PEPE ESCOBAR — Brazilgate is Turning into Russiagate 2.0

The Intercept‘s bombshell about Brazilian corruption is being ludicrously spun by the country’s media and military as a “Russian conspiracy,” writes Pepe Escobar...

Consortium News
PEPE ESCOBAR: Brazilgate is Turning into Russiagate 2.0

Ramanan — New York On Glenn Greenwald

Short overview of New York Magazine's take on Greenwald on Trumpgate and Russiagate. 

The whole article at New York is worth a read.

Example.

Greenwald is no longer invited on MSNBC, and he’s portrayed in the Twitter fever swamp as a leading villain of the self-styled Resistance. “I used to be really good friends with Rachel Maddow,” he says. “And I’ve seen her devolution from this really interesting, really smart, independent thinker into this utterly scripted, intellectually dishonest, partisan hack.” His view of the liberal online media is equally charitable. “Think about one interesting, creative, like, intellectually novel thing that [Vox’s] Matt Yglesias or Ezra Klein have said in like ten years,” he says. “In general, they’re just churning out Democratic Party agitprop every single day of the most superficial type.” (Reached for comment, none of these people would respond to Greenwald.)

Couldn't agree more. But perviously to this, Maddow's silence when Cenk left MSNBC because he refused to parrot the party line was an early tell. 

Regarding Klein and Yglesias, once one is in the bubble, it's only a matter of time. Same for Maddow, et al. 

The Case for Concerted Action
New York On Glenn Greenwald
V. Ramanan

Zero Hedge — The Conspiracy Theory Is True: Agents Infiltrate Websites Intending To "Manipulate, Deceive, And Destroy Reputations"

Glenn Greenwald report. Creepy people and sick stuff. Fascistic if as reported.

Zero Hedge
The Conspiracy Theory Is True: Agents Infiltrate Websites Intending To "Manipulate, Deceive, And Destroy Reputations"

Alert — Freedom of the press under attack?

Guardian journalist Luke Harding says paragraphs of his writing mysteriously disappeared while working on his latest book 'The Snowden Files.'

Bizarre. Much more to the story than the headline implies. 

Transcript of Amy Goodman's interview of The Guardian's Luke Harding.

AlterNet
'The Paragraph Began to Self-Delete': Did NSA Hack Snowden Biographer's Computer?
Amy Goodman | Democracy Now!

John Byrne — Matt Taibbi quits Rolling Stone, joins Glenn Greenwald

First Look, the news company created by former PayPal employee Pierre Omidyar, announced Wednesday that they had added irreverent journalist Matt Taibbi to their stable of prominent reporters.

Taibbi will lead a second newsmagazine for First Look. The First, Glenn Greenwald’s The Intercept, launched earlier this month....

First Look’s release adds:

"While at Rolling Stone, Taibbi won a National Magazine Award for his reporting on the 2008 presidential election, and was a finalist for his coverage of Occupy Wall Street. The author of two New York Times bestsellers, he earlier worked as reporter for the Moscow Times, an English-language expatriate newspaper, and co-founded The eXile, a bi-weekly newspaper based in Moscow. The paper became infamous for its satirical wit, as well as for hard-nosed reporting of corruption in both the Russian government and the American aid community. The paper was the only publication to correctly predict the 1998 Russian financial crisis…

"Taibbi will be based in New York City. The name and launch date of his digital magazine will be announced in the coming months. First Look Media’s first online publication, The Intercept, led by Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Jeremy Scahill, launched on February 10."

The Raw Story
Matt Taibbi quits Rolling Stone, joins Glenn Greenwald
John Byrne

It's on. Hunter Thompson must be pleased, wherever he is. Paul Krassner too.

Is Greg Palast next?

Michael Wolff — Ezra Klein, Glenn Greenwald and the odd rise of personal brand journalism

There is a new vision of journalism – call it the auteur school – in which the business shifts from being organized by institutions to being organized around individual journalists with discrete followings.

