Iām very happy to hear this. I think it is a travesty that it is so hard for whistleblowers to do the right thing and that people who help them like Greenwald are accused of āaiding and abettingā and should also be charged by other people who are supposedly journalists.
Iām looking at you David Gregory.
While Iām not sure how safe or foolhardy this is, Iām not surprised they all had the guts to do this. They are amazing people.
Entering is the easy part. āCome into my parlor said the spider to the fly.ā
Letās see what happens when they try to leave the US.
Whatās the backstory? Did they come to America just to see what would happen, or are they going somewhere with a purpose? Or just trying to go home?
I hope they stay safe and free.
This was my first thought too.
OH MY GODS THEY DIDNāT GET ARRESTED! IāM SO SHOCKED! SO PROUD OF THEIR COURAGE! THEYāRE SUCH HEROES!
ā¦
Ahahaha. Are you serious?! I pity the fools who thought that was going to happen. The Man loves them. Thanks to their horrible reporting the Man is actually stronger than before.
Potatocam strikes again.
As opposed to no reporting where they would have crumbled and ceased to exist without anyoneās prying eyes or information given to the public.
You really are a fan of Glenn I see, he compels you like no other.
Wuh? Horrible reporting? Examples, pleaseā¦
I donāt get it, if they really thought they might be arrested, why did they come?
They certainly knew they were not going to be arrested.
While I fully support what they are doing, I am a bit irked that they always talk about documents which prove the NSA is doing this or that, but they never show the documents.
All they do is make assertions and occasionally show a cryptic powerpoint slide, out of supposedly many.
Naturally we want to believe them, and their persecution only makes them more credible, but why donāt they just show us the documents?
It shouldnāt be a surprise that arrests did not happen, and probably will not happen. Not to say that the āManā are nice and stuff, but I think thereās a tendency to assume an unified long term agenda when really, I think the situation is that a large number of disconnected individuals doing their own thing.
Our perspective of the survelliance state continues to be dictated by 1984, but I think that is kinda outdated. There needs really to be a new form of dystopia in our fiction - one that is anarchic, decentralised, and emergent, instead of being imposed.
Pynchon?
His partner was held and interrogated for hours in the UK. He wasnāt thrown in jail, but technically you could call it an arrest since he was not permitted to move/leave. I think that the US government knows that he isnāt hauling any documents around with him, so to make a show and arrest him would only serve to elevate media attention. Maybe they learned something from the way the UK handled it.
As to revealing documents, I canāt answer that. But nothing released via articles thus far has been denied. The commenter above thinks it is helping the US cause for spying, but I donāt see that. If anything, there is a collective malaise and inertia from the masses because for some, even though it makes them uncomfortable, they feel powerless over a shadow government that doesnāt exist on paper, for some, they are in fear of the bogeyman and buy that they are being protected by it, and for others, they have been so indoctrinated into constant over-sharing, data mining/collection, ubiquitous cameras, that they donāt even imagine life with privacy.
Any takers for a sweepstake on when the grand jury indictment will be unsealed?
While I fully support what they are doing, I am a bit irked that they always talk about documents which prove the NSA is doing this or that, but they never show the documents.
All they do is make assertions and occasionally show a cryptic powerpoint slide, out of supposedly many.
Naturally we want to believe them, and their persecution only makes them more credible, but why donāt they just show us the documents?
I think Greenwald actually understands the skepticism and even admits heād be skeptical as well if he was in your position. He tries to address it directly here:
http://utdocuments.blogspot.com.br/2014/01/email-exchange-with-reader-over-first.html
and here:
http://utdocuments.blogspot.com.br/2013/12/questionsresponses-for-journalists.html
A highlight from first link above:
" ā¦ in his Washington Post interview with Snowden last month, Bart Gellman noted āSnowdenās insistence, to this reporter and others, that he does not want the documents published in bulk.ā From the start, Snowden indeed repeatedly insisted on that.
Anyone who demands that we ārelease all documentsā - 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 donāt 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 doesnāt 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. ā¦ "
If you have some time, read the rest here. I think it may address at least some of your questions you have about the release methodologies and perhaps challenges you may not have been aware of, etc.
It appears you have an open mind and this may be helpful to you, but Iām sure thereās others out there that will continue to focus just as much or even more scrutiny on the messengers than the perpetrators in the NSA, etc. - But, thereās always that peanut gallery that tries to knock down anyone else who stands up for what is right even as they themselves have never bothered to stand up for anything themselves. A lot of self-frustration and projection at play, I suspect.
I wonāt address them directly. But you know who you are.
[quote=āclayton_coffman, post:13, topic:28298, full:trueā]
While I fully support what they are doing, I am a bit irked that they always talk about documents which prove the NSA is doing this or that, but they never show the documents.[/quote]
Well there is this https://www.aclu.org/nsa-documents-search which is a searchable database of all documents related to the Snowden leaks and released either by governments or news outlets.
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
