikiLeaks would fold."^[122]

Josh Voorhees, writing in slate.com, reported that in 2013 congressman Peter King (R-NY) suggested Greenwald should be arrested for his reporting on the NSA PRISM program and NSA leaker Edward Snowden.^{[123] Journalist} Andrew Ross:{Sorkin said "I would arrest [Snowden] and now I'd almost arrest Glenn Greenwald",^[124] but later apologized for his statement, which Greenwald accepted.}:

Journalist David Gregory accused Greenwald of aiding and abetting Snowden, before asking "why shouldn't you, Mr. Greenwald, be charged with a crime?"^[125]

In an interview with Martha Raddatz of ABC's Sunday morning news program This Week, Greenwald said that members of Congress are being "blocked" from getting "the most basic information about what NSA is doing... and what the FISA court has been doing...." and specifically referenced Rep. Dutch Ruppersberger (D-MD), a ranking member of the United States House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence("House Intelligence Committee"). Ruppersberger, who was a guest on the show, responded, "We have rules as far as the committee and what you can have and what you cannot have. However, based on that, that statement I just made, is that since this incident occurred with Snowden, we've had three different hearings for members of our Democratic Caucus, and the Republican Caucus.... And we will continue to do that because what we're trying to do now is to get the American public to know more about what's going on." Rep. King, who was also a guest on This Week as a ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, stated: "[T]o me it's unprecedented to have all of these top people from an administration during this time of crisis still come in and answer question after question after question. So anyone who says that Congress is somehow being stonewalled is just wrong and [the question] is generally, I think, raised by people who are trying to make a name for themselves."^[126]

In a February 2014 interview Greenwald said he believed he risked detention if he reentered the U.S., but would likely return, should he win a prestigious journalism award.^[127] Later that month, it was announced that he was among the recipients of the 2013 Polk Awards, to be conferred April 11, 2014 in Manhattan.^[128] In a subsequent interview, Greenwald stated he would attend the ceremony, and added: "I absolutely refuse to be exiled from my own country for the crime of doing journalism and I'm going to force the issue just on principle. And I think going back for a ceremony like the Polk Awards or other forms of journalistic awards would be a really good symbolic test of having to put the government in the position of having to arrest journalists who are coming back to the US to receive awards for the journalism they have done."^[129] On April 11, Greenwald and Poitras accepted the Polk award in Manhattan. Although their entry into the United States was trouble-free, they travelled with an ACLU lawyer and a German journalist "to document any unpleasant surprises". Accepting the award, Greenwald said he was "happy to see a table full of Guardian editors and journalists, whose role in this story is much more integral than the publicity generally recognizes".^[130] On April 14, the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service was awarded jointly to The Guardian and The Washington Post for revelation of widespread secret surveillance by the NSA. Greenwald, along with Laura Poitras and Ewen MacAskill, had contributed to The Guardian′s reporting.^[131]

Awards[edit]

• 2009 Izzy Award for independent journalism^[19]
• 2010 Online Journalism Award for Best Commentary^[20]
• 2013 EFF Pioneer Award for coverage and analysis of the 2013 mass surveillance disclosures^[132]
• 2013 George Polk Award^[25]
• 2014 Geschwister-Scholl-Preis for No Place to Hide ^[133]
• 2015 Siebenpfeiffer-Preis ^[134]

Books[edit]

• 2014 No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State. Metropolitan Books (Div. of Henry Holt and Company), ISBN 1-6277-9073-X (10). ISBN 978-1-62779-073-4 (13).
• 2011 With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful. Metropolitan Books (Div. of Henry Holt and Company), ISBN 0-8050-9205-6 (10). ISBN 978-0-8050-9205-9 (13).
• 2008 Great American Hypocrites: Toppling the Big Myths of Republican Politics. New York: Random House, ISBN 0-307-40802-7 (10). ISBN 978-0-307-40802-0 (13). (Also available as an E-book.)
• 2007 A Tragic Legacy: How a Good vs. Evil Mentality Destroyed the Bush Presidency. New York: Crown (Div. of Random House) ISBN 0-307-35419-9 (10). ISBN 978-0-307-35419-8 (13). (Hardback ed.) Three Rivers Press, 2008. ISBN 0-307-35428-8 (10). ISBN 978-0-307-35428-0 (13). (Paperback ed.)
• 2006 How Would a Patriot Act? Defending American Values From a President Run Amok. San Francisco: Working Assets (Distrib. by Publishers Group West), ISBN 0-9779440-0-X (10). ISBN 978-0-9779440-0-2(13).