The latest development is the announcement by Ezra Klein that he will leave the Washington Post and is looking for investors to back him – with a reported eight figure investment (ie more than $10m!) – in an independent enterprise. Last week Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg, who ran the Wall Street Journal tech conference AllThingsD, announced that, following the WSJ ending its relationship with them, they were setting up in business backed by NBC and other investors.

 Glenn Greenwald, who broke the NSA-Edward Snowden story for the Guardian, is the headliner in a new left-oriented journalism venture backed by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar.

The former New York Times data wiz-kid, Nate Silver, has left the Times to set up a new site and vertical business under the auspice of ABC and its subsidiary ESPN. Andrew Sullivan, a blogger first at the Atlantic and then at the Daily Beast, may be the grandfather of the auteur school, leaving the Daily Beast a year ago to set up his own subscription site.
In fact, one might as well include here Tina Brown, who used the seemingly attractive economics of the web, along with her personal brand and the backing of Barry Diller, to claim journalistic independence with the Daily Beast – and in the process lost, I am reliably told, an astounding $100m.

And that leads to my cautionary question: is this all journalistic vanity and hubris, ending in certain tears, or is there plausible economic logic to individual journalistic fiefdoms?

The Raw Story
Ezra Klein, Glenn Greenwald and the odd rise of personal brand journalism
Michael Wolff, The Guardian

Al Jazeera interview — Glenn Greenwald: U.S. uses terrorism as excuse to do almost everything

See also Greenwald Reveals 'Crux' of NSA Spying: The 'Elimination of Individual Privacy Worldwide' at Common Dreams.

Dominic Rushe — Pierre Omidyar: Behind the billionaire bankrolling Glenn Greenwald’s new journalism project

The founder of the online giant [eBay] is setting up a hugely ambitious news organization. Will the combination of his tech savvy and commitment to investigative journalism offer a new media model?

By the time Pierre Omidyar was 31, he was, in his own words, not just regular rich but “ridiculous rich”. With enough money to make an impact in pretty much any sphere he chooses, the eBay billionaire last week made a splash in an area that is increasingly attracting the attention of tech titans: news.

Journalist Glenn Greenwald announced that he was leaving the Guardian, where he has broken a series of stories on the National Security Agency, based on documents from whistleblower Edward Snowden. His new, as yet unnamed, venture will be a general news service backed by Omidyar. It will be the most hotly awaited news startup in years.

Omidyar’s move comes just three months afterJeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder, bought theWashington Post. Omidyar, too, had looked at the paper, he wrote in a blog post. “That process got me thinking about what kind of social impact could be created if a similar investment was made in something entirely new, built from the ground up. Something that I would be personally involved in outside of my other efforts as a philanthropist,” he wrote.

The Raw Story
Pierre Omidyar: Behind the billionaire bankrolling Glenn Greenwald’s new journalism project
Dominic Rushe, The Guardian

Is the future of the media going to be dueling billionaires? Looks like Rupert Murdoch started something.

And, oh my, I can just hear the right:  Omidyar is of Iranian descent and born in France.

AFP — ‘Guardian’ scoops up two online journalism awards for NSA coverage

Britain’s The Guardian scooped up two awards for online journalism on Saturday for its coverage of the National Security Agency (NSA) leaks from former US intelligence contractor Edward Snowden.

The Guardian’s exposure of the electronic surveillance by the US spy agency was honored in the categories of innovative investigative journalism and watchdog journalism at the annual awards banquet here of the Online News Association (ONA).

The Raw Story
‘Guardian’ scoops up two online journalism awards for NSA coverage
Agence France-Presse

The Obama administration is not going to be happy.

Eric W. Dolan — Glenn Greenwald’s partner detained at U.K. airport under terrorism law

David Miranda, the partner of Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald, was detained Sunday morning by U.K. authorities in London’s Heathrow airport under the Terrorism Act, according to The Guardian.

