This causes me to see Glenn Greenwald in a whole new light. Perhaps what
happened to him this year at the Intercept was some kind of poetic justice.
And by the way, it is true that a whole bunch of NSA material was never
printed by the Intercept, after the first batch.
Miriam
Keeping Secrets: Pierre Omidyar, Glenn Greenwald and the privatization of
Snowden's leaks
By Mark Ames
, written onNovember 27, 2013
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FROM THENEWSDESK
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
SecretsT, 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.
As the single investor, founder and CEO of "NewCo", Omidyar's self-professed
helplessness at eBay doesn't extend to his new journalistic venture.
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.