See also[edit]

• Citizenfour (2014 documentary film)
• Snowden – a 2015 Biographical drama film directed by Oliver Stone starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Edward Snowden and Zachary Quinto as Greenwald.

==

Even if he made it out of Moscow, he couldn’t have doubted that the full resources of the NSA and other parts of the U.S. government would be turned on him. How many CIA case officers and Joint Special Operations Command types did the U.S. have undercover in Ecuador? After all, the dirty tricks had already started. The partner of Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald, who broke Snowden's story, had his laptop stolen from their residence in Brazil.  This happened only after Greenwald told him via Skype that he would send him an encrypted copy of Snowden’s documents.

---

Glenn on 4/13 moyers said transparency must be accompanied by accountability, or power will be abused

---

AlterNet [1] / By Max Blumenthal [2]

Exposing the Dark Forces Behind the Snowden Smears

June 28, 2013

Since journalist Glenn Greenwald revealed the existence of the National Security Agency’s PRISM domestic surveillance program, he and his source, the whistleblower Edward Snowden, have come in for a series of ugly attacks. On June 26, the day that the New York Daily News published a straightforward smear piece [3] on Greenwald, the website Buzzfeed rolled out a remarkably similar article, [4] a lengthy profile that focused on Greenwald’s personal life and supposed eccentricities.

Both outlets attempted to make hay out of Greenwald’s involvement over a decade ago on the business end of a porn distribution company, an arcane detail that had little, if any, bearing on the domestic spying scandal he sparked. The coordinated nature of the smears prompted Reuters media columnist Jack Shafer to ask if an opposition research firm [5] was behind them. “I wonder who commissioned the file,” he mused on Twitter.

A day before the Greenwald attacks appeared, Buzzfeed published an anonymously sourced story [6] about the government of Ecuador, which had reportedly offered asylum to Snowden (Ecuador has just revoked a temporary travel document [7] issued to Snowden). Written by Rosie Gray and Adrian Carasquillo, the article relied on documents marked as “secret” that were passed to Buzzfeed by sources described as “activists who wished to call attention to the [Ecuadorian] government’s spying practices in the context of its new international role” as the possible future sanctuary of Snowden.

Gray and Carasquillo reported that Ecuador’s intelligence service had attempted to procure surveillance technology from two Israeli firms. Without firm proof that the system was ever put into use, the authors claimed the documents “suggest a commitment to domestic surveillance that rivals the practices by the United States’ National Security Agency.” (Buzzfeed has never published a critical report on the $3 billion in aid the US provides to Israel each year, which is used to buy equipment explicitly designed for repressing, spying on and killing occupied Palestinians).

Buzzfeed’s Ecuador expose supported a theme increasingly advanced [8] by Snowden’s critics -- that the hero of civil libertarians and government transparency activists was, in fact, a self-interested hypocrite content to seek sanctuary from undemocratic regimes. Curiously, those who seized on the story had no problem with Buzzfeed’s reporters relying on leaked government documents marked as classified. For some Snowden detractors, the issue was apparently not his leaking, but which government his leaks embarrassed.

Questionable journalism ethics, evidence of smears

At first glance, Buzzfeed's Ecuador expose might have seemed like riveting material. Upon closer examination, however, the story turned out to be anything but the exclusive the website promoted it as. In fact, the news of Ecuador’s possible deal with Israeli surveillance firms was reported [9] hours before Buzzfeed’s piece appeared by Aleksander Boyd, a blogger and activist with close ties to right-wing elements in South America. “Rafael Correa's Ecuadorian regime spies on its citizens in a way strikingly similar to what Snowden accuses the U.S. of doing,” claimed Boyd.

