The Cold who came in from the Spies

Joshua Cold, that is.

Via whatdoesitmean.

THE “SNOWDEN IS READY TO COME HOME!” STORY: A CASE STUDY IN TYPICAL MEDIA DECEIT

BY GLENN GREENWALD @ggreenwald

WEDNESDAY AT 1:30 PM

Most sentient people rationally accept that the U.S. media routinely disseminates misleading stories and outright falsehoods in the most authoritative tones. But it’s nonetheless valuable to examine particularly egregious case studies to see how that works. In that spirit, let’s take yesterday’s numerous, breathless reports trumpeting the “BREAKING” news that “Edward Snowden now wants to come home!” and is “now negotiating the terms of his return!”....

Greenwald's story is over 2,330 words long. That would be nearly eight typewritten pages. It is entirely about how these allegations, if you want to call them that, because they sound harmless enough, are not false, but not breaking news either, since Eduardo has been saying he wants to come home and working with lawyers ever since he arrived in Hong Kong. That is an "egregious case" of "typical media deceit" (neat trick being egregious and typical at the same time, too), and it takes more words for Greenwald to expose it than Hemingway needed for "Up in Michigan". I would guess that most sentient people have not even asked themselves how authoritative are the tones with which the US media routinely disseminate their stories and falsehoods, let alone accepted the fact, rationally or otherwise. Worldwide, most sentient people don't follow the US media at all.

But the story (at least as I saw it, very calmly and concisely reported by Alexandra Odynova in the New York Times) is not really all that breathless, misleading, or outright. (You get a little more breathlessness from the Daily News, but not all that much, considering.) Though they missed the part I would have liked to read, which you can get some idea from poking around (thanks, Google Translate!) in the Russian press.

Blackout Blues

Image via TodayInWebDesign.

At Jonathan Turley's blog is a post (signed by Charlton Stanley, PhD) alleging a US "media blackout" of Edward Snowden's interview on the German government–run TV station ARD:

The interview was big news in Germany and much of the world in both print and broadcast media. However, the interview appears to have been blocked intentionally by US government authorities. In fact, the media in the US appears to have gone to ‘radio silence’ about it.

I left the following in the comments section:

Verrilli I say unto you

The Department of Justice doesn't know whether the warrantless wiretapping given to it as a parting gift by G.W. Bush's 110th Congress is constitutional or not, and would like to find out:

Five years after Congress authorized a sweeping warrantless surveillance program, the Justice Department is setting up a potential Supreme Court test of whether it is constitutional by notifying a criminal defendant — for the first time — that evidence against him derived from the eavesdropping, according to officials.

Prosecutors plan to inform the defendant about the monitoring in the next two weeks, a law enforcement official said. The move comes after an internal Justice Department debate in which Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr. argued that there was no legal basis for a previous practice of not disclosing links to such surveillance, several Obama administration officials familiar with the deliberations said.

A couple of quick points: [jump]

Image from Jammer-Store.

Don't make me

Personally I don't think Edward Snowden should be charged with espionage under a ridiculous misuse of the statute, and apparently charging him with theft of government property is a violation of sensible Justice Department rules, so if that's the best they can come up with maybe they really should just drop the case altogether. Especially if it gives Michael Hayden a sad.

That said, I just cannot get over what a crappy case it is as a poster child against the abuses of the US intelligence agencies foreign and domestic or for the improved protection of federal whistleblowers. This is shown more clearly than ever by the way the New York Times has jumped on it as part of their campaign to show that the Obama administration is more totalitarian in tendency than that of Cheney because even Stalin wouldn't have been mean to David Sanger. I refer to Friday's editorial in which the Times claims, with some reason, that

Greenwald's literary errors

Santiaguito, Guatemala, 2005.

Bureaucrat Decries Unauthorized Disclosures that Make Him Look Bad

Or as Glenn Greenwald's copy editor at The Intercept, who I believe is Glenn Greenwald, put it,

Glorious Fifth

South Fayetteville, PA.

Was that the grand finale of the Snowden fireworks display that showed up in the Washington Post on Saturday (instead of the Intercept, which went silent three weeks ago), with the unacceptable part, the naming of victims, removed?

“As with a fireworks show, you want to save your best for last,” Greenwald told GQ magazine. “The last one is the one where the sky is all covered in spectacular multicoloured hues.” (Real Clear Politics)

What did I tell you?

Chertoff's Gut Terror Alert System. By James Joyner, July 2007.

What I told you, at the beginning of August, was that if reports of a "conference call" or whatever among senior Al-Qa'eda officials planning some kind of massive strike on an unnamed US embassy were true, it was not necessarily true that they were planning

Cheap shots: Rubinesque

The good Jennifer Rubin.

