Omidyar influence in new Greenwald venture [was: SRF: cryptic]

coderman coderman at gmail.com
Fri Nov 29 19:26:55 PST 2013


On Sun, Nov 17, 2013 at 7:02 PM, coderman <coderman at gmail.com> wrote:
> see http://cryptome.org/2013/11/omidyar-extraordinary.pdf
>
> the Omidyar buyout of Greenwald and Poitras apparently to shield the
> willful, disgraceful corporate role in pervasive privacy destruction
> by faux beating of the state proper, as embodied by the NSA, CIA, and
> their tax payer funded patsies...
>
> effective disclosure dies.


see also:
"Keeping Secrets: Pierre Omidyar, Glenn Greenwald and the
privatization of Snowden’s leaks"
http://pando.com/2013/11/27/keeping-secrets/
 - BY MARK AMES, NOVEMBER 27, 2013

---

Who “owns” the NSA secrets leaked by Edward Snowden to reporters Glenn
Greenwald and Laura Poitras?

Given that eBay founder Pierre Omidyar just invested a quarter of a
billion dollars to
personally hire Greenwald and Poitras for his new for-profit media
venture, it’s a question worth asking.

It’s especially worth asking since it became clear that Greenwald and
Poitras are now the only two people with full access to the complete
cache of NSA files, which are said to number anywhere from 50,000 to
as many as 200,000 files. That’s right: Snowden doesn’t have the files
any more, the Guardian doesn’t have them, the Washington Post doesn’t
have them… just Glenn and Laura at the for-profit journalism company
created by the founder of eBay.

Edward Snowden has popularly been compared to major whistleblowers
such as Daniel Ellsberg,Chelsea Manning and Jeffrey Wigand. However,
there is an important difference in the Snowden files that has so far
gone largely unnoticed. Whistleblowing has traditionally served the
public interest. In this case, it is about to serve the interests of a
billionaire starting a for-profit media business venture. This is
truly unprecedented. Never before has such a vast trove of public
secrets been sold wholesale to a single billionaire as the foundation
of a for-profit company.

Think about other famous leakers: Daniel Ellsberg neither monetized
nor monopolized the Pentagon Papers. Instead, he leaked them to well
over a dozen different newspapers and media outlets such as the New
York Times and Washington Post, and to a handful of sitting senators —
one of whom, Mike Gravel, read over 4,000 of the 7,000 pages into the
Congressional record before collapsing from exhaustion. The Papers
were published in book form by a small nonprofit run by the Unitarian
Church, Beacon House Press.

Chelsea Manning, responsible for the largest mass leaks of government
secrets ever, leaked everything to WikiLeaks, a nonprofit venture that
has largely struggled to make ends meet in its seven years of
existence. Julian Assange, for all of his flaws, cannot be accused of
crudely enriching himself from his privileged access to Manning’s
leaks; instead, he shared his entire trove with a number of
established media outlets including the Guardian, New York Times, Le
Monde and El Pais. Today, Chelsea Manning is serving a 35-year
sentence in a military prison, while the Private Manning Support
Network constantly struggles to raise funds from donations; Assange
has spent the last year and a half inside Ecuador’s embassy in London,
also struggling to raise funds to run the WikiLeaks operation.

A similar story emerges in the biggest private sector analogy — the
tobacco industry leaks by whistleblowers Merrell Williams and Jeffrey
Wigand. After suffering lawsuits, harassment and attempts to destroy
their livelihoods, both eventually won awards as part of the massive
multibillion dollar settlements — but the millions of confidential
tobacco documents now belong to the public, maintained by a nonprofit,
the American Legacy Project, whose purpose is to help scholars and
reporters and scientists fight tobacco propaganda and power. Every
year, over 400,000 Americans die from tobacco-related illnesses.