Later in the day, Boyd contacted Buzzfeed’s Gray through Twitter, complimenting her piece before commenting, [10] “Evidently Ecuadorian source leaked same info to you guys, seems I jumped the gun before you…”

Since Boyd contacted Gray, who has not publicly responded, Buzzfeed has not credited him or altered its headline to acknowledge that its story was not an exclusive. Buzzfeed’s refusal to acknowledge Boyd was not only a testament to the kind of questionable practices [11] that have plagued the outlet [12] since its inception, it helped obscure the story’s disturbing origins.

Boyd’s disclosure that a single source shopped opposition research to him and Buzzfeed at the same time confirmed the existence of a coordinated campaign orchestrated by elements exploiting the Snowden drama for political gain. Boyd’s remark that he “jumped the gun” suggests that the source intended for Buzzfeed to be the first to publish the story, and that he inadvertently embarrassed the site by running with it before them. There is also the possibility that Boyd was the source all along, and that his tweet to Gray was designed to establish deniability. Either way, the source seemed to be carefully managing the operation, wielding Snowden as a cudgel against the Ecuadorian government and timing the story for maximum impact.

Soliciting smears, dreaming of headless opponents

Who is Boyd, and how did he appear in the middle of the Snowden saga?

A London-based representative of Venezuela’s political opposition, Boyd solicits his services as an opposition researcher, informing potential clients through his official bio, [13] “Alek can be contracted to do due diligence on individuals and companies in Venezuela and LatAm.”

As I reported for The Electronic Intifada [14], Boyd has repeatedly promoted terrorism and assassination against members of the elected government of Venezuela. Back in 2004, Boyd wrote, “I wish I could decapitate in public plazas [Venezuelan politicians] Lina Ron and Diosdado Cabello. I wish I could torture for the rest of his remaining existence Vice President Jose Vicente Rangel … I wish I could fly over Caracas slums throwing the dead bodies of the criminals that have destroyed my country … Only barbaric practices will neutralize them, much the same way [Genghis] Khan did. I wish I was him.” A year later, he declared, “Re: advocating for violence yes I have mentioned in many occasions that in my view that is the only solution left for dealing with [Hugo] Chavez.”

In 2008, Boyd’s services were contracted by theHuman Rights Foundation(HRF), an NGO run by a veteran conservative activist named Thor Halvorssen. [14] The son of a Venezuelan oligarch and former CIA asset who funneled money to the Nicaraguan Contras, Halvorssen founded HRF to publicize the human rights abuses of Hugo Chavez’s government. His first cousin, Leopoldo Lopez, the son of an oil industry executive, is one of the most visible leaders of the Venezuelan opposition, and as such, has received substantial financial support from the US. In 2002, Lopez was among the politicians who momentarily seized power from Chavez during a failed coup attempt. At the 2010 Oslo Freedom Forum, a yearly confab Halvorssen promotes as “the Davos of human rights,” Lopez was presented to an audience of foreign correspondents and diplomats as a “human rights leader.”

Boyd claimed [15] that during his year and a half working for Halvorssen, he successfully campaigned for the release of Guadelupe Llori, an Ecuadorian opposition politician jailed by Correa under charges of sabotage and terrorism for her role in leading a crippling oil workers’ strike. (After her release, Llori was junketed to Halvorssen’s Oslo Freedom Forum). During this time Boyd visited Llori in prison in Ecuador while meeting [16] opposition activists “to coordinate future projects,” as he told an interviewer. Whether this was how he made initial contact with the source that supplied him and Buzzfeed with the documents on Ecuador’s deal with the Israeli surveillance firms is unknown.

Boyd may have never met Buzzfeed’s Gray, however, each are well acquainted with Halvorssen. This May, Gray was among the select cadre of journalists flown to the Oslo Freedom Forum to provide positive PR for Halvorssen and his global operation. Gray returned with a fawning profile [17] of Halvorssen, portraying him as an iconoclastic activist whose “job of opposing strongmen is arguably more media-friendly than that of anyone doing human rights work today.”

