"In one passage, Mr. Greenwald makes the demonstrably false assertion that one “unwritten rule designed to protect the government is that media outlets publish only a few such secret documents, and then stop,” that “they would report on an archive like Snowden’s so as to limit its impact — publish a handful of stories, revel in the accolades of a ‘big scoop,’ collect prizes, and then walk away, ensuring that nothing had really changed.” Many establishment media outlets obviously continue to pursue the Snowden story."
It's trivial to point to CNN, NBC, CBS, NYT, WaPo etc and show that really they haven't kept up with the Snowden papers in depth and certainly haven't emphasized any of the relevant points in their stories-- for instance, a Google search of "JTRIG CNN" or "JTRIG NBC" or "JTRIG New York Times" comes up with nothing, because they didn't even write stories on that revelation-- perhaps intentionally as a result of collusion with the government to protect the terms of their access to officials. JTRIG was a super-important reveal which was not covered whatsoever by the MSM, and is described as "The scope of the JTRIG's mission includes using "dirty tricks" to “destroy, deny, degrade [and] disrupt” enemies by “discrediting” them, planting misinformation and shutting down their communications." by Wikipedia.
In summary: NYT is wrong when they attempt to defend themselves against Greenwald's claim that they're pro-establishment because they refused to write stories on the most damaging Snowden files.
EDIT: Out of curiosity, I additionally decided to investigate whether the NYT and MSM covered Operation Earnest Voice, the NSA's program to sway public opinion via shilling and sockpuppeting.
They did not cover the story whatsoever. Operation Earnest Voice detailed extensive false-person based propaganda efforts against the US and international public.
Agree with regards to the NYT. I cancelled my subscription when they published a front-page NYT Magazine story on how wonderful Anthony Weiner was, how he had reformed, and that he was a real family man running for mayor of NYC. It was so transparently a propaganda piece that I read it with dismay, seeing immediately that it was nothing but arranged by a PR machine. Then of course just a couple months later we found out that he hadn't changed his behavior one bit. Of course there was no acknowledgement whatsoever by NYT that they'd either been had or that they participated in a thinly-veiled PR strategy.
You're assuming that the PR firm put one over on the Times, but it's entirely possible that they knew what they were publishing and were quite happy with it.
The idea is: journalists need sources to be able to do their job. But sources can be difficult to cultivate relationships with. Enter the "beat sweetener" -- a completely uncritical profile of a policymaker, written for the sole purpose of buttering that person up so they give greater access in the future to the reporter and/or publication that produced it.
The NYT is probably the most prestigious PR mill that exists in the USA-- nearly everyone of import gets their own interview or too-favorable opinion piece written. Their criticism is forever tepid and toothless, and their "objective" descriptions too-frequently appear to be mild praise.
The WaPo review is even weirder. The author can't even maintain the pretense that he's commenting on Greenwald instead of just defending his own home turf.
Anyone reporting in DC for a media outlet with any access to politicians, knows they their reporting is tempered by their desired to maintain that access to power. The fact he doesn't acknowledge that says pretty much everything you need to know about the quality of the review. Edit: Turns out Cole is a law professor: I guess that explains his deference to the current law and attitude that what we already know the NSA is unable to be scandalous in and of itself.
Even when Cole attempts to elucidate a criticism of Greenwald I already agree with, he looks like a hack. Once the Casablana quote comes up it's obvious this guy is just sputtering trying to find a way to look down his nose at the guy that won his paper a Pulitzer.
I don't think you're familiar with David Cole. He's not some drone reporter, trying not to offend his government contacts. His main job is as a law professor, not a reporter. He's the legal affairs correspondent for The Nation, which is probably the premier left-oriented intellectual journal in the US. This journal was against the Iraq war from Day One, for example, and has never had any problem with its outsider status.
I think, as a litigator and law professor, he's invested in the idea that both competing interests be recognized. But confusing that with hackery is a mistake. As is the notion that Cole feels a need to defend the WaPo -- he's not part of the WaPo.
*
Regarding the remarks nearby on the limitations of the NYT -- yes, the main problem with the NYT is that it is an establishment paper. Not always "liberal", but typically reliably "establishment". This partly explains their behavior WRT the Iraq war.
And maybe also their assigning Michiko Kakutani, their all-purpose book reviewer (typically of literary fare, but not always), to such a political book. I think they would have been better served with a specialist.
While I absolutely wish the NYT were more forthcoming with its reporting on these issues (such as the example you pointed out), the NYT is by far the best "mainstream"[0] news source around.
Let's also not forget that the New York Times did stand up for the first amendment in one extremely important whistleblower case resulting in a Supreme Court decision that is highly relevant to the Snowden leaks[1].
