So I've asked if the facade on the Snowden ruse is cracking.
I personally believe it to be a ruse or a hoax -- a snow job perpetrated by not only a band of anarchists but the Russian intelligence using them as cats' paws. I've outlined a lot of the connections here and type in "Snowden" in the search box and read everything I've come up with.
But it doesn't matter what I say, I'm just a blogger.
Until some of the adversarial journalists crack, this won't be done. It's never going to be Glenn Greenwald or Laura Poitras or Jacob Appelbaum themselves.
But maybe Bart Gellman. Or maybe some other national security journalist who has shown a bit of skepticism.
Or maybe a CNN anchor -- we've seen one pummel Holger Stark already.
So today, I was pointed to this:
Very interesting, because this prominent journalist for Foreign Policy who has covered war zones and Snowden issues had this provocative question to ask of the Guardian.
If Snowden actually scammed his colleagues out of their passwords, how does that change your publishing choices? #mynsaquestion
— Noah Shachtman (@NoahShachtman) November 12, 2013
BTW, I was too busy to get involved in that session, but I noticed it was extremely lame. The same Guardian journalists themselves filling it up, and fangirlz.
What would be my NSA question?
Well, I might ask about this.
Or that.
Well, any of the contradictions here or here.
Maybe Greenwald wants to huff and puff indignantly that he never set up Snowden to hack or connived in his hack, but that's not the question, as Greenwald a) doesn't know how to hack b) didn't know what to hack until Electronic Frontier Foundation told him what was important (metadata).
So I'd ask if Appelbaum or Poitras or any others made a wish list for Snowden to hack, and did he hack with it, in complicity with them.
The angle that Noah is taking is more technical about the rules of the journalistic ethics and craft.
It's one thing if someone shared with you materials they had legitimate access to (like Daniel Ellsberg did with the Pentagon Papers) -- materials they authored or were given as part of their own clearance. The leaking of that is the heart of the case of the Pentagon Papers as being permissible under the First Amendment.
But if you steal, if you didn't have authorized access, if it wasn't what you saw through the normal course of your work day and become outraged at -- if you in fact got your agenda from a hacker's anarchist collective or Russian intelligence, for that matter -- then it's no longer whistle-blowing, and journalists providing you with an outlet may be helping you engage in espionage.
That's the implication.
Although Shachtman doesn't come out and say it. But then he doesn't get an answer, either.
I really think that when the Guardian does a public Q&A, they really should bar their own journalists from filling up the queue like Bolsheviks packing a peace meeting. There are more of them giving answers -- lengthy answers -- and asking questions -- than there are real people. They need to let the real public come in, and they need to shut up. They did this with the Snowden Q&A too, and it was fraudulent as a result.
Noah's question was never answered -- instead, they only answered his milder question with a lame generality:
OK, Guardian team, I'll play. How do you decide which Snowden doc to reveal next? #MyNSAQuestion
— Noah Shachtman (@NoahShachtman) November 12, 2013
@NoahShachtman We use the documents to craft stories, which we then report out. Some come together quicker than others. #MyNSAQuestion
— Spencer Ackerman (@attackerman) November 12, 2013
Recent Comments