The other Jennifer Rubin, the one who hasn't spent her life making the world a slightly better place, has come up with a listicle of favorite Republican moments of the week, with an air of desperate, Rubinesque randomness:

Best visuals on announcement: Former Texas governor Rick Perry in an airplane hanger surrounded by veterans made for a compelling tableau. Since then, he’s had one of the strongest performances in the field.

OK Jennifer, so this is an airplane hanger (works better for shirts than for airplanes; Rick Perry is smaller than an airplane, but he still wouldn't fit):

Tempelhof Airplane Hanger.

This is an airplane hangar with Rick Perry in it, making for a compelling visual but unable to attract Sean Hannity's attention:

Snowdeniana

Hong Kong. Photo by Philippe Lopez/AFP/Getty, via The Guardian.

Odd little detail, on the demonstrations yesterday in Hong Kong in support of Edward Snowden and his stand in favor of Hong Kong's famous tradition of unsurveilled* free speech: It should be obvious to anybody with any experience of the situation that the Beijing government is quietly backing the demonstrations—some protests in Hong Kong are in brave and magnificent opposition, but this is not one of them—and yet from the US press coverage it's just about impossible to tell; looking at the Times, CNN, and Reuters (via Raw Story), only the last even hints at it: [jump]

Alt.Snowden

Image via Pastor Chris Owens.

Woke up with an alternative narrative designed—I'll be up front about this—to maintain my preconceptions intact, to keep my eyes jaundiced in the way they were before: the Le Carré version, in which the young and caring are abused by the careerist game-players.

1. The question about Greenwald isn't, Is he a journalist? It's, Since when did he become a reporter? Of course he's a journalist if he wants to be, and a very skilled one in many ways, but what he wants to be is a journalist in a movie, with the international intrigue and romance, dead drops and car chases, vast plutocrat conspiracies swirling around him: he wants to be a kind of public spook, running his joes in the public eye.

2. The question about Snowden is, How did somebody so smart get to be so stupid? Why does he act like a brave and silly 16-year-old, happy to go to jail for the sake of suffering humanity until they tell him he can't take his laptop with him? Why does he think somebody's self-serving PowerPoint presentation is a literal representation of the truth? Why does he think the Chinese government in Hong Kong or the Russian government at Sheremetyevo would be spying on him less than the NSA in Honolulu? Well, that's libertarianism for you—delay in growing out of adolescent solipsism.

3. The question about Obama is, How cynical is he? I can't digest the picture of Obama talking like a hippie to make everybody vote for him while he's really Nixon in his heart, because talking like a hippie to make everybody vote for you doesn't work. Just ask President Kucinich. I think the right is halfway right about Obama: he's a socialist, but a real Fabian, building it 50 years from now and unable to brook criticism from the left precisely because we're the ones who ought to understand that it can't be done any faster. (But Mr. P, you're really not giving us much to work with on the security side of the picture.)

In this story, Snowden has been used, his yearning to be a hero, his techie cleverness, his relaxed and reassuring presence. It was a crappy, undercooked plan. The information it collected wasn't all that devastating, merely evidence of what everybody already knew (however shocked-shocked the diplomatic world may be); and it left poor Edward under the bus. I like him—he reminds my of my own 16-year-old, actually—like I like Bradley Manning, but I think Greenwald, and Assange, are a little bit careless.

Martha Vickers as Daisy in George Cukor's imaginary film of The Great Gatsby.

Glorious Fifth: Postscript

Looks like the promised sky-covering fireworks naming of Snowden names at Pierre Omidyar's Intercept really has taken place after all, not on the fifth of July, but close. It's possibly the most shocking misbehavior by the NSA reported in the Snowden documents so far—involving the targeting of American citizens and even a Republican!—and I'm really glad to see it come out:

So you don't trust Obama? Compared to the Eye of Sauron?

.@pierre certainly is for me. When giant unaccountable corps align against a govt with electoral system I will always be biased toward govt
— Yastreblyansky (@Yastreblyansky) December 11, 2013

I'm pretty sure I really mean this, though it's always hard to be totally certain. Government is not always right by any means, and it may not be right in the present case, but if it is pitted against Microsoft, Facebook, Google, AOL, Yahoo, and LinkedIn that is to me a prima facie indication that it just might be right this time. Or not "right", that's absurd when you're talking about the behavior of intelligence agencies, but more interested than the corporations, in spite of appearances, in being on my side and on the side of the rabble in general.

Has there ever been a historical case where an elected government clearly in the wrong was opposed by the corporate establishment? Did the railway and telegraph magnates tell [jump]

Headquarters of Field Marshal Lord Raglan, sometime between 1855 and 1865. 

Cheap shots and million-dollar troupers

Wikipedia.

