Is Paul Krugman a journalist?

I ask in all seriousness because tout le monde is, was, or will be, upset that David Gregory asked Glenn Greenwald if Greenwald should be charged with aiding and abetting Edward Snowden's crimes, and Greenwald huffed (on air and later on  Twitter, where all serious conversations are held) that the question was insulting.  Or appalling.  Or something.

And I'm trying to figure out the difference between me, Krugman, and Greenwald.

I post on this otherwise largely overlooked blog.  If a former NSA employee came to me and wanted me to publish his/her stolen secrets, could I claim the magic privileges accorded to journalists?

Yeah, right.

But up until he got a gig with the Guardian, Greenwald was a blogger.  Now he writes a column for that paper, in which he does nothing more than express his opinion, usually based on some current news item. Paul Krugman writes a column for the New York Times, in which he does nothing more than express his opinion, usually based on some current news item.  And, of course, like Greenwald I am a lawyer, and like both of them, I publish my opinion, usually based on some current news item.  Krugman is a college professor.  If Ben Bernanke came to Krugman with juicy inside info on the Federal Reserve and Krugman got the NYT by-line on a news article, would Krugman now be a journalist?

What about if he just posted it on his NYT blog?

Which of us is a journalist?

One attempt at definition is that a journalist is someone with an editor.  Paul Krugman has an editor.  I don't.  Guess I'm out.  But is Greenwald a journalist, and Krugman not?  And what difference does it make?

I don't think journalists have any special legal protections (this is one reason Obama started pushing a shield law), but Greenwald does and he sure wants 'em now.  Nobody suspects Barton Gellman of aiding a felon, but Gellman hasn't been in Hong Kong hobnobbing with Snowden.  I assume Greenwald didn't go all that way to talk to Snowden on Skype.

So is Greenwald a journalist?  Does he have a magic legal shield Krugman and I don't?  If he doesn't, why does anybody think David Gregory asked the wrong question?  Especially when he made this comment:

Gregory replied that "the question of who's a journalist may be up to a debate with regard to what you're doing," but added that he was merely posing a question others have asked, and not "embracing anything."

Greenwald is a noted and vociferous supporter of Julian Assange.  Wikileaks says they are helping Edward Snowden.  Did Greenwald's support of Assange lead him to want to help the next Assange before criminal charges were filed?  Greenwald has clearly wanted this story to affect U.S. government policy.  I can't say the same for Barton Gellman, or for David Gregory.  Greenwald is free to support whomever he wants, but is Greenwald a journalist because a newspaper publishes his opinions?  Did Snowden contact Greenwald because of the latter's support for Assange?  Did Greenwald help Snowden in any way in Hong Kong, or even to get to Hong Kong?

It's a fair question.

But before we answer that, can somebody please explain to me just who the hell a "journalist" is, and what kind of special protections they get?  'Cause I can't figure out how Glenn Greenwald is anything; except opinionated.

Where's my fork?

Have you seen my fork?

Just noting in passing, but I think Glenn Greenwald is becoming more irrelevant by the day.

I'm quite sure Salon had two Greenwald related posts up only a few days ago.  One is still available if you search for it, but it didn't slide from the front page over to "Most Read" status; I found it through Google.  The other was an excerpt from his book.  Maybe they deleted that one because Huffington Post has it now; maybe it was never there, and my memory is bad (I didn't bother to read it, but I remember it).

In either case, Greenwald doesn't seem to be trending, even at his old internet stomping grounds.  Which is curious, because Greenwald seems more determined than ever to make the NSA revelations of Edward Snowden all about Greenwald.

He promised, in the Salon interview, to reveal yet more blockbusters.  I thought I'd read somewhere these would be in his book (which was embargoed even for reviewers until it was released), but apparently no blockbusters were hidden in those pages.  In the interview he says the news will be ready for the public by maybe June of this year.  Of course, he's been promising major revelations and retribution against the British and American governments since August of last year, so I guess we're just supposed to believe him and keep waiting with bated breath; or on tenterhooks, or something.

The anticipation is killing me.

But if the excerpt of his new book from Huffington Post is any indication, Greenwald still thinks this story is all about Greenwald.  (I ventured that opinion at Salon, and was denounced as a troll by Greenwaldian acolytes.  I thought it was kinda funny nobody would engage the substance of what I said.  No one rebutted me, they just complained that I'd raised the issue.)  He doesn't seem to have much to say about what the NSA has been doing (no surprise, since so much of what he's said has been wrong), but a great deal to say about what it's like to be Glenn Greenwald.  The more things change, the more they remain the same.

I thought the journalist wasn't supposed to be the point; the story was.  Even Edward Snowden asked Putin about surveillance and espionage.  Greenwald just gives interviews about what it's like to be Greenwald, and to make sure everybody looks forward to what Greenwald says next, or what Glenn Greenwald thinks about surveillance and national security.  I mean, what, exactly, did he tell Stephen Colbert about the NSA that was new, interesting, or even insightful, except that, once again, the best is yet to come?

Which seems to be pretty much to be the best way to be sure everybody is paying attention to Glenn Greenwald, because he's not through trying to occupy center stage just yet.

Just as a quick example, because Greenwald is on "Fresh Air" as I type:  he just said he has in his possession "tens of thousands" of documents (the number has never been specific) which governments around the world want to get hold of.  Again, the story is about brave Glenn Greenwald and nefarious governments with shadowy, threatening powers.  What it isn't about, over a year later, is what's in those documents.  Greenwald can't, or won't, tell us.  What he will tell us is that he's very important because he has them.

As long as he can do that, he's a "journalist."  Apparently.  Odd definition, if you ask me.

Can you hear me now?

Is this thing on?

Not to beat a dead horse, but Joshua Foust has some useful observations about l'affaire Miranda, beginning with the fact that neither the Guardian nor Glenn Greenwald were immediately forthcoming with the facts:

Step one in this should be making sure the record is correct. It is false that Miranda was denied a lawyer — he refused a lawyer, which is a crucial detail. Far from being evidence of tyranny out of control, as Greenwald wants to argue, this suggests the British authorities were trying to provide his representation as the law allows, and he refused. That isn’t the UK’s fault, it is Miranda’s.

Which is an oversight excusable in a journalist trying to get the story; but when the journalist is the story, or has near direct access to the facts of the story, well, one wonders what the point of being silent on this issue was.  One doesn't wonder long, of course, because Mr. Greenwald has been quite explicit in his purpose:

“The U.S. government should be on its knees every day praying that nothing happens to Snowden, because if something happens, all information will be revealed and that would be their worst nightmare.”

And after the incident at Heathrow:

"I will be far more aggressive in my reporting from now. I am going to publish many more documents. I am going to publish things on England, too. I have many documents on England's spy system. I think they will be sorry for what they did," Greenwald, speaking in Portuguese, told reporters at Rio de Janeiro's airport where he met Miranda upon his return to Brazil. 

 Which leaves me wondering:  is this how journalists talk?  And if it is, why are they supposed to get special privileges when they report on state secrets?