The point is this: In the most successful whistleblower cases, the
public has sided with the selfless whistleblower against the power- or
profit-driven entity whose secrets were leaked. The Snowden case
represents a new twist to the heroic whistleblower story arc: After
successfully convincing a large part of the public and the American
Establishment that Snowden’s leaks serve a higher public interest,
Greenwald promptly sold those secrets to a billionaire.

He justified this purely on grounds of self-interest, calling
Omidyar’s offer “a once-in-a-career dream journalistic opportunity.”
Speaking to the Washington Post, Greenwald used crude careerist
terminology to justify his decision to privatize the Snowden secrets:

“It would be impossible for any journalist, let alone me, to decline
this opportunity.”

Let alone me.

News about Greenwald-Poitras’ decision to privatize the NSA cache came
just days after the New York Times reported on Greenwald’s
negotiations with major movie studios to sell a Snowden film. This
past summer, Greenwald sold a book to Metropolitan Books for a
reportedly hefty sum, promising that some of the most sensational
revelations from Snowden’s leaks would be saved for the book.

Indeed what makes the NSA secrets so valuable to Greenwald and Poitras
is that the two of them have exclusive access to the entire cache.
Essentially they have a monopoly over secrets that belong to the
public. For a time, it was assumed that Snowden had kept copies of the
leaked documents, possibly on a number of laptops he was carting
around the world. Greenwald and Poitras were simply conduits between
Snowden’s cache and the public. In late August, Greenwald disclosed
for the first time in a statement to BuzzFeed:

“Only Laura and I have access to the full set of documents which
Snowden provided to journalists.”

Later, from his hideout in Russia, Snowden released a statement
claiming he had left all the NSA files behind in Hong Kong for
Greenwald and Poitras to take. A third Guardian journalist in Hong
Kong at the time, Ewen MacAskill, confirmed to me on Twitter that only
Greenwald and Poitras took with them the full cache. Even the Guardian
was not allowed access to the motherlode.

Clearly, in a story as sensational and global and alluring as
Snowden’s Secrets™, exclusive access equals value. And for the first
time in whistleblower history, that value has been extracted in full
through privatization.

It is one thing for Greenwald to maintain that exclusivity — or
monopoly — while working with the Guardian, a nonprofit with
institutional experience in investigative journalism. It is quite
another for him to sell them to a guy with a history of putting
profits before public interest. As Yasha Levine and I wrote at
NSFWCORP, Omidyar invested in a third-world micro-loans company whose
savage bullying of debtors resulted in mass suicides. Rather than
acknowledge this tragedy, Omidyar Network simply deleted reference to
the company from his website when the shit hit the fan.

This — this? — is the guy we’re supposed to trust with the as-yet
unpublished NSA files? He’s the one we’re relying on to reveal any
dark secrets about the tech industry’s collusion with the NSA? Let’s
hope there’s nothing in there about eBay. Whoops! Deleted!

Since we first raised our concerns, Yasha and I have been swamped with
responses from Greenwald’s followers. The weird thing is, not all of
those responses have been negative: even Wikileaks —Wikileaks! —
responded that, “We have not [fallen out with Greenwald] but @Pierre
is seriously compromised by Paypal’s attacks on our organisation and
supporters.”

Greenwald’s leftist and anarchist fans have always had an almost
cult-like faith in his judgment, seeing him as little less than a
digital-age Noam Chomsky. But now they’re reeling from cognitive
dissonance, trying to understand why their hero would privatize the
most important secrets of our generation to a billionaire
free-marketeer like Omidyar, whose millions have, in some cases,
brought market-based misery into some of the poorest and most
desperate corners of the planet.

A Greenwald-Omidyar partnership is as hard to swallow as if Chomsky
proudly announced a new major venture with Sheldon Adelson, on grounds
that it’s a “once-in-a-career dream academic opportunity.”

WikiLeaks’ concern about Omidyar can be traced back to PayPal’s
decision in December 2010 to blockade users from sending money to
WikiLeaks. PayPal (founded by Pando investor, Peter Thiel — more on
that below) is owned by eBay, where Omidyar has served as the chairman
of the board since 2002. Before the blockade, PayPal was the principal
medium for WikiLeaks donations, according to the Washington Post.