This review was painful to read, but let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater ("The NYT is a joke"). The NYT reports on a number of these issues with higher-quality reporting than most publications. As with any reporting and editorial team as large as the NYT, we can point to both cases in which they have done their job well and case in which they have not. But I wouldn't say that the NYT is "a joke" - I'd reserve that judgment for publications that truly add net-zero or net-negative value[2], not a publication whose history is "mixed, but still better than almost anything else out there".
It's also worth noting that the NYT has less leeway with editing the content of editorials and reviews (such as this one), and for good reason - as a policy, it limits the extent to which editors can censor writers (or makes it more difficult for them to do so).
Yes, it's certainly possible - policies are, after all, just policies. In the era in which a company can be served an NSL, I think we can all agree that nothing is impossible, for any company[3].
[0] ie, not single-issue journalism, or publications run explicitly by advocacy groups
[2] Fox "news" would be the obvious whipping boy here.
[3] Put another way, I can totally understand if you're concerned about the government having undue influence on the NYT's reporting (either directly or indirectly). But for that, no publication with a reach as large as the NYT can be immune to that. That's certainly a sad statement about the state of our government, but it's not a statement about the NYT specifically.
I don't think that we can infer anything about the modern NYT from their involvement in the pentagon papers. For god's sake, they still have a hard time calling Bush out for torture and instead stick to the use of "harsh interrogation." The NYT thrives on being part of the political establishment.
Let's also not forget that the NYT was at the forefront of banging the drum to lead us into the Iraq war, not to mention it's perpetual hawkishness on Iran.
I think that depends on the topic and the journalist (how much pressure he received, how does he respond to such pressures).
That I like the 'New Yorker' better when it comes to quality, although I reckon that are not comparable magazines. Generally speaking I'm very picky, but I read NYT articles as well. Of course, I'd never pay for a subscription...
I don't see how JTRIG was a "super-important reveal". The domestic spying reveals were significant and important because they revealed programs that might be illegal. JTRIG, on the other hand, appears to fall into what we expect spy agencies and intelligence agencies to do. It would be newsworthy if they were NOT doing these things. There might be some newsworthiness in which agency is doing it (e.g., if GCHQ is doing something that should be done by MI6).
So the big reveal then, is that while America may consider its heavily industrialized war-monger operations 'honorable' for 'moral principles' and the 'greater good', in fact underneath the covers is a vile hive of rotten scum and villainy.
Yes, spy agencies are 'allowed to do dirty things', thats why they are spy agencies .. it is the state sacrificing its last privilege, the individual, for the 'greater good'.
Except, like all technology that is weaponized, it can also fall into the wrong hands. Snowdens' reveal is that it is in fact in the wrong hands, because it is being used indiscriminately and without any scruples by the people with special .. privileged .. access to The Citadel.
I find it hard to consider doing business against an American company, in a serious big-picture way, as being anything but a ruthless affair. If the NSA and its corporate owners are allowed to consider their occupation, indeed we have witnessed the death of freedom, liberty, and the pursuit of justice for all. We have new rules, and new rulers.
Big deal. British military-industrial crimes are just as heinous as the American kind. Didn't America get started because of British oppression - and yet here it is, subverted, and committing the very same acts that were once worth sacrificing ones life to prevent ..
Unless you were actually following the propagation of Snowden stories through the MSM in realtime as I was (at the time), it'd be tough to realize a story isn't getting covered.
People also tend to have intentionally blind spots when it comes to their own institution.
It tells all you need to know about the establishment nature of the NYT that Kakutani, in her defense of establishment media against Greenwald's critique, writes:
>"Many establishment media outlets obviously continue to pursue the Snowden story."
Correction - it's not the Snowden story, it's the NSA surveillance story. The story isn't supposed to be about the whistleblower.
I quickly clicked back to get the author's surname, and didn't pay enough attention. Also, I'm subconsciously sexist and have to make an effort to refer to the unknown and anonymous with gender-neutral pronouns (obviously!)
The review fails to tackle allegations of economic espionage for the department of commerce, interception of hardware to install backdoors, targeting allies, targeting dissidents not terrorists, and an ambition to collect all the information on the planet.
Given the lack of engagement with the central allegations of the book, and the sniping about his character in this review, I think it demonstrates very well that media outlets publish only a few such secret documents, and then stop. The NYT has just occasionally been brilliant in covering this story (mostly when involving Laura Poitras), but mostly has avoided the central issues and has completely avoided challenging the talking points and framing of this story by the administration as about terrorism and a naif who has put the country in danger, encouraged by the 'activist' Greenwald.