And as for why Mr. Miranda was known to the British authorities as Mr. Greenwald's partner; well, maybe they have internet access:

 In June, [Greenwald] told the Daily Beast:

“When I was in Hong Kong, I spoke to my partner in Rio via Skype and told him I would send an electronic encrypted copy of the documents,” Greenwald said. “I did not end up doing it. Two days later his laptop was stolen from our house and nothing else was taken. Nothing like that has happened before. I am not saying it’s connected to this, but obviously the possibility exists.”

Among the documents Greenwald published is evidence that the NSA long ago broke open Skype, which is not a secure method of communication. Moreover, as a Brazilian national living in Brazil, Miranda would not be protected by the same laws that protect Greenwald, an American citizen, from being monitored. Moreover, he’s almost bragging to a reporter that he was enlisting his husband’s help in trafficking stolen Top Secret documents across national borders. When combined with knowing his own employer was funding his husband’s travel to collaborate with his well-known coauthor — who is herself flagged by the U.S. government — it’s a bit difficult to see why anyone would be surprised that he would be at the very least questioned by British authorities.

Mr. Greenwald, of course, thinks he is everyman for journalists:

"This is a profound attack on press freedoms and the news gathering process," Greenwald said. "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.

Well, not necessarily:

 Few journalists would treat their spouses as authority-bait the way Greenwald did this past weekend, and few would tell other reporters, for a profile, that they used their spouses to help them avoid intelligence agencies. Glenn Greenwald is a very smart man — he knew what he was doing. While we should all condemn the British authorities for holding Miranda for so long, we should also keep in mind exactly why he might have been singled out — and there a whole new set of complications and questions emerge.

That, I think, is now the issue.  And why?  Because Mr. Greenwald has made much of the danger to the spouses of journalists arising from this incident; but that claim is what we call "chutzpah."  Having created the danger, he now seeks to take advantage of it.

There’s also a bit of historical literacy we should perhaps add to the discussion. Histrionics aside, most governments, and many more unsavory groups, treat secrecy very seriously — sometimes with deadly seriousness. Regardless of the rightness or wrongness of his decision to help pilfer and distribute the treasured secrets of several governments, to do so openly, with such braggadocio, is not only arrogant it is misguided. This is not a game, especially to the governments being exposed, and casually involving a spouse to take a hit when he won’t risk it is a bizarre and troubling decision.

This is the intractable issue:  we are dealing with government secrets here, and no matter what you may think of them, governments are entitled by law to have secrets, and to keep things secret.  For decades Fort Meade, the black building that housed the NSA, didn't officially exist; neither did the NSA.  THe CIA has only recently acknowledged that Area 51 actually is Area 51.  Sometimes secrets aren't so secret; sometimes they are; and sometimes, they don't need to be.

I'm not impressed with the actions of Edward Snowden, but I don't deny an interest in what he has revealed.  The problem is, of course, he has revealed only a little, and there may be much to justify what the NSA is doing.  There are all sorts of mad speculation out there, including that the NSA is recording every phone call made in America and probably counting my keystrokes as I type.  How much we need to know to be reassured, and how much we need to trust our government, is always a tough call.  Being a child of the '60's, I'm not inclined to trust the government very much.

But neither can I lionize Edward Snowden; and Glenn Greenwald, for the record, is not a journalist.  He's an ideologue with a platform and an axe to grind.  And he seems quite willing to use anyone to further his aim of publicizing Glenn Greenwald and making sure we all know just how important Glenn Greenwald is.

Aren't his 15 minutes up yet?

Probably because the Zimmerman trial swamped all the other news in America this weekend, Glenn Greenwald had to give another interview:

Edward Snowden has very sensitive “blueprints” detailing how the National Security Agency operates that would allow someone who read them to evade or even duplicate NSA surveillance, a journalist close to the intelligence leaker said Sunday.

Glenn Greenwald, a columnist with The Guardian newspaper who closely communicates with Snowden and first reported on his intelligence leaks, told The Associated Press that the former NSA systems analyst has “literally thousands of documents” that constitute “basically the instruction manual for how the NSA is built.”

 But if these get released, it's okay, because no harm will result; Mr. Greenwald is sure of that:

 Despite their sensitivity, Greenwald said he didn’t think that disclosure of the documents would prove harmful to Americans or their national security.

 “I think it would be harmful to the U.S. government, as they perceive their own interests, if the details of those programs were revealed,” said the 46-year-old former constitutional and civil rights lawyer who has written three books contending the government has violated personal rights in the name of protecting national security.

So we can all rest assured that Mr. Greenwald, from Brazil, is concerned about the best interests of Americans now, and will keep us from harm. We no longer need that pesky Constitutional form of government, we have a blogger in South America looking out for us. And by the way, he's really tired of this whole thing being about Snowden:

Greenwald said he worried that interest in Snowden’s personal saga had detracted from the impact of his revelations, adding that Snowden deliberately turned down nearly all requests for interviews to avoid the media spotlight.

Because, you know, this story is not about Snowden:

Still, Greenwald said that Snowden remains “calm and tranquil,” despite his predicament.

 “I haven’t sensed an iota of remorse or regret or anxiety over the situation that he’s in,” said Greenwald, speaking at a hotel in Rio de Janeiro, where he’s lived for the past eight years. “He’s of course tense and focused on his security and his short-term well-being to the best extent that he can, but he’s very resigned to the fact that things might go terribly wrong and he’s at peace with that.”

And those secrets Snowden could reveal? Well, it's not blackmail Mr. Snowden is engaging in, Mr. Greenwald can tell you that:

Asked about a so-called dead man’s pact, which Greenwald has said would allow several people to access Snowden’s trove of documents were anything to happen to him, Greenwald replied that “media descriptions of it have been overly simplistic.

It’s not just a matter of, if he dies, things get released, it’s more nuanced than that,” he said. “It’s really just a way to protect himself against extremely rogue behavior on the part of the United States, by which I mean violent actions toward him, designed to end his life, and it’s just a way to ensure that nobody feels incentivized to do that.”

I guess if Snowden is simply taken off a plane that leaves Moscow and extradited to America, that won't constitute violence that would trigger this release, would it? Remember, it's only blackmail if you don't like the person holding the secrets over someone else's head.

Honestly, can we just arrest Greenwald, too, in the hopes that would shut him up? He really is a jerk.

Gaily bedight, a gallant knight....

Have I reached the party to whom I am speaking?

Glenn Greenwald is righteously indignant:

If the UK and US governments believe that tactics like this are going to deter or intimidate us in any way from continuing to report aggressively on what these documents reveal, they are beyond deluded. If anything, it will have only the opposite effect: to embolden us even further. Beyond that, every time the US and UK governments show their true character to the world - when they prevent the Bolivian President's plane from flying safely home, when they threaten journalists with prosecution, when they engage in behavior like what they did today - all they do is helpfully underscore why it's so dangerous to allow them to exercise vast, unchecked spying power in the dark.

David was unable to call me because his phone and laptop are now with UK authorities. So I don't yet know what they told him. But the Guardian's lawyer was able to speak with him immediately upon his release, and told me that, while a bit distressed from the ordeal, he was in very good spirits and quite defiant, and he asked the lawyer to convey that defiance to me. I already share it, as I'm certain US and UK authorities will soon see.