More troubling for fans is that Greenwald has repeatedly provided
cover for Omidyar, claiming that he “had nothing to do with [the
blockade]” despite his board status. Whether or not eBay’s chairman
really was ignorant of his company’s most controversial decision in
years, there’s no denying that Omidyar is also eBay’s largest
shareholder. At nearly 10%, his stake is worth billions and is more
than twice as large as that of the next largest shareholder.

By Greenwald’s reasoning, even though Omidyar is the founder, largest
shareholder, and chairman of the body responsible for eBay/PayPal
management oversight, he had “nothing to do with” its policy towards
Wikileaks. Zero. None. He was as helpless as you, me, Batkid, or
Grumpy Cat.

Fortunately, as the single investor, founder and CEO of “NewCo”,
Omidyar’s self-professed helplessness at eBay doesn’t extend to his
new journalistic venture. With that level of autonomy, no one — not
even Glenn Greenwald, who has admitted that Omidyar’s money is
irresistibly persuasive — can tell him which secrets to publish on his
new site, and which should remain hidden forever.

We can all rest easy in our beds, then, knowing that Omidyar is in
charge of our secrets. Information of national importance, such as
which major tech companies colluded with the US government to spy on
private citizens, will be published at the discretion of the founder
and largest shareholder of one of those companies.

Robbing Peter to Pay Paul (and Mark). An important footnote about
Peter Thiel and Pando, by Paul Carr

When NSFWCORP’s acquisition by Pando was announced, Greenwald raced to
Twitter to accuse us of hypocrisy because Peter Thiel (another
billionaire whose previous business dealings could fill a book, and
who sold PayPal to eBay in the first place) once invested $200,000 in
PandoDaily, through his Founders Fund.

That’s absolutely true. Founders Fund’s investment is disclosed here
on Pando’s main about page, along with the names of the other
investors who collectively invested the remaining $2.8m raised by
Pando.

The difference between us selling our company to a media outlet that
once received a minority investment from Founders Fund and Greenwald
being personally hired by Omidyar should be obvious to anyone with a
brain. But at the risk that category excludes Glenn’s most ardent
supporters, we’re happy to spell out the difference (apart from the
monetary difference of $249,800,000 between Thiel’s $200k and
Omidyar’s $250 million, of course):

Peter Thiel has no involvement with the running of Pando. Zero. He
doesn’t make hiring or firing or any other kind of decisions (nor do
any other investors), Founders Fund isn’t Pando’s only (or even
closest largest) investor and no one from Founders Fund has a board
seat, voting rights or any other input in business or editorial
policy. In other words, Thiel has less ability to dictate editorial
policy here, in fact, than the guy who cleans the coffee cups (at
least that guy has a key to the office).

Pierre Omidyar is personally hiring the journalists for his new
project, starting with Greenwald himself. He is the venture’s sole
backer. But, you know what? All of that would still be OK if Greenwald
would make a simple, unequivocal, public pledge: to cover any bad
behavior by Pierre Omidyar in the same way that he would cover someone
who wasn’t backing him with millions of dollars.

Should be a simple thing to promise, right?

Here’s our absolute, unequivocal pledge: we will cover Peter Thiel and
Pando’s other investors just as fiercely as we cover Pierre Omidyar or
anyone else. In fact, it’s likely due to proximity that we will cover
Pando’s investors even more fiercely. That’s how we always worked at
NSFWCORP — and it’s how we’ll work here. Our past coverage of Thiel
can be found all over the web, including here, hereand even right here
on Pando. Or see how we’ve covered NSFWCORP/Pando investors
CrunchFundand Vegas Tech Fund.

When we asked Glenn to make that same pledge about his single
investor, in light of our coverage of Omidyar, he responded simply: “I
can’t speak for Omidyar Network,” adding he had “no idea” about
Omidyar’s involvement in micro loans.




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