To me this doesn’t look like a hopeless interviewer trying and failing to bring down Glenn’s arguments, it looks like an interviewer repeating all the talking points against Glenn to give him a platform to answer them.
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Our spies are supposed to spy on Them, we assume Their spies spy on us, that’s just the way it goes. From quiet conversations with friends in politics however, on trick is for the Americans to spy on the Australian citizens, and pass anything useful along to the Australian agencies, and thus those agencies can say that ‘they’ don’t spy on Australian citizens. The same kind of agreement is in place in other places, often reciprocal.
Industrial espionage has long been par for the course however, although it made more sense when big companies actually had a national home, rather than being trans-national companies. If my country’s companies do better, my country gets more tax and has more well-paid workers, so my country’s spy agencies stealing secrets from foreign companies and giving them to my country’s companies makes sense. Now that those taxes aren’t really being paid, and wages are so low in so many places, it all just gets mercenary.
Friendlies like Bill Maher? Maher was disagreeing with him, on a point that Greenwald felt (and I happen to agree with him on this one) that Maher was factually and quite problematically incorrect on. Maher may be quite Liberal in a lot of ways, but he still drinks the Coolaid on ‘why do they hate us so much??’ far too often, including in the video someone posted in a comment here. Greenwald makes his point very strongly and succinctly, so that there can be no question as to the veracity of his statement.
If they had full pros doing uber-optmized geeky wizardry, you’d probably be screaming that your tax money is being wasted to make YouTube better.
Kirsty Wark certainly seems to be the female version of Jeremy Paxman. Both are bully tosspots who frequently hammer away, demanding an answer to some nonsense question of the “when did you stop beating your wife” type, rather than carrying out a proper interview.
Hey, dude, stop being so bully and adversarial…
Also, the site believes that political identification is some kind of religion whereby if you are liberal or some other tag, you can’t agree with opinions from anyone else who doesn’t go to your church.
I don’t care what his party affiliation is. I am an independent voter. With an issue as important as privacy and freedom of the press, why would I concern myself with incidentals? Hell, I even agreed with John McCain once, when for a second, he was advocating for campaign finance reform…and then he went off the rails as a bitter man for having lost and making the fatal mistake of hitching Palin to his sails, but that’s another story.
No kidding. Talk about false flag conspiracies. That “Spandan C” dude accused Greenwald of being a right-wing nut who is trolling the left, where in fact, it seems that Spandan C is doing a much better job of that himself.
Greenwald is a journalist. A journalist that reported on leaked documents from the NSA which revealed that Western governments have created a spy network so pervasive that they’re watching the entire world and have rendered all manner of electronic communication insecure. That is all I need to know about Glenn Greenwald.
Shooting the messenger doesn’t change the content of the information the messenger presents.
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Attack the source and not the message huh? Do you work for the US or UK governments?
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danegeld: Kirsty Wark wasn’t forced to be a shill for the government by the absence of a representative of the security state; the editing of the video only makes it appear that way. If you watch the video carefully, you’ll see someone’s elbow occasionally poking into the shot; that’s Baroness Pauline Neville-Jones, former head of the joint intelligence committee, fidgeting impatiently to go on the attack. You can see a lengthier selection (22 mins — higher def, too!) from the broadcast here:
— in it, Glenn Greenwald listens while the Baroness and Anthony Barnett, founder of Open Democracy weigh in. At the end, Greenwald is allowed to respond to the flak from Neville-Jones. If it is true, as some have speculated, that Wark was actually throwing reverse softballs to Greenwald (stupid, frequently-seen talking points chosen precisely so that he could knock them down), he didn’t seem to be in on the game, and her behavior and mannerisms (angry tone, dramatic use of the eyeglasses, etc.) certainly gave no clue that she knew was delivering clueless talking points. But it may well be true the end effect was the same (as reverse softballs).
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Wark: You can’t be sure that he hasn’t had to give up something.
Greenwald: Well, you pointed out very astutely just a few minutes ago that nobody can prove a negative…
The Force (of deprecating sarcasm) is strong with this one.
Also, thought it was hilarious that the item Snowden used to identify himself to Greenwald on their first meeting was … a Rubik’s cube.
Cheers 
thanks for pointing out the longer edit. I hope snowden did have good security against divulging stuff to the Russians - probably he has divulged encrypted data to which he has no keys - i guess the challenge for the Russians is to get the keys off the third parties
Kirsty Wark was just trying to follow in the steps of her much more experienced, authorititative and credible colleague, Jeremy Paxman, who has terrorised/terrified numerous politicians over the years.
Greenwald showed up the insititution that BBC Newsnight has become. This interview was cringe-worthy and shocking for it’s lack of objectivity.
The worst part was not the Greenwald/Wark clash, but the final minute when Greenwald took down Pauline Neville-Jones, the ex Minister of State for Security and Counter Terrorism, and left her mumbling and bumbling in the face of the cold hard facts.
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They are proving they don’t have a liberal bias remarkably hard these days, aren’t they?
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Well, totally +1 on being even more impressed with Greenwald. He outclassed his opposition by three orders of magnitude or so.
But as for not being unimpressed with the interviewer?
I’m fucking aghast! I had no idea the Beeb had sunk so low! They’re in the sewer with Fox, for crying out loud.
Dark days.
Well said.
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I don’t think this is a bias issue. It is just a competence issue. It is perfectly fair for an interviewer to play devil’s advocate in order to probe deeply and elucidate interesting information. That may have been the intent, but it wasn’t the outcome.
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