It seems his partner, David Miranda, was detained at Heathrow Airport for nine hours, in accordance with Section 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000:

 Miranda, 28, was stopped Sunday while traveling home to Brazil after visiting Germany where he met with Laura Poitras, a U.S. filmmaker who has worked with Greenwald on the NSA story. The Guardian reported it paid for Miranda’s flights, but did not immediately respond to a request for elaboration on what his role with the newspaper might be, if any.

Mr. Miranda was on his way back from Berlin, where he'd met with Laura Poitras, the woman who filmed Mr. Greenwald's interviews with Edward Snowden.  But it wasn't just a social call:

Mr. Miranda was in Berlin to deliver documents related to Mr. Greenwald’s investigation into government surveillance to Ms. Poitras, Mr. Greenwald said. Ms. Poitras, in turn, gave Mr. Miranda different documents to pass to Mr. Greenwald. Those documents, which were stored on encrypted thumb drives, were confiscated by airport security, Mr. Greenwald said. All of the documents came from the trove of materials provided to the two journalists by Mr. Snowden. The British authorities seized all of his electronic media — including video games, DVDs and data storage devices — and did not return them, Mr. Greenwald said. 

Seems to me Mr. Greenwald has just explained why the British confiscated all the electronics Mr. Miranda had in his possession.

Mr. Greenwald may style himself a journalist, and imagine this gives him some kind of legal shield under the First Amendment; but that law only applies in the U.S., and it isn't at all clear it gives him carte blanche to deal in stolen documents.  I certainly don't see how this "journalist" shield he thinks he has extends to his partner, especially when he uses Mr. Miranda as a courier to carry stolen information across international boundaries.

I will be the first to admit I think the British Terrorism Act, like the U.S. PATRIOT act, is an overly broad law that gives government far too much police power.  But. Mr. Greenwald is not a privileged person above the law who can act without hindrance.  He should know that, if you strike at a king, you'd better kill him.  I don't think he, or Mr. Miranda, are even being harassed.  I think they are just finding out what governments, even governments of laws, can, and will, do. As Thought Criminal points out,  this is precisely what governments do, and generally with good reason.  I can't help but think this kind of detention is getting attention because Mr. Miranda is not an African American in any city in the United States; or a Latino, or simply a poor (v. rich) man.  People are regularly detained by American police on all manner of pretexts, yet it never makes international news.  Where is Mr. Greenwald's dudgeon about "stop and frisk" in New York?  I think that entire process is unconstitutional, and should be an affront to the notion of due process.  But while Bloomberg screams that the judge is going to let people die, the only thing the judge found unacceptable was the high number of blacks who were stopped and frisked.  We actually allow quite a bit of interference with our personal freedoms, or privacy, in the name of security.  Well, that and white people are not as automatically suspect of criminal acts as black people are, so we're generally not as bothered by daily intrusions on our privacy or liberty.

But when they do happen:  look out!

In the end, Charlie Pierce gets it about half-right:

What has become very plain is that very few of our national institutions -- and especially not our government and our media -- have any idea how to deal with what is essentially a major international brawl over information. You want to fight over land, you seize it. You want to go to war over oil, you grab the other guy's oilfields. But this is a battle over what people know, and how they come to know it, and whether or not they have the right to know it at all. This is a war on the battlefield of the mind. The rules are different. They have to be. Freedom of thought is not a prize to be won or lost, or even to be contested. It is the natural human right of every person on the planet. We are in an age in which technology has accelerated the processes of exercising that right. The institutions that would abridge that right are slow to catch up. Their efforts are clumsy and, in the case of David Miranda in London, brutal. Edward Snowden, International Man Of Luggage, has touched off a period of insanity in those institutions. I really hadn't planned on a "national conversation" in which so many voices seem to be screaming from Bedlam. This is not going well at all.

This is a fight over information, and the rules do have to be different, because of the technology.  But it isn't a fight over freedom of thought; it's a fight over what is secret and what happens when those things legally classified as secret become public.  It isn't even the Pentagon Papers fight, over what is secret and what shouldn't be secret.  I'm not sure this detention really qualifies as clumsy or brutal, for reasons I mentioned above.  Detention of ordinary citizens, even for a quick frisk, is no less clumsy than detention at an airport for 9 hours.   Detaining a man at an airport for 8 hours is hardly the equivalent of torture, of daisy-cutters, of drone aircraft launching missiles at tall men and a wedding in the desert.  And in this case the insanity was fully predictable; no good deed goes unpunished, and no "national conversation," here, or anywhere else on the planet, is conducted over tea and scones in the quiet of the late afternoon. Frankly, the most interesting part about this to me is Mr. Greenwald's high dudgeon, and his fervid imaginings that he's scaring the governments of Britain and the United States.  He's dealing with people regularly responsible for the deaths of others (and I mean soldiers as well as victims of military action), and responsible for the lives of millions more.  These are people threatened by people who want to inflict death on the citizens those governments are responsible for.  So far, the worst revelations Mr. Greenwald has disclosed have resulted in:  no Congressional action, not even a reduction in the intelligence budgets of the U.S.

And he's threatening them?

That man is so brave!

No, seriously....

Update:  unsurprisingly, this is a changing story; but now we know why the British were interested in David Miranda:

“I’m going to publish many more things about England, as well,” he said in Portuguese at Rio’s international airport when Miranda arrived. “I have many documents about England’s espionage system, and now my focus will be there, too. I think they’ll regret what they’ve done.”

Brazil is claiming the detention was unjustified.  If Mr. Greenwald had kept his threats to himself, they might have had a case.

Glenn Greenwald is an Idiot. But I repeat myself.

Not accurate. The charge is "conspire...to knowingly access a computer...without authorization..." 15 (A) in the following document: https://t.co/qQpx07wqOK

— Alex Gibney (@alexgibneyfilm) April 11, 2019

Agree that journalists encourage sources. But the legal distinction that the DOJ will try to draw is that Assange actually tried to help Manning gain more access (via anonymity) for more info. DOJ will argue that journalists are not protected for breaking into computer systems.

— Alex Gibney (@alexgibneyfilm) April 11, 2019

Greenwald's "argument" is to scream that Assange is a "journalist" and Wikileaks a "media outlet," so:  1st Amendment!  Which is what Wikileaks is also trying to say, even though that's not the legal argument that's going to prevail in court.

Yes, journalists who receive classified materials and publish same can declare a "shield" under the 1st Amendment for prosecution for trafficking in such materials.  However, journalists cannot encourage nor aid the person who obtains the classified materials, anymore than they can encourage a bank robbery so they can get the "scoop" on the story.  The distinction is admittedly a fine one:  if a client uses a lawyer's legal advice to commit a crime, the lawyer is not responsible for the crime.  Or could be, if the lawyer means to help the client commit a crime.

