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.

Cheap shot: Not grim, not dank

Lindsay Mills, in a YouTube screenshot captured by Stimme Russlands, Moscow's German-language radio station, where the Cold War does not seem to be quite over—I'm talking about pleased announcements that the Russian Federation has overtaken the US in the number of strategic nuclear warheads.

If you happened to be worried about Eduardo Snowden and how he's been bearing up in his strange new life of exile and whatever, and I'm not saying you were worried, but just in case, Glenn Greenwald at the Intercept wants to assure you that you need worry no longer, because he's doing just fine:

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:

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)

Quanto mi piaci mai, semplicità!

Phoenix.

And here's intrepid journalist Èdvard Snouden in the Guardian, explaining his controversial interview with Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin:

I was surprised that people who witnessed me risk my life to expose the surveillance practices of my own country could not believe that I might also criticise the surveillance policies of Russia, a country to which I have sworn no allegiance, without ulterior motive. I regret that my question could be misinterpreted, and that it enabled many to ignore the substance of the question – and Putin's evasive response – in order to speculate, wildly and incorrectly, about my motives for asking it.

Let the record show that I, for one, would easily believe that he might have criticized the neo-Tsarist police state without ulterior motive, and I'm also starting to believe that story that Greenwald promised him he could go to China and enjoy their freedom of speech and have his own pet phoenix. But not everybody involved is so innocent, starting with Vladimir Vladimirovich and working back to 2009 or so, when the CIA sent young Snowden to NSA by means of a very curious mistake.

Cheap shots and fever spots

Dark... edgy... conservative...



Wednesday Addams deals with the national debt. The film's auteur is—apparently—John Hilt, head of the little known and less effective Exposing Marxists PAC (h/t The Wire). His letter to Louisiana Representative Louis Gohmert suggests he's an entrepreneurial job-creaty seeker after some of that wingnut grift:

Ukraine, I kraine...

Things go better w @CocaCola v @Obewise RT @MarquardtA Another from the "Militants with Kids" series from Sloviansk pic.twitter.com/aFOvL3UWlZ
— Ani Wandaryan (@GoldenTent) April 16, 2014

I have a Croatian friend—for well over 20 years, in fact, meaning I first really got to know him during the collapse of Yugoslavia, when he was pretty militant, as you might be too if you knew Slobodan Milošević was trying to murder your mother along with all her neighbors, and even though one of his best friends was a Serb. But he mellowed to some extent thereafter.

At the beginning of 1993, he caught me mocking the Czechs and the Slovaks over the pathetic character of their national breakup, when they couldn't afford to have [jump]

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:

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

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

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.