Wednesday, February 19, 2014

Awards Day


I'm struggling to keep up with the stories here.  Now:

Greenwald had already condemned the ruling and promised a legal appeal in a blog post on Wednesday morning. He told Minkovski that the ruling was "in line with this government's genuine hostility to what most people in the Western world consider a basic freedom of a free press."

He also pointed to a part of the ruling in which the judges quoted from the communications of the British Security Services, which said that it had "intelligence" that Miranda was traveling from Berlin and carrying material from Snowden.

"There is no possible way for them to have known any of that unless they were eavesdropping on our communications," he said. "To invade those kinds of communications of journalists is itself a pretty grave menace to the newsgathering process."

And then

“It is clear why those took me. It’s because I’m Glenn’s partner. Because I went to Berlin. Because Laura lives there. So they think I have a big connection,” he said. “But I don’t have a role. I don’t look at documents. I don’t even know if it was documents that I was carrying. It could have been for the movie that Laura is working on.”

 In an interview published July 19 of last year, Mr. Greenwald told Der Spiegel that he and Ms. Poitras had copies of all the documents Mr. Snowden took from the NSA, all 9000-10,000 of them.  On August 6, 2013, Mr. Greenwald told the Brazilian Senate that he had 20,000 documents.  On August 18, 2013, David Miranda was detained at Heathrow on his way back from Germany.

Nope; no way in the world the British government could suspect Mr. Miranda of being a mule without wiretapping Mr. Greenwald's communications.  Or just reading the internet; or just knowing Mr. Miranda was going from Brazil to Germany, and that he had connections with both Greenwald and Poitras.

And by the way, the British government claimed it found 58,000 documents in Mr. Miranda's possession.  And the password for the encrypted documents, on a piece of paper.  Mr. Greenwald is a security genius.  He's also either a liar, or has a huge problem with counting.

All of this in the context of whether or not it is safe for Mr. Greenwald to return to America, where the government may strip him of his journalistic protections and put him in jail.

Remind me again of when Barton Gellman was arrested for interviewing Mr. Snowden.

Glenn Greenwald is so brave!

3 comments:

  1. Of course, British intelligence might have just looked at the story about Poitras in the NYT the day before, where she revealed this:

    After being detained repeatedly, Poitras began taking steps to protect her data, asking a traveling companion to carry her laptop, leaving her notebooks overseas with friends or in safe deposit boxes. She would wipe her computers and cellphones clean so that there would be nothing for the authorities to see. Or she encrypted her data, so that law enforcement could not read any files they might get hold of. These security preparations could take a day or more before her travels.

    http://zthoughtcriminal.blogspot.com/2013/08/when-he-was-coming-home-from-visit-to.html

    Greenwald is a pretty bad excuse for a journalist, he always, always twists everything to make himself some kind of hero or victim or tragic martyr. He reminds me of some of the worst of the publicity hounds in the assassination conspiracy industry.

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  2. I was just remarking that while I'm not particularly fond of Glenn, some of the stuff I've read sounds like agit-prop. That said, even if he didn't use 20 words when 1 would do (and 17 updates), he does strike me as a self-aggrandized douche, which means a lot coming from a self-aggrandizing douche such as I.

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  3. And FTR: the Internet has been hacked, HACKED, I tell you, by intel agencies. They use this nefarious app called Twitter, and a "social media" system called Facebook to stalk people. Be. Ware.

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