Greenwald's argument tries to obscure this distinction.  Manning "had access," he claims, but that could merely mean Manning was in a position to access government computers, a position others would not be in.  Having access, and having authorization, are two different things.  An IRS employee may have access to your tax records; the same employee is not authorized to publish those records (and "publish" here merely means transfer them to a third party, not make available on a website).  If a third party helps that employee figure out how to access those records so they can be stored on a device, or otherwise copied and transferred to that third party, it makes no difference if the third party is a GUR agent, or a famous journalist for a major media outlet:  it's still a crime.  And the crime is committed by the third party, as well as by the employee.

That, as I understand it, is the essence of the government's legal claim.  Greenwald knows that, so he dances around it, trying to argue what the meaning of "is", is.  His argument from the indictment is a narrow bit of evidentiary dicta included in the pleading probably included to support a conspiracy charge, but Greenwald tries to make it the sole grounds for the case against Assange, without ever addressing what the legal elements of the crime are.  He then went off (on Twitter) on a conspiratorial rant against NBC/MSNBC that would frankly make Donald Trump proud:

I'm not surprised to see NBC journalists uniting behind Trump DOJ to justify the criminalization of WikiLeaks - NBC is fully aligned with the CIA/NSA long obsessed with destroying WL - but this tweet is false: the indictment also charges Assange with *encouraging* his source: https://t.co/pvJHVvea0K

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) April 11, 2019

NBC is the official organ of whatever you call it: the military-industrial complex, the Deep State, the Blob. I'm glad they made it official by putting CIA & intel officials on their payroll. The above psychopathic tweet is what you'd expect to hear at Langley, not a news outlet.

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) April 11, 2019

It's unhinged ranting.

When he's challenged on the charge against Assange, he resorts to his favorite line from the indictment (the only one he seems to know) and changes the subject, his favorite method of argument:

So you're saying the Obama DOJ searched for years to find evidence that Assange "hacked" those documents but failed to find any evidence, but the Trump DOJ found what you couldn't. Pretty humiliating for you. Hacking is a crime, but they're emphasizing "encouragement": pic.twitter.com/ikafKk1ReT

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) April 11, 2019

Since the Obama DOJ didn't charge Assange with hacking, it means the Trump DOJ can't?  And they "emphasize" encouragement, not hacking?  Isn't encouragement a central element of a conspiracy charge?

I never practiced criminal law, and I can figure out why that passage is in the papers.

Greenwald's argument may get people to fight with him on Twitter.  Assange would be wise not to add Greenwald to his legal defense team.

You might want to switch to decaf. https://t.co/ARJh13sDKv

— Rick Wilson (@TheRickWilson) April 12, 2019

The Snowed-on Effect

Gonna ride them someday....

Salon reminds us just how brave Glenn Greenwald is.  He wants to come "home" to the U.S....someday.  But he's really not that anxious to: 

“My parents are getting older, my nieces [live there] — none of that is something I’m going to go home for now…." 

Not even money could make him change his mind:

"I had a foundation that wanted to sponsor and pay for and market aggressively a six-city speaking tour to talk about the NSA story and the revelations. I would have completely loved to have done it… on the assurance that nothing would happen. And because we couldn’t get it from the U.S. government, I had to cancel.”

The threats, we are assured, are real.  Or kinda real.  Maybe real.  Anyway, public figures have said not-nice things about this brave, brave man:

[Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee Mike] Rogers compared Greenwald to a thief selling stolen material. [Director of National Intelligence James] Clapper appeared to suggest that Greenwald and other NSA reporters are “accomplices” to Snowden’s crimes. In each case the innuendo sidesteps the unseemly appearance of targeting journalists by attempting to distinguish the work of the journalist from journalism.

Still not sure how journalists get to violate laws on classified materials with impunity, but set that aside because it's a valid question whether any U.S. Attorney wants to open that can of worms.  My guess is:  none. However, precisely what prosecutorial power does James Clapper have?  Or Rep. Mike Rogers (R, not D, so who in DOJ is listening to him)?  Still, if you stick with this 15 paragraph report until paragraph 12, you get rewarded with this:

"Everybody I’ve talked to, including experienced lawyers — nobody has said ‘this is crazy,’” Greenwald added, stipulating that he doubts he’d actually be charged with anything — less than 50 percent chance of that in his mind. Nevertheless, “Everybody recognizes that there’s some risk.”

Greenwald is a lawyer, so presumably he knows it is malpractice to give legal advice that there is no risk, especially when the question is "Will I be prosecuted?"  There's always a risk of that.  How much risk is the question, but on that, Greenwald is deliberately, shall we say, legalistic?  Because even I would say "there's some risk."  But I wouldn't necessarily mean arrest was guaranteed the moment his plane touched down. And then there's paragraph 13:

A Justice Department spokesman referred me to these inconclusive November comments by Attorney General Eric Holder. “[O]n the basis of what I know now, I’m not sure there is a basis for prosecution of Greenwald.”

And that's "inconclusive" because no prosecuting attorney or AG worth his law license would ever say "there is ABSOTIVELY POSOLUTELY NO BASIS" for prosecution.  And even if Mr. Greenwald had that assurance, as his lawyer I'd tell him that promise is worth the paper it's printed on.

That's just the way the world works.

And while Mr. Greenwald really misses his family but doesn't want to come see them anytime soon, he will come to America if he wins the Polk Award, he assures us.

Wild horses, apparently, couldn't keep him away from being publicly feted.

That man is so brave!

"This is the end, my beautiful friend, the end....*

Dial "F" for Frankenstein

Interestingly, if you wander beyond the squabble between Charlie Pierce and Booman (I'm not even gonna link it), you can stumble into a world of facts and reason about NSA and Glenn Greenwald.  And no, the two are not yet separable.

Understanding the fact that they aren't begins with this very long post, which I will summarize for you (aren't you lucky!?).  I will summarize it by going to some of the source material Paul Canning cites, such as a post from Kurt Eichenwald (coincidentally, a journalist Pierce has cited favorably on other topics).

First, let's establish Eichenwald's claim to authority, especially since Greenwald has been spectacularly wrong in his assertions and suppositions:

Some explanation up front: I spent seven years investigating the national-security systems and policies established in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks for my book 500 Days. I learned a fair amount about the data-mining programs of the N.S.A. and wrote about it. I summarized those findings in my last post.

As Eichenwald pointed out in that post:

 Think about it for a second: all of us submit much more personal information to the government every year in our tax returns. We disclose the cost of our medical bills, how much we spent on computers or copy paper, child support, and on and on. And unlike the data collected for this portion of the Stellar Wind program, that personal information can be studied minutely and directly by a government employee.

There is also this problem, which I alluded to earlier:

 The NSA would have no authority to pull up, say, some American’s email account out of curiosity. Anyone violating this ban could potentially be committing a crime, just as an unauthorized IRS employee sneaking a peek at an individual tax return could be cited for wrongdoing. But the stricture was largely theoretical; sifting through the metadata to isolate an (arbitrary) individual’s records would be an almost impossible—and pointless—undertaking.

They have to find individual information, in other words; and they aren't set up to do that.  Need I say, rather like finding a particular cell phone anywhere in the world and turning it into a listening device, somewhat a la "The Dark Knight"?  No, that's just a ludicrous suggestion.