In contrast to Buzzfeed’s profile of Greenwald, Gray cast Halvorssen’s eccentricities as charming quirks that bore little relevance to the larger story. And his intimate ties to the right-wing Venezuelan opposition and the oligarchic forces seeking to topple socialist-oriented governments in South America went unmentioned.

Right-wing corporate lobbyists target Correa

Ecuador’s Correa is among the most popular of the Latin American leaders to embrace Hugo Chavez’s socialist economic model. Having defiantly defaulted on $3.2 billion in foreign loans, he has been able to leverage his country’s oil wealth to drastically expand social programs, improving access to education and doubling spending on healthcare while lowering poverty rates by a remarkable five percent since he took office in 2007. Naturally, Correa’s rejection of neoliberal policies has earned him a fair share of enemies, especially among the elites who have traditionally governed Ecuador. In 2010, he resisted a coup attempt [18] led by Lucio Gutierrez, a former president who earned the wrath of Ecuador’s poor by implementing crushing IMF-imposed austerity measures.

Correa’s opponents may have resorted to zero-sum politics, but his response has not always been judicious. He has, for example, advanced [19] criminal libel laws as a means of punishing opposition media and has battled indigenous groups that protested his attempts to open their land up to wide-scale state mining operations. The Committee to Protect Journalists has accused [20] Correa of leading Ecuador “into a new era of widespread repression.”

Of all the enemies Correa has earned, some of his fiercest reside not in Quito, but in the conservative think tanks of Washington. They include George W. Bush’s former Latin America handlers and a coterie of corporate-bankrolled right-wing radicals determined to unravel the South American socialist bloc.

Ezequiel Vazquez Ger, [21] an Argentina-born economist, is among the most aggressive of Correa’s antagonists. Vazquez Ger works for a DC-based lobbying firm run by Otto Reich, a Cuban exile who served as the Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs under the second Bush administration. In 1987, Reich was singled out [22] during the US Comptroller General’s investigation of Iran-Contra for having “engaged in prohibited, covert propaganda activities” on behalf of the Nicaraguan Contras. He is also suspected [23] of helping the anti-Castro terrorist Orlando Bosch escape prosecution in Venezuela.

Reich contracted Vazquez Ger in 2011 to help him oversee a portfolio of corporate clients [24] that included Lockheed Martin, Exxon Mobil, and Bacardi International, the rum company whose lawyers drafted much of the 1996 Helms-Burton Act tightening the US embargo of Cuba. Before he partnered with Reich, Vazquez Ger served as a Latin American fellow at the Atlas Economic Research Foundation, [25] a corporate funded think tank that promotes climate change denialism and sweeping deregulation policies.

To compliment their lobbying operation, Vazquez Ger and Reich have churned out a steady stream [21] of op-eds for publications from Foreign Policy to Fox News to the Miami Herald, [26] demonizing the socialist leaders of South America who have stifled the ambitions of multi-national corporations. During the past year, they homed in on Correa, assailing him for sheltering Assange while he cracked down on opposition media. In a June 2012 op-ed [27] for the right-wing Newsmax website, Reich and Vazquez Ger cited Assange as a key reason why the US should refuse to sign any further trade agreements with Ecuador. “Signing or renewing trade agreements with Ecuador will only allow Rafael Correa to continue undermining US foreign policy,” they wrote, “trading with our enemies, and destroying his country’s democracy.” (Following threats from Congress over its alleged offer to shelter Snowden, Ecuador’s government unilaterally rejected [28] US trade preferences).

When Buzzfeed published its expose on Ecuador, Vazquez Ger was overjoyed. A heavily trafficked US news site had recycled he and Reich’s attacks on Correa’s support for Assange, this time framing Ecuador’s president as a hypocrite for supposedly offering asylum to Snowden. At 7:28 PM on June 25 -- a full 27 minutes after the article appeared -- Vazquez Ger took to Twitter to promote [29] the piece to his Spanish-language followers. Next, he personally thanked [30] Buzzfeed Editor-in-Chief Ben Smith “for unmasking [Correa’s] hypocrisy.”