I think you've got something there, Billo:

Fox News host Bill O'Reilly on Tuesday said he was unhappy with how some media outlets characterized his questions for President Obama during the pre-Super Bowl interview.

"I was watching the cable competition last night, and the unusual suspects are going, 'Oh! A Republican!' The Associated Press, their headline of the interview was: ‘President Obama Defends Himself from Republican Charges,'" O'Reilly said on "Fox and Friends." "These aren't questions that all Americans should be interested in?" (TPM)

Yes! They aren't! In fact if there are any non-Republican Americans in the audience who are interested in the IRS investigations of Tea Party 501(C)(4)s, the issue of whether [jump]

Got paranoia?

Updates below:

Salvador Dali, Swans Reflecting Elephants, 1937.

So Israeli spies have been listening to Secretary Kerry's telephone calls made on unencrypted phone systems over the past year as he tried to negotiate a deal between Israel and Palestine, along with "at least one other secret service", but you can't find out whose, according to Le Nouvel Observateur:

un autre service de renseignement d’un pays non identifié a lui aussi écouté les communications du chef de la diplomatie américaine lorsqu’il utilisait un téléphone portable non sécurisé au lieu des systèmes cryptés, ce qui lui est arrivé plus d’une fois.

(I assume they looked behind Spiegel's subscription wall to make sure, as I was unwilling to do.)

Well, I'm willing to hazard a guess on the identity of that secret service, too contrarian for Slate, too paranoid for the Firebaggers, and too baroque for anybody but the late Norman Mailer, who might well have written it, and its initials are C.I.A., at war with the Obama administration since January 2009. I'm not even kidding. [8/4/14: It looks like speculation on CIA spying on Kerry is false. See below. Y]

Here were Mark Mazzetti and Scott Shane a little before the inauguration:

Got paranoia? Update

Toilet in Tobermory, Ontario, via Dima's Corner.

I haven't wanted to dive into this toilet for quite a long time, because it's really not my subject, but I happened to notice a silly falsehood from Mark Rumold for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, at Professor Cole's place:

Reports today in the New York Times and ProPublica confirm what EFF’s Jewel v. NSA lawsuit has claimed since 2008—that the NSA and AT&T have collaborated to build a domestic surveillance infrastructure, resulting in unconstitutional seizure and search of of millions, if not hundreds of millions, of Americans’ Internet communications.

Well, no, they don't confirm that at all. Yes, the tight relationship between NSA and AT&T seems to be demonstrated, but as the Times introduction to the documents makes clear,

The Eeyore Caucus

[Update: Revised toward the end for clarity 2/1/2015.]

Via StopMeBeforeIVoteAgain.

Vivid piece by Jeff Stein at Newsweek about the Israeli-style assassination of the Hezbollah terror architect Imad Mugniyah in Damascus in February 2008, which turns out not to have been Israeli at all but our own CIA.

Mugniyah was apparently a very dangerous and bad man, too, the alleged planner of the 1983 bombings of the US barracks and embassy in Beirut and many other bombings, murders, and kidnapings, including the bombings of the Israeli embassy and Jewish community center in Buenos Aires in 1992 and 1994. On the other hand, his involvement in these things has never been proven, and it's not clear that he was up to anything at the time of the killing other than visiting one of his wives, and the assassination looks very much like one of those bad things of which Obama is always being accused, an extrajudicial execution without trial.

But a curious detail of the story, noted by Laura Rozen, is that Bush's DCI, Michael Hayden, was worried himself that the strike might be illegal:

Exchange

From BooMan Tribune, explaining maybe better than I could do with a normal post how I feel about the NSA horror show. I expect the brilliant and exceedingly well-informed Tarheel Dem (I don't often have courage to disagree with him, and much more often don't disagree at all) will be replying to my last over there, where you can keep following it if you're interested.

Big Data. From the GoodData blog.

Re: Serious Questions (4.00 / 2) Techies were always there on issues of privacy and of course drugs. They vote Republican because of taxes. They're only being political about privacy now because it's suddenly a Republican issue, and because the Snowden revelations reveal that rich white boys can be spied on. (Though in fact it's no likelier than it ever was.) by yastreblyansky on Sat Aug 17th, 2013 at 01:45:35 PM EST [ Parent | Reply to This ]

Re: Serious Questions (none / 0) You're saying there's a "rich white boy" block on NSA searches? 50 states, 210 media markets, 435 Congressional Districts, 3080 counties, 192,480 precincts by TarheelDem on Sat Aug 17th, 2013 at 01:47:25 PM EST [ Parent | Reply to This |   none 0-Mega Troll 1-Troll 2-Warning! 3-Good 4-Excellent  ] [jump]

And in the international Greenwalding circuit

Used for somewhat relevant purposes by YoStatus.