GG: The NSA has the capability, which is widely reported, to remotely activate people’s cellphones and turn them into listening devices. Even if you turn your cellphone off, as long as the battery is in it, it will still function that way. You could take the battery out, but I actually had a cellphone of the type where the battery could not be taken out. The only real solution was to leave it somewhere outside of the room but there was no real place we could leave it. So Snowden suggested that we put it in the refrigerator; there, it would be hermetically sealed and there would be no pickup of audio.

Why wouldn't I believe a journalist who says things like that?

Back to the sheer mass of material:  if the policy doesn't stop ya, the bulk certainly will.  Sure, NSA may have all this data; but then somebody has to tell a computer to sift through it; and somebody has to look at the results; and it still seems to me that's a task that would require most of the employees of the federal government to accomplish, and I'm not yet convinced Edward Snowden is the most reliable source for how much easier those things are than I think they are.

But, of course, this story isn't about Snowden; or his credibility.  How could it be?

So what is PRISM?  A super deep secret, like the aliens in Area 51?  Not according to Eichenwald:

First, the much-ballyhooed PRISM program is not a program and not a secret, and anyone who says it is should not be trusted because they don’t know what they’re talking about. PRISM is the name for the government computer system that is used to handle the foreign-intelligence data collected under Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

That link, by the way, is to the statute authorizing a program like PRISM.  Statutes are public documents.

As for the purported secrecy of this program—folks haven’t been listening. Section 702 was widely debated and parsed through by the Congress before its adoption in 2008 (under the Bush administration). It was widely debated and parsed through by Congress before its re-authorization in December 2012 (under the Obama administration). Any supposed expert who feigns surprise here is, once again, either uninformed or hyping.

I know it's not about Glenn Greenwald, but has he ever been accused of expertise in this area?  Have any of his supporters?

We should also consider what we know about data mining. Is it the magical ability to read all e-mails and text messages and electronic communications from everywhere at once, and know what you said and who you said it to?  Is it, like the movie "Enemy of the State," the ability to locate an active cell phone conversation in real time and pinpoint the location of the person having that conversation as they have it? Well, no, not really:

 the National Security Agency puts the information through a larger process known as “knowledge discovery in database”—or K.D.D.—which cleans, selects, integrates, and analyzes the data. It is also run against a large set of what are known as “dirty numbers”—telephones linked to terrorists either through American signals intelligence or information provided by foreign services. Even the Libyans under Qaddafi turned over huge stacks of dirty numbers to us.

So, on its simplest level, the program—part of a broader enterprise codenamed Stellar Wind, which includes the now infamous warrantless-wiretapping initiative—allows the government to detect when someone in the United States calls a dirty number. (For those who love irony, one of the first phones found to have placed a call to a dirty number was located in the West Wing of the Bush White House; investigators determined it was a fluke, although it did raise questions about the integrity of such inquiries.)

In addition, as part of K.D.D., an algorithm was applied to the broader data set in efforts to detect patterns of behavior fitting models that had been previously established as being indicative of the activities of a terrorist cell.

Are there privacy interests involved there; reasonable expectations of privacy, as the Court says?  Perhaps.  All I can tell you is that as a teacher I can't put personal information to students, like grades, in an e-mail; e-mail is not private communication, since anyone with access to the e-mail account can access the message, too.  Still, Eichenwald's description is a far cry from someone assigned to record and then listen to every phone call you ever make, or every phone call ever made in the world. To begin with, why would they be listening to your phone calls?  Out of all the people on the planet, what would make them stumble on you?  Unless there's some kind of one-to-one correspondence between you and an NSA employee, the odds against anyone's calls being monitored is actually pretty damned high.  There may still be a theoretical problem here; but let's get some perspective on even that possibility.

And speaking (again) of Greenwald, why do we care what he says?  Well, for a very good reason, it turns out:

There are other major errors of logic in how NSA programs are being covered as well. The distinction between a capability and the legal right to use it is acknowledged but completely fudged together in the piece. Hence, people left angry comments demanding to know why the NSA is reading Americans’ emails, when nothing of the sort is suggested by either the slides or even by a close reading of Greenwald’s story. Nevertheless, he’s writing in such a way that people will think the NSA is both surveilling the content of Americans’s phone calls and emails, and it is doing so in contravention of U.S. law — despite not actually providing any evidence to support either claim.

This sort of mendacious narrative-building is, sadly, now a regular feature of the Guardian’s coverage of the NSA. Which is a real shame, since there are serious qualms to raise about blanket surveillance programs (Senator Wyden has been the clearest voice in the Senate questioning not just their legality but their utility as well), about oversight, and about the law writ large. But that debate is getting crowded out by the misinformation and exaggerations that have replaced any sort of factual debate about the NSA. We’re going to lose out big time on a chance for real reform if it continues.

 I think we can say, very plainly and simply, that Glenn Greenwald is a liar, and most of the information we are getting is being read through the lens of lies he originally put in place.  That doesn't really help the conversation, does it?  It doesn't really matter now what Pro Publica or The New York Times or Der Spiegel report on, unless we understand the context we've been given for understanding this information is badly skewed and largely misrepresented.  The mad hyperbole of the government monitoring every single thing you do needs some perspective:

 When the government grabs every single fucking telephone call made from the United States over a period of months and years, it is not a prelude to monitoring anything in particular. Why not? Because that is tens of billions of phone calls and for the love of god, how many agents do you think the FBI has? How many computer-runs do you think the NSA can do — and then specifically analyze and assess each result? When the government asks for something, it is notable to wonder what they are seeking and for what purpose. When they ask for everything, it is not for specific snooping or violations of civil rights, but rather a data base that is being maintained as an investigative tool.

And a data base is not a particularized review of everything you said by e-mail, text message, or over a phone.  But Mr. Greenwald doesn't want perspective; he has an ideological axe to grind ("Both Snowden and Greenwald have made standard Libertarian attacks on US foreign policy alongside defences on Libertarian domestic policy."), and he wants to be sure everyone who disagrees with him is proven wrong:

 Greenwald is clearly an ideologue, and I’m sure he sincerely believes that the government’s use of drones and waging of covert wars and the drug war are the most pressing problems facing the planet. Or at least he believes that now. But his most consistent pattern seems to be a rapier’s edge applied to anyone who disagrees with him. And unlike, say, the late Christopher Hitchens, Greenwald applies the sword without the ballet of swordsmanship. His attacks are more like serial killings than swashbuckling. One has to be, in Greenwaldian terms, literally evil to not agree with his point of view. And he’s not afraid to say so. Anyone who fails to loathe Obama as he does is an “Obama lover” (just chew on that, if you’re African-American) or a “cultist.” It isn’t possible that Obama could do anything that isn’t vile and insipid and worthy of continual, emphatic condemnation.

So we're back to Aristotle's concept of Ethos:  Greenwald is not reporting on a story, he's making an argument.  The first legitimate question is not:  is his logic sound, but:  can he be trusted to tell the truth?

No, he can't.

And finally, the argument that Snowden (and Greenwald) have at least started a conversation is, as Mr. Pierce (who continually forwards that argument) would say, "all my balls":

 Snowden/Greenwald claim to have started a debate. This is rubbish. Just one month before Snowden appeared Obama made his big speech on terrorism which covered reining in surveillance. Plenty of others have been reporting on the NSA, in fact much of what is being sold as new 'revelations' has already been reported.

