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

coderman coderman at gmail.com
Tue Jan 7 05:36:37 PST 2014


On Sun, Nov 17, 2013 at 7:02 PM, coderman <coderman at 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-first.html
"""
(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.
"""




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