The following day, at a press conference in Ecuador, Interior Minister Jose Serrano was asked to answer for the Buzzfeed report. Buzzfeed’s Gray quickly picked up Serrano’s defensive comments, quoting them [31] in a follow-up story alongside a strident denunciation of Correa’s sheltering of Assange by Cléver Jiménez, a key opposition leader. Meanwhile, Alek Boyd projected the story of Ecuador’s surveillance deal into South American media, publishing it as an “exclusive” [32] in Semana, a leading Colombian daily.

Whoever planted the story with Buzzfeed appeared to have scored a major success, exploiting the Snowden drama to tarnish the image of Ecuador’s government. Though the identity of the source that triggered the operation may never be known, their agenda does not seem to be much of a mystery anymore.

See more stories tagged with:

buzzfeed [33],

Snowden [34],

ben smith [35]

---

Source URL: http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/exposing-dark-forces-behind-snowden-smears

Links:

[1] http://alternet.org

[2] http://www.alternet.org/authors/max-blumenthal

[3] http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/greenwald-reporter-broke-nsa-story-lawyer-sued-porn-biz-article-1.1383448

[4] http://www.buzzfeed.com/jtes/how-glenn-greenwald-became-glenn-greenwald

[5] https://twitter.com/jackshafer/status/350058336105934848

[6] http://www.buzzfeed.com/rosiegray/exclusive-documents-illuminate-ecuadors-spying-practices

[7] http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/jun/28/edward-snowden-ecuador-julian-assange

[8] http://www.vanityfair.com/online/eichenwald/2013/06/errors-edward-snowden-global-hypocrisy-tour

[9] http://alekboyd.blogspot.com/2013/06/edward-snowden-ecuador-rafael-correa-julian-assange-wikileaks.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+AlekBoyd+(Alek+Boyd)

[10] https://twitter.com/alekboyd/status/349832582873088000

[11] http://gawker.com/5922038/remix-everything-buzzfeed-and-the-plagiarism-problem

[12] http://www.michaelmoore.com/words/mike-friends-blog/my-final-word-buzzfeed-and-emad-burnats-detention-lax

[13] http://alekboyd.blogspot.com/

[14] http://electronicintifada.net/content/oslo-freedom-forum-founders-ties-islamophobes-who-inspired-mass-killer-anders-breivik/12451

[15] http://alekboyd.blogspot.com/2010/06/guadalupe-llori-and-justice-in-ecuador.html

[16] http://jodca-venezuela.blogspot.com/2008/07/alek-boyd-visits-venezuela-interview.html

[17] http://www.buzzfeed.com/rosiegray/is-this-the-face-of-a-new-global-human-rights-movement

[18] http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/oct/01/rafael-correa-ecuador-coup

[19] http://www.hrw.org/americas/ecuador

[20] http://www.cpj.org/reports/2011/09/confrontation-repression-correa-ecuador.php

[21] http://www.americas-forum.com/opinion/ezequiel-vazquez-ger/

[22] http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2002/10/14/021014fa_fact1?currentPage=all

[23] http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2002/feb/08/britainand911.usa

[24] http://www.ottoreich.com/www.ottoreichassociates.com/Samples_of_Work.html

[25] http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Atlas_Economic_Research_Foundation

[26] http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/05/02/3377184/ecuadors-correa-a-continued-assault.html#.UYgWrGnNCys.twitter

[27] http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/Ecuador-trade-Assange-Correa/2012/06/22/id/443202#ixzz2XV3nUe3D

[28] http://www.miamiherald.com/2013/06/27/v-print/3473295/ecuador-rejects-us-trade-preferences.html

[29] https://twitter.com/ezequielvazquez/status/349670392266358784

[30] https://twitter.com/ezequielvazquez/status/350080341056299008

[31] http://www.buzzfeed.com/rosiegray/ecuador-defends-domestic-surveillance

[32] http://www.semana.com/mundo/articulo/rafael-correa-tambien-espia-ciudadanos/348935-3

[33] http://www.alternet.org/tags/buzzfeed

[34] http://www.alternet.org/tags/snowden

[35] http://www.alternet.org/tags/ben-smith

[36] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B