Even if the MSM has been sucked in and covered his 'revelations', hence 'debate', how can any proper 'debate' happen when it is being fed by 'reporting', not just by Greenwald (more later), best characterised as 'shoddy'? And lying behind all this of course is that it is simply untrue, as many appear to believe (even with mass jail breakouts, or whatever it was, causing those embassy closures) that no terrorism threat exists.

There is a serious and legitimate discussion to be had here about the NSA and surveillance, especially surveillance of anyone in the U.S. (the 4th Amendment is not limited to "citizens").  But it cannot be had on the terms established by Mr. Greenwald.

*and not a moment too soon!

Generating far more heat than light....again

So now we've reached the point in our revels where we're arguing over who arguably gets more unfavorable coverage, and what ratio of unfavorable coverage to favorable, and to candidate v. candidate, should be allowed, thought proper, or be taken as evidence of bias and, well...unfavorable coverage.

And we wonder why the American public gets sick of this circus long before the second Tuesday of November every 4 years, and why they refuse to give this oh so important! topic the searing, laser-like attention we say it deserves?

Yeah, you could say Krugman started it, although he conveniently overlooked the NYT's long history of Clinton Derangement Syndrome, capped most recently by its concern for the issuance of diplomatic passports sought by Bill Clinton so he could take two people to North Korea to help him retrieve two journalists held by the insane government there (hmmm.....why would you want to travel to North Korea on a diplomatic passport on a mission of mercy to wrest two people from the clutches of the government there?  Perfidy?  or Charity?  Notice how the two words end in "y"? Coincidence?  I think not, says the Old Gray Lady!  The game's afoot!).  But then Glenn Greenwald had to offer his $.02 worth, to reassure us he isn't a dried up old has-been since he came to America and nobody found him interesting enough to even detain at the airport for 10 minutes.  And somebody want to ask him about those "tens of thousands" of documents he had from Snowden?  The ones he was gonna release, like Julian Assange was/is gonna do against Hillary?  It must be hard, losing the limelight like that.

In the fine tradition of internet-based rants everywhere, whenever anyone anywhere publishes an opinion you disagree with, it is a sign of the imminent collapse of Western Civilization and another victory for the barbarians and a sign of "The Unrelenting Pundit-Led Effort to Delegitimize All Negative Reporting about Hillary Clinton."  No, really, that's what Greenwald said; or at least that's the headline his rant was posted under.  Evil has won, the barbarians have breached the walls, we're done for, we're done for!

All because Paul Krugman wrote a column criticizing the press coverage of Hillary Clinton and pointing out the continuing presence of Clinton Derangement Syndrome.  This, of course, is the real evil.  (This response, of course, requires mocking Krugman and siding with Zaid Jilani, a "colleague" (Greenwald's word) who is described as a journalist who writes for, among other on-line outlets, The Intercept.  Small world; although it raises the question again:  is Glenn Greenwald a journalist?  And does it matter?  Oh, let's not go there; like Camelot, it's much too silly.  Besides, it turned out it didn't matter; he wasn't important enough to detain when he bravely came to America to accept a minor award.  Brave, brave Sir Greenwald.)

Honestly, this is so far inside baseball it's under the stitches.  Krugman is right, but who really cares?  The reputation of Hillary Clinton is set in stone:  everybody knows it's true because everybody knows it's true.  And yet don't point out how it probably isn't true (unless you are Charlie Pierce, whom apparently Mr. Greenwald never reads; although I like to think that, because he's solely on-line too, Greenwald knows Pierce would rip him a new one, in style)* because then you will have upset the balance of the universe and given somebody somewhere who is anxious to be relevant again, if only for five minutes (is it up to 15 in total, yet?) a reason to rant.

Because, really, isn't that what the internet is for?

*I only wonder why Greenwald didn't tag Hillary with the Iran "ransom."  That would have been fun.  Because, you know, the only reason to object to such coverage is to cover for Hillary.  What a Manichean world they do live in.

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!

Mr. Greenwald to the clue phone, puh-leeze!

Do I laugh, or do I cry?

"Our NSA stories have been published and discussed in countless countries around the world, where they have sparked shock, indignation and demands for investigation. So revealingly, it is only American journalists - and them alone - who have decided to focus their intrepid journalistic attention not on the extremist and legally dubious surveillance behavior of the US government and serial deceit by its top officials, but on those who revealed all of that to the world."

Because, of course, Glenn Greenwald has never gone on TeeVee or given interviews just to talk about how this all affects Glenn Greenwald; nosireebob!

 “When I was in Hong Kong, I spoke to my partner in Rio via Skype and told him I would send an electronic encrypted copy of the documents,” Greenwald said. “I did not end up doing it. Two days later his laptop was stolen from our house and nothing else was taken. Nothing like that has happened before. I am not saying it’s connected to this, but obviously the possibility exists.”

 When asked if Greenwald believed his computer was being monitored by the U.S. government. “I would be shocked if the U.S. government were not trying to access the information on my computer. I carry my computers and data with me everywhere I go.”

 And Snowden has never tried to be sure everyone knows what a brave martyr he is:

The arrangement to entrust encrypted archives of his files with others also sheds light on a cryptic statement Snowden made on June 17 during a live chat with The Guardian. In the online session he said, “All I can say right now is the U.S. government is not going to be able to cover this up by jailing or murdering me. Truth is coming, and it cannot be stopped.”

 And let's not forget why Snowden brought that up:

 The second question, from The Guardian's Glenn Greenwald, read as follows: "How many sets of the documents you disclosed did you make, and how many different people have them? If anything happens to you, do they still exist?"

 Sorry, Charlie, but there are reasons the American press is obsessing over the character of Messrs. Snowden and Greenwald, and it's not because the two gentlemen have been coy about the impact of this story on their personal lives, or that they've refused to let the subject wander from what the NSA is allegedly doing.  In no small part it's because Mr. Snowden has admitted getting his last job just so he could spy on the NSA, and then he flees to Hong Kong claiming he can only be free there, only to find out China doesn't really want him, Russia doesn't really want him, and now getting to a country that will take him may be tougher than he thought.  And he's really upset the U.S. won't let him travel freely, but maybe that's because he's more upset they don't think him worthy of at least an exploding cigar.  And Mr. Greenwald loves to tell us how important this story is to him, or how important he is as a journalist that the U.S. is clearly spying on him.

I wonder how Barton Gellman feels about the security of his computer?  Or that French reporter who revealed France's spying on other people's electronic communications.  Who was that again....?

And then we bring back Liquid Paper....

I'll admit it, I'm a little fuzzy on the whole "privacy" issue.

I didn't know about PRISM when I wrote my post about the NSA looking at "telephony metadata" from Verizon (and, it turns out, we can pretty much assume the government has the same order issued against all the other phone companies.  Anybody else remember "The President's Analyst"?  We always knew it would come to this.), but as I said:  does anybody really have an expectation of privacy in their e-mails?

