GG is to be complimented for engaging on Twitter. That could be the most lasting of the outlets due to its free swarming and lack of wealth accumulation and concentration by hierarchical rewarding of the very top, commercial journalism (acknowledging the Twitter owners stealing the values of the free tweets). Tweets are only about self- and product promotion. Not like this grafitti billboard. Most of GG's statement comes right out of Silicon Valley playbook for acquiring hard-luck journalism. Use of "thrilling" is the clue the saved emit upon envisioning the IPO, which is what GG is PRing about as required of NGO beneficiaries of great wealth. The Snowden pact was superceded by the Omidyar pact. A buyout of a fledgling venture by a vulture continuing to prowl for rabbits. The vulture is the commercial components coutured by the non-profits. GG is disingenuous about the separation, as PGP was about Symantec takeover, as RSA was about EMC's. Many journalists aquired by Omidyar and Bezos have made similar statements of "irresistable" rescue by better endowed kingpins. And, yes, founders do appreciate the windfall, sign NDAs, relieve their desperate families, and move on to being celebrities, their brands prostituted to continue the windfall deal to keep quiet, to say nothing disparaging. Seymour Hersh and many others have told about their experinences with short-attention span of journalist publishers and their advertisers, TV producers, movie underwriters as fans move massively toward other markets. Edward Snowden should prepare to be royally screwed as Manning has been. This is the ancient tradition of brass sacrificing grunts for noble causes, the careers of generals and above. At 08:36 AM 1/7/2014, you wrote:

On Sun, Nov 17, 2013 at 7:02 PM, coderman <coderman@gmail.com> wrote:

...

... the Omidyar buyout of Greenwald and Poitras apparently to shield the willful, disgraceful corporate role in pervasive privacy destruction...

GG refutes this premise entirely, and with conviction:

http://utdocuments.blogspot.com.br/2014/01/email-exchange-with-reader-over-f... """ (4) The claim that we are "holding back documents" for some nefarious or self-interested purpose is and always has been false. I have discussed many times before - most prominently here - why our agreement with our source, along with related legal issues, prevents any sort of mass release of documents, but I have been working endlessly, as has Laura, to continue to publish stories all around the world, including publishing many stories and documents after we formed our new venture.

Not only have I published new documents in Norway, Sweden, France, Spain, and Holland after we formed our new venture, but I also published one of the most attention-generating stories yet in the Huffington Post just five weeks ago. Similarly, Laura has published numerous big articles and key NSA documents in both der Spiegel and the NYT after we formed our new venture. We're doing the exact opposite of this accusation: we're publishing documents and stories aggressively all over the world with other media outlets until our First Look site is ready.

We will continue to publish aggressively with other outlets until we are up and running at First Look. In fact, I am working right now with other news outlets, including in the U.S., on big stories. I'm not "holding back" anything: of all the many entities with thousands of Snowden documents, I have published more NSA documents, in more nations around the world, than anyone. And there are many, many more that will be published in the short-term.

But - and this is critical - in his Washington Post interview with Snowden last month, Bart Gellman noted "Snowden's insistence, to this reporter and others, that he does not want the documents published in bulk." From the start, Snowden indeed repeatedly insisted on that.

Anyone who demands that we "release all documents" - or even release large numbers in bulk - is demanding that we violate our agreement with our source, disregard the framework we created when he gave us the documents, jeopardize his interests in multiple ways, and subject him to far greater legal (and other) dangers. I find that demand to be unconscionable, and we will never, ever violate our agreement with him no matter how many people want us to.

That said, we have published an extraordinary number of top secret NSA documents around the world in a short period of time. And our work is very far from done: there are many, many more documents and stories that we will publish.

Toward that end, we have very carefully increased the number of journalists and experts who are working on these documents and who have access to them. We are now working with more experts in cryptography and hacking than ever. One of the most exciting things about our new organization is that we now have the resources to process and report these documents more quickly and efficiently than ever before, consistent with ensuring that we don't make the kinds of errors that would allow others to attack the reporting.

These documents are complex. Sometimes they take a good deal of reporting to fill in some of the gaps. From the start, people have been eager for us to make serious mistakes so they can exploit them to discredit the reporting, and so we work very hard to make sure that doesn't happen. That takes time. Convincing media institutions (and their armies of risk-averse lawyers, editors and executives) to publish documents, the aggressive way we think they need to be published, also often takes a lot of time.

When we began our reporting in June by publishing a new story every day, even our allies - people who work on these issues for a living - complained that the releases were coming too fast to process, understand, or keep up with, and argued that each story needs time to be processed and to allow people to react.

In terms of effects, I think it's hard to argue with the strategy. Even seven months later, the story continues to dominate headlines around the world and to trigger what Chelsea Manning described in her private chat as her goal when whistleblowing: "worldwide discussion, debates, and reforms". That's why Edward Snowden made clear to Bart Gellman that he "succeeded beyond plausible ambition."

For the same reason, I'm proud that we're trying to amplify the lessons and maximize the impact of these disclosures even more through things like books and films, which can reach and affect audiences that political reporting by itself never can. I've been working for many years warning of the dangers of state surveillance and the value of internet freedom and privacy, and am thrilled to now be able to have those messages heard much more loudly and clearly than ever before by using all platforms to communicate them.

In sum, I know that we have been and continue to be extremely faithful and loyal to the agreement we entered into with our source, and are doing our journalism exactly as we assured him he would. As Snowden himself has said, he thinks that, too. That continues to be a critically important metric for me. """