The Greenwald effect

While much has been written about the Snowden effect, another interesting feature of the recent NSA revelations is the Greenwald effect, which is the label I apply to the irrational hostility that Glenn Greenwald evokes from so many quarters in the media. I can understand those people in the mainstream media who hate him. Long before his involvement with the Edward Snowden NSA revelations, he had no hesitation in calling out the media and naming names when they carried water for the government and were hypocritical in the way they covered events when the US government or its allies/clients did it or when countries that were considered hostile did it. His relentless exposing of legacy media shallowness was not something they were used to. The last straw was him getting the opportunity to break the biggest story in decades precisely because they had proven themselves to be so feckless and unprincipled and untrustworthy. [Read more…]

The backlash begins

The suggestion that the nine-hour detention of David Miranda at Heathrow airport and the confiscation of all his electronic items was a snafu by an over-eager airport security official or that it was a routine decision taken by the anti-terror branch of their security forces was never very plausible but it has now been shot down by the US government saying that it had been given a ‘heads up’ by the British government that they were going to take this action. [Read more…]

Foiling forced marriages

Forcing girls to marry at a young age, often to much older men, is unfortunately something that still occurs in some parts of the world. The girls have no say in the process. Fortunately, the practice is disappearing and is almost completely gone in many nations. But even in those nations where the practice is not allowed, some immigrant parents seek to perpetuate it by sending their daughters back to the home country purely for the purpose of getting them married, not telling them the true purpose of the trip and letting them think it is for a family function or a holiday or to see relatives. Once they are back in that country, there is little the girls can do to stop the wedding since they are now alone in a strange country. [Read more…]

An open-and-shut case of abuse of terrorism laws

Those of us who have been concerned with the massive assault on civil liberties have warned that all the so-called ‘anti-terror’ measures that are being rammed through for the ostensible purpose of fighting terrorism would be also used against anyone whom the government does not like, and that those who casually dismissed those concerns might one day find themselves in the cross-hairs. Those alleged realists who adopted a worldly-wise air and airily treated due process and constitutional protections as quaint relics of a bygone era that need to be dispensed with in our hard-eyed effort to protect ourselves from terrorism dismissed these arguments as fear-mongering, placing their trust in the supposed goodness of political leaders that they would not abuse the powers they had seized. [Read more…]

What happens when you lose credibility

Jeff Jarvis writes about how the Obama administration is coming to realize the cost of its repeated lying and other attempts at media manipulation.

That is the punchline of the Snowden affair: when we can’t trust what government tells us, we come to trust those whom government doesn’t trust. Thus, we no longer necessarily care what the official line is and who delivers it. And when that happens, access – the currency of the Beltway – becomes worthless. Ah, the irony.

The one big lesson is that whatever one might think about the advisability of the revelations by WikiLeaks, Manning Snowden, Greenwald, etc., they have not lied to us while the government has repeatedly lied.

So who are you going to believe?

Great moments in mainstream journalism

Michael Grunwald is a reporter for Time magazine. He recently sent out a tweet that said, “I can’t wait to write a defense of a drone strike that takes out Julian Assange”.

He has since deleted the tweet but nothing even truly disappears in the internet. In the face of a backlash he apologized for the tweet calling it ‘dumb’ but he has a long history of supporting drone strikes attacking those who are concerned about civil liberties. [Read more…]

Edward Snowden clarifies his situation

I was reading the Wall Street Journal that the conference hotel provides and came across this article today that suggests that there are splits between the three groups that are providing support to Edward Snowden: Wikileaks, Glenn Greenwald, and Snowden’s father’s husband and wife legal team of Bruce and Mattie Fein. Mattie Fein said that they were concerned that the other two groups were not acting in Snowden’s best interests and were working for their own benefit and even trying to make money off him. [Read more…]

The Barack and Francis show

I think that pope Francis has picked up a few ideas from president Obama. Recall that Obama came into office as the agent of hope and change, who would reverse the course of the Bush administration and bring about transparency and a commitment to end the civil and human rights abuses. Many people who hated what the Bush/Cheney regime had wrought bought into that at least partially and supported him enthusiastically. [Read more…]