I know anything I put into an e-mail can be forwarded to anyone else with a single mouse click, which is why I'm very careful about what I put into an e-mail.  How many times have I received e-mails where someone hit "Reply All," telling me things I not only didn't want to know, but probably shouldn't know.  Try doing that with a telephone conversation, or a personal letter.

The problem here is, as I said, less that:  "There is a massive apparatus within the United States government that with complete secrecy has been building this enormous structure that has only one goal, and that is to destroy privacy and anonymity not just in the United States but around the world."  The problem here is that we let that apparatus be legally built.  (Greenwald bravely told Lawrence O'Donnell that Sen. Diane Feinstein, who wants the leaks of this court order and of PRISM investigated, could come and get him.  Bravely, because he's somewhere in England [actually he usually resides in Brazil.  I made an assumption based on the newspaper he writes for, but I leave the original error because, at the moment at least, Greenwald is in Hong Kong, and, purportedly, "out of reach of U.S. jurisdiction."].  He knows that, at most, he would go to jail for contempt of court for not revealing his source, and Diane Feinstein is not a prosecuting attorney who is going to force him to testify before a judge.  Greenwald isn't at personal risk here, for all his bravado.  His sources, however, have Bradly Manning as their future.  Greenwald is a punk.)

Since I've wandered off into the subject of Greenwald, note the comparisons he wants to make about this:

The times in American history when political power was constrained was when they went too far and the system backlashed and imposed limits. That's what happened in the mid-1970s when the excesses of J Edgar Hoover and Richard Nixon became so extreme that the legitimacy of the political system depended upon it imposing restraints on itself. And that's what is happening now as the government continues on its orgies of whistleblower prosecutions, trying to criminalize journalism, and building a massive surveillance apparatus that destroys privacy, all in the dark. The more they overreact to measures of accountability and transparency - the more they so flagrantly abuse their power of secrecy and investigations and prosecutions - the more quickly that backlash will arrive.

There ought to be a corollary to Godwin's Law that, when you can't go to Hitler, you go to Nixon.  Let us recall history, which Mr. Greenwald probably didn't live through (I'm quite sure I'm older than him by a decade or two).  What Nixon did was both secret and illegal.  He didn't have FISA or the PATRIOT ACT to fall back on; nor did J. Edgar Hoover, who ran his own clandestine spying program pretty much on the basis of being able to blackmail any politician (and probably a few judges) in D.C.  I don't feel completely comforted by the explanation of James Clapper that this is all legal and approved, because that isn't exactly full disclosure.  But it is at least within a legal framework; and therein lies the problem.

I would rather that terrorism be treated like a crime, not a national security issue.  But unless you haven't been paying attention, the Congress has made it clear since at least 9/11 that it doesn't want to treat any terrorist like a criminal.  They won't shut down Gitmo; they forced Obama to back down on prosecutions in New York City; Republicans still excoriate him as "soft" on terrorism because he wants to put any suspected terrorist on trial at all.  And every member of Congress since 9/11/2001 has been elected to office, and none of them perceive their jobs to depend on treating terrorism in any other way.

The problems here, in other words, are profound:  and Mr. Greenwald is anything but a profound thinker.  The Congress has been quite comfortable with this program, as evidenced by the statements coming out of the Senate and House yesterday.  No one was scrambling for the exits or trying to run away from this one, unlike the IRS scandal which really isn't a scandal and touches no one, or Benghazi Benghazi BENGHAZI!  Indeed, the American public seems to be pretty blase about this:  as O'Donnell told Greenwald, everyone O'Donnell spoke to shrugged and said "I figured the phone company was compiling that data anyway."

And so we're back to that linchpin of Constitutional analysis, the reasonable expectation of privacy.

I expect privacy in my mail (unless I send a postcard); that's what envelopes are for.  And lest we forget, the "Unabomber" was so successful (sadly) because he didn't use electronic communications.  He was so off the grid it was his manifesto that finally tripped him up, and that only because his brother recognized the ideas in it.

Anyway, my reasonable expectation of privacy in my letters is that the recipient won't pass it on to ten other people; unless it's a chain letter, of course (does anybody do those anymore?).  My reasonable expectation in a phone call is that no one is listening to the conversation, or can listen to it, except the person on the other end.  But when I make a phone call, or send an e-mail, or post anything at all on the internet; am I supposed to be surprised the government might be looking at it?  Am I really surprised that the whole world could be looking at it (ahem!), in a world where videos go "viral" and an e-mail can circumnavigate the world faster than a lie can outrace the truth?  The person who leaked the news of PRISM to the Washington Post said: “They quite literally can watch your ideas form as you type.”  Well, you want a connected world, you get a connected world.  You don't want them to watch as you type, then print a letter.  Better yet, drag out the old typewriter.  Wendell Berry would approve.

Maybe we should restrict this; but the fact is, we haven't.  This isn't Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover because we now have laws which allow the government to collect this kind of information.  Should we have such laws?  That's a valid conversation, a debate I would happily engage (no, is my answer.  I don't like FISA and I don't like the PATRIOT ACT (which is its name; the title is an acronym, not an informal nym)).  According to Sen. Mark Udall:

“As it is written, there is nothing to prohibit the intelligence community from searching through a pile of communications, which may have been incidentally or accidentally been collected without a warrant, to deliberately search for the phone calls or e-mails of specific Americans.”

This strikes me as the real problem.  Whether we will change it or not, is the question. 

But how do I really feel?

Will no one rid us of this troublesome pest?

Truth be told, I started reading this:

We could be talking about whether accessing and monitoring citizen information and communications is constitutional, or whether we should continue to allow a secret court to authorize secret warrants using secret legal opinions.

But we’re not. We’re talking about you! And flight paths between Moscow and Venezuela, and how much of a jerk Glenn Greenwald is. We could at least be talking about whether the Obama administration is right that your leak jeopardized national security. But we’re not talking about that, Ed.

We’re talking about you. I can imagine you’d say, “Well, then stop! Just talk about something else.” But here’s the problem, even if your initial leak didn’t compromise national security, your new cloak-and-dagger game is having real and tangible geopolitical consequences. So, well, we have to talk about … you.

Without reading the headline (I was on my phone, so I skipped to the story), and my first thought was "Wonder how long it's gonna take Greenwald to tweet about this."

Then I read the rest of the story.  Took Greenwald 4 tweets to express himself.  Or maybe it was just one, with three updates.  I've peeled peaches with thicker skins.

What's funny is Greenwald still wants to be an important part of this story:

"Snowden has enough information to cause harm to the U.S. government in a single minute than any other person has ever had," Greenwald said in an interview in Rio de Janeiro with the Argentinian daily La Nacion.

"The U.S. government should be on its knees every day begging that nothing happen to Snowden, because if something does happen to him, all the information will be revealed and it could be its worst nightmare."

Because if it isn't, then Greenwald backed the wrong horse; or failed to start the new American revolution; or just isn't nearly as important as his ego says he is.  And despite both articles identifying Greenwald as the "Guardian journalist," he's no more a journalist than I am.

Melissa Harris-Perry is right:  he's a jerk.

How many licks?

I stumble back into this topic just long enough to ask  "What the hell is going on here?:"

Who – and what – is a journalist? It’s not just about semantics.