On one hand, I think that Greenwald fails to understand the nature of the NYT: The NYT seeks to turn a profit, and they do so via the formation and recapitulation of the most middle ground, most mainstream views and opinions.
On the other hand, this kind of "perfectly normal and always palatable fare for the sake of always being popular" stuff is certainly very weak journalism. They're so low-brow that they can't even write a story that refutes their readership's expectations because they're afraid of losing business. When it comes to the government, the criticism of the NYT will always be pedestrian and surface-level rather than deep. This ends up serving the government because it implies that solutions will also be merely surface-level rather than far-reaching.
>On one hand, I think that Greenwald fails to understand the nature of the NYT: The NYT seeks to turn a profit, and they do so via the formation and recapitulation of the most middle ground, most mainstream views and opinions.
Let's make an important distinction here: the NYT does not merely seek to turn a profit. That is, they do not try to cover their operating costs plus some extra percentage. Even at their size, they could engage in responsible journalism and still achieve this goal.
Rather, the NYT seeks to maximize profit, above all else. And, if responsible journalism does not contribute to that goal, then responsible journalism will not get done.
How can we protect ourselves from this type of interception? It seems impossible. Why would any non-american customers buy US made devices? Any protections that are added can/will be bypassed if the US gov gets physical access (or even remote).
It seems like our US vendors are going to take a hit from this.
If some product (router, cell phone, heck, even a cable or power supply) where designed to be amenable to physical inspection, a lot of the weirder anti-air-gap NSA spying would be possible to verify against. I mean, a USB cable with a clear silicone strain guard would show you that some of the taps don't exist.
Verifiable builds, and open-source software would take away the potential of a lot of the rootkit-like taps. The big issue is the BIOS-level, DMA-level and hidden-disk-storage (host protected area). Perhaps using Linux BIOS, with verifiable builds, would protect against some of that. Naturally, hardware like the Broadcom network adapters that have their own Mips CPU is right out: peripherals would have to be demonstrably "dumb" to fit in this sort of system.
Perhaps shipping components and requiring some self-assembly would help. Certainly, you'd have to have enough documentation to ensure that no weird extra chips are soldered on, and design so that chips can be verified by the users.
All of these things mitigate against, but don't eliminate the spying.
Yes, but not immediately, since the NSA thing came as a surprise, so:
a. nobody had a plan to switch at that time.
b. foreign companies did not know they might be able to compete simply for privacy reasons.
I think this will change over the next decade. People move slowly, but now that the trust is lost, it will be difficult to restore, even if the US government would act. (They won't.)
> b. foreign companies did not know they might be able
> to compete simply for privacy reasons.
Tell that to employees of companies such as Airbus... They have always assumed that they were under constant attack from government-level entities, with good reason.
An exception or two to the rule does not invalidate the rule. Most ordinary commercial businesses using US-made devices or online services don't deal with technology their government considers a national asset, and as a result don't have to be as paranoid as Airbus, BAE, Petrobras, etc.
"In one passage, Mr. Greenwald makes the demonstrably false assertion that one “unwritten rule designed to protect the government is that media outlets publish only a few such secret documents, and then stop,” that “they would report on an archive like Snowden’s so as to limit its impact — publish a handful of stories, revel in the accolades of a ‘big scoop,’ collect prizes, and then walk away, ensuring that nothing had really changed.” Many establishment media outlets obviously continue to pursue the Snowden story."
It's trivial to point to CNN, NBC, CBS, NYT, WaPo etc and show that really they haven't kept up with the Snowden papers in depth and certainly haven't emphasized any of the relevant points in their stories-- for instance, a Google search of "JTRIG CNN" or "JTRIG NBC" or "JTRIG New York Times" comes up with nothing, because they didn't even write stories on that revelation-- perhaps intentionally as a result of collusion with the government to protect the terms of their access to officials. JTRIG was a super-important reveal which was not covered whatsoever by the MSM, and is described as "The scope of the JTRIG's mission includes using "dirty tricks" to “destroy, deny, degrade [and] disrupt” enemies by “discrediting” them, planting misinformation and shutting down their communications." by Wikipedia.
In summary: NYT is wrong when they attempt to defend themselves against Greenwald's claim that they're pro-establishment because they refused to write stories on the most damaging Snowden files.
EDIT: Out of curiosity, I additionally decided to investigate whether the NYT and MSM covered Operation Earnest Voice, the NSA's program to sway public opinion via shilling and sockpuppeting.
They did not cover the story whatsoever. Operation Earnest Voice detailed extensive false-person based propaganda efforts against the US and international public.
The NYT is a joke.