The 28-year-old was released nine hours later without being charged, but some of his electronics were confiscated. Miranda was traveling from Berlin to Rio de Janeiro, his home.“This is a profound attack on press freedoms and the news gathering process,” said Greenwald. “To detain my partner for a full nine hours while denying him a lawyer, and then seize large amounts of his possessions, is clearly intended to send a message of intimidation to those of us who have been reporting on the NSA and GCHQ. The actions of the UK pose a serious threat to journalists everywhere.”

The Raw Story

Glenn Greenwald’s partner detained at U.K. airport under terrorism law

Eric W. Dolan

Feel safer?

The Guardian (UK)
Detaining my partner: a failed attempt at intimidation
Glenn Greenwald

The detention of my partner, David Miranda, by UK authorities will have the opposite effect of the one intended...

But they obviously had zero suspicion that David was associated with a terrorist organization or involved in any terrorist plot. Instead, they spent their time interrogating him about the NSA reporting which Laura Poitras, the Guardian and I are doing, as well the content of the electronic products he was carrying. They completely abused their own terrorism law for reasons having nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism: a potent reminder of how often governments lie when they claim that they need powers to stop "the terrorists", and how dangerous it is to vest unchecked power with political officials in its name.

Worse, they kept David detained right up until the last minute: for the full 9 hours, something they very rarely do. Only at the last minute did they finally release him. We spent all day - as every hour passed - worried that he would be arrested and charged under a terrorism statute. This was obviously designed to send a message of intimidation to those of us working journalistically on reporting on the NSA and its British counterpart, the GCHQ.

The Guardian (UK)
Glenn Greenwald's partner detained at Heathrow airport for nine hours
Guardian staff

David Miranda, partner of Guardian interviewer of whistleblower Edward Snowden, questioned under Terrorism Act

Greg Gordon — Hints surface that NSA building massive, pervasive surveillance capability

Glenn Greenwald, a columnist for the British newspaper The Guardian who reported on the disclosures of NSA leaker Edward Snowden, said in a speech over the weekend that an upcoming story will describe a classified document that “talks about how a brand new technology enables the National Security Agency to redirect into its own repositories 1 billion cellphone calls every single day.”

“What we are really talking about here is a globalized system that prevents any form of electronic communication from taking place without it being stored and monitored by the National Security Agency,” Greenwald said in a webcast to the Socialism Conference in Chicago. “It means they’re storing every call and have the capability to listen to them at any time.”

McClatchy

Hints surface that NSA building massive, pervasive surveillance capability

Greg Gordon | McClatchy Washington Bureau

See also "The entire point of the Fourth Amendment was to ban this kind of general warrant" - Marcy Wheeler interviewed at Corrente

Glenn Greenwald — Two lessons from the Megaupload seizure

Read it at Salon
Two lessons from the Megaupload seizure
by Glenn Greenwald
(h/t Kevin Fathi via email)

(1) It’s wildly under-appreciated how unrestrained is the Government’s power to do what it wants, and how little effect these debates over various proposed laws have on that power.

(2) The U.S. really is a society that simply no longer believes in due process: once the defining feature of American freedom that is now scorned as some sort of fringe, radical, academic doctrine. That is not hyperbole.

Here's the crux of it:

...what distinguishes a tyrannical society from a free one is whether the government is first required to prove guilt in a fair, adversarial proceeding. This is a precept Americans were once taught about why their country was superior, was reflexively understood, and was enshrined as the core political principle: “no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” It’s simply not a principle that is believed in any longer, and therefore is not remotely observed.

It is simply not possible to have free enterprise in a tyrannical society. The US is kneecapping itself. Eventually this leads to powerful interests taking down competition politically, thereby stifling innovation.

Joseph Schumpeter saw the risk to capitalism as late-stage capitalism stifling innovation.