And what?  Which is not a question just about semantics, it's about "What the hell are you talking about?"  Is my computer now a journalist because I use it to write posts for this blog?  If I take a stored post and publish it via my phone, is my phone now a journalist?  What what is what in that sentence?

It's a tempting point to go all Derrida on the NYT  Public editor, but that's already a joke that's so inside it's under the stitches (which may be a bit low and inside itself).  So we move on, because in all the glowering a glimmering of reason pokes through:

There is a strong legal component to this discussion: Who will be covered by a federal shield law that would give legal protection to journalists who have promised confidentiality to their sources, if it ever comes to pass? Will it cover only established news organizations or those who get paid for news gathering? Or does it cover everyone with a Facebook page?

Excellent questions which indeed have to be answered before a federal shield law makes any sense at all.  But don't look for any further discussion of those questions in that link, because you can't even find out if Paul Krugman is a journalist or not, over there:

Then, quite separately, there’s a question of the amount of professional respect shown to those like Ms. O’Brien and the columnist Glenn Greenwald, who has broken major news stories about government surveillance for The Guardian in recent weeks.

Is Mr. Greenwald a “blogger,” as a Times headline referred to him recently? That headline was atop a profile that did not use the word journalist to describe the columnist for The Guardian United States, the New York-based Web site associated with the British newspaper. At the time, I wrote (on Twitter) that I found the headline dismissive. There’s nothing wrong with being a blogger, of course – I am one myself. But when the media establishment uses the term, it somehow seems to say, “You’re not quite one of us.” (And that might be just fine with Mr. Greenwald, who has written disparagingly of some media people, whom he calls “courtiers of power.”)

This is the kind of thing I'm usually slagging Freshman composition students for (and sophomores; it runs deep):  making lots of unfounded and unsupported statements and then running on to some other topic.  It's hard to argue against when it gets an NYT imprimatur, but assuming (safely) none of my students even know what "NYT" means, I think I can soldier on.  Still, there's the big, fat question I asked earlier, hanging right over the plate.  How can I not swing at it?

Mr. Greenwald is a "columnist," says Ms. Sullivan; so, of course, is Mr. Krugman (who does have a day job). Can he be a journalist, too?   Mr. Greenwald has, with help (I'm pretty sure he shared bylines on his "scoops"), written some major stories, which he has tirelessly promoted since, and made himself a significant party to.  Well, Geraldo Rivera did the same thing, and he's a respected journalist, right?

Still, what this really comes down to, at the moment, is what Ms. Sullivan rightly identifies as the problem:  "You're not quite one of us."  Journalists are a high school clique, then:  Mean Girls with microphones and TV cameras and editors.  Ms. Sullivan surmises that Mr. Greenwald doesn't want to be a part of their stinky old club anyway; except he clamors to be respected as a journalist so he won't be investigated as an aide to a federal felon.

Nice work, if you can get it.

But who is a journalist?  Ms. Sullivan doesn't have the space (she demurs) to discuss the legal definitions (the ones that might actually matter, and therefore are complicated),  She does offer some attempt at a definition by Frank Rich, who really should know better:

Is David Gregory a journalist? As a thought experiment, name one piece of news he has broken, one beat he’s covered with distinction, and any memorable interviews he’s conducted that were not with John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Dick Durbin or Chuck Schumer.

Let us be kind and simply note that argument doesn't advance the issue one jot.   Apparently a journalist earns her spurs "breaking news" (something Bob Woodward hasn't done in decades, but apparently once is enough), by covering a "beat" with "distinction," and conducting "memorable interviews" (again, when was the last time Woodward did any of these things?)  Didn't Barbara Walters go through this problem about 40 years ago, trying to be taken seriously as a "journalist"?  Can we move on from the who "we" approve of and who "we" don't approve of definitions of high school social life now?

Ms. Sullivan makes her own stab at it, not doing much better than Mr. Rich:

But for now, I’ll offer this admittedly partial definition: A real journalist is one who understands, at a cellular level, and doesn’t shy away from, the adversarial relationship between government and press – the very tension that America’s founders had in mind with the First Amendment.

Which, I guess, does qualify Bob Woodward, now that he's set his sights on being a personal adversary of Barack Obama.  And that this definition disqualifies most of the most famous "journalists" in America, including several who do, or have, worked for the NYT, passes without further comment.

Who is a "journalist"?  Like the question about how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop:  the world may never know.

Adding:  is this guy a journalist?  Once in the club, is there anything you can do to get thrown out?  To lose your standing?  Just wondering what the parameters are here....

The Problem of the Unreliable Narrator

We're watching you, Mr. Blue

And because, you know, the NSA story should NEVER be about Glenn Greenwald:

• In July, Greenwald told Der Spiegel he and Laura Poitras had each received a complete archive from Snowden in Hong Kong, which totaled 9,000-10,000 documents.
• Greenwald later told the Brazilian senate that he possessed up to 20,000 documents.
• In its court statement over the temporary detention of David Miranda, the UK government said Miranda was carrying approximately 58,000 documents directly related to UK national security, which took up around 60 gigabytes of disk space.
• In late August, the Independent pegged Snowden’s document count at 50,000.
• In its recent story on NSA’s encryption-breaking activities, they said the Guardian shared with them “more than 50,000″ documents.

Which means Greenwald is an idiot, or a liar.  It also means we can't trust anything he says:

 If the source, and the journalists closest to him, are lying — constantly — why on earth should we trust them to report on their documents honestly? At this point, I have no faith that they will do so — and I think it is safe to assume that if they find evidence that the law is followed, or a document exonerating the President, they will refuse to publish it because it would weaken their argument.

As a journalist, that refusal to employ the truth in reporting, even if it cuts against your own biases, is deeply abhorrent. And I’m shocked it isn’t abhorrent to more of us.

In Poe's story "The Tell-Tale Heart," the narrator starts by asking us why we think he is mad.  It seldom occurs to the reader to wonder why a narrator would ask such a question of the reader, until we learn of the narrator's obsession with his landlord's bad eye.  By the end of the story we are convinced the madman has confessed to his hideous crime as he tells us in the story's climax:

I foamed --I raved --I swore! I swung the chair upon which I had been sitting, and grated it upon the boards, but the noise arose over all and continually increased. It grew louder --louder --louder! And still the men chatted pleasantly, and smiled.

That last sentence is the loose thread that unravels the tapestry.  Is it likely?  Is it even credible?  And if it isn't, is anything this narrator tells us credible?  Is it possible, indeed, the entire crime itself is a fabrication, the fiction of a deranged mind?  We have only the narrator's word for it, for the entire story itself.  And as for the opening sentence, when he asks why we think him mad:  perhaps he isn't talking to the reading audience at all, but to a silent character in the story, someone interviewing the narrator in...well, perhaps a madhouse.

We have Glenn Greenwald's word for how many crimes have been committed by the NSA.  Evidence of those crimes has not yet been forthcoming, and most of what Greenwald has asserted has simply been wrong.  But maybe this story really isn't about the "beating of his hideous heart;" maybe it really is about the narrator.

A narrator who insists we not consider him mad.