Earlier this week, Greenwald came so close to noticing himself being wrong about something:

Snowden was almost certain this meant that the NSA had identified him as the likely source of the leaks, but I was sceptical. "If they thought you did this, they'd send hordes of FBI agents with a search warrant and probably Swat teams, not a single NSA officer and a human-resources person." I figured this was just an automatic and routine inquiry, triggered when an NSA employee goes absent for a few weeks without explanation.

But the moment passed quickly. It wouldn't be the last time, anyway, that he was unnecessarily terrified of the jack-booted thugs of our police state. There was this, for instance, from October 2013:

Glenn Greenwald would like to go home to the United States, at least for a visit. But the Guardian journalist and blogger is afraid to do so. He still has material and unpublished stories from his contacts with fugitive whistleblower Edward Snowden that he believes U.S. authorities would love to get their hands on.  The nine-hour detention and interrogation of Greenwald's Brazilian partner David Miranda by British security services at London's Heathrow airport in August has only compounded his fears.

I remember! I was so struck by the way Wallace Shawn was forced to go to hot, unpleasant Brazil to stage a private performance of his Greenwald play just last January so Greenwald could see it without risking his life. And yet our intrepid journalist managed to show up in April to collect his Polk Award. So now he's afraid to go to England:

There’s only one country that has been consciously excluded from the tour – in fact, only one country in the world that Greenwald says he absolutely will not visit. It is the UK. The wounds left by the detention under the Terrorism Act of his partner, Miranda, at Heathrow airport last August, are still open and deep.... “I don’t trust them not to detain me, interrogate me and even arrest me. Their behaviour has been so extreme and offensive, and the political and media class was so supportive of it, that I feel uncomfortable with the entire atmosphere,” says Greenwald.

Does that mean he's angling for a Hackademy Award from the Press Gazette for his work getting interviewed by Guardian reporters? Only Time (or more likely Spiegel) will tell. Meanwhile Zandar the Great and Terrible informs us that Glenn got that movie deal, with Sony Pictures, or as Glenn affectionately calls them

Liberal Hollywood has produced the ultimate hagiography of the most secretive arm of America's National Security State, while liberal film critics lead the parade of praise and line up to bestow it with every imaginable accolade

 so it's all good.

How come they call it intelligence?

I feel funny about suggesting that our August THREAT might have more to do with the NSA's harried public relations than with Al Qa'eda. I've been very wrong about this before, notably during the Clinton administration, when I couldn't believe what they were saying about this Osama bin Laden. It seemed to me so obvious that he was a comic book villain made up by the CIA to justify bombing Sudan or the FBI to justify rounding up Arabs. But of course he wasn't.

Still, it seems so odd that Ayman al-Zawahiri should be choosing this precise moment to be "chattering" over the Internet about his plans, which everyone agrees he normally doesn't do, just as the world is learning about the NSA's ability to listen in. Unless he wants them listening, of course.

And I've read enough cheap spy fiction to think of a scenario that works like that. Zawahiri's reading his Washington Post about Snowden, and he's wondering how this can be, that the devil Crusaders are allowing their wicked ways to be exposed like this, unless they want him, Zawahiri, to know about it, or to know more than he already suspects. He can't imagine this ridiculous nerd is simply telling people, on his own initiative, without being instantly assassinated, he must be a tool of the Yankees. Because maybe they're bluffing, pretending to have a capacity they don't actually have. So he decides to test it out, and tosses off an email  places a conference call to the boys in Yemen Somalia: "O my brothers, could you kindly stage a horrible big incident preferably involving a US embassy somewhere in the neighborhood, sometime this month? Or a consulate will do, just not Benghazi. What did you think of the season end of Game of Thrones? Let us know by the usual channels if there's anything we can get you. Your friend  Have a good one," etc. The usual channels being the couriers they normally use to bypass electronic eavesdropping.

So the NSA picks up on this startling development and gets all excited. Al Qa'eda's planning something! And pretty soon everybody's mobilized and terrorized and the embassies are all closed down and Dr. Evil up there is saying yup, I guess they can read my email monitor my phone all right.

“This was like a meeting of the Legion of Doom,” one U.S. intelligence officer told The Daily Beast, referring to the coalition of villains featured in the Saturday morning cartoon Super Friends. (Gawker, via Betty Cracker)

Of course in this case, ironically, the NSA will have done itself considerably more harm than Snowden did. But that's intelligence for you. Wonder why they call it that?

How should I know? I'm just a federal judge!

NSA data collection. Photo by Julian Stratenschulte/EPA, via The Guardian.

Adam Serwer at MSNBC, showing how

Judge destroys ‘just metadata’ argument

it is the collection of metadata that Snowden’s leaked court order exposed – the frequency, duration, and identifying numbers for the calls – which can reveal a universe of information about a target even without capturing the content of the conversation.