He certainly doesn't rank with MLK or Ellsberg — even though Ellsberg backs him.
He did good with the revelations of the domestic spying but him and Greenwald went too far by divulging how our international, covert info gathering works. And Greenwald, who has parlayed his part in this into his own media venture, continues to drip, drip, drip more and more tidbits from the Snowden files, seemingly timed to keep him and his new online magazine in the news and relevant. Meanwhile poor, naive Snowden is holed up in Russia, having to kiss Putin's ass for putting up by proclaiming in a presser that Russia is a beacon of light on human rights issues. And said presser was held in the run-up to the Olympics when many incidents of gay bashing in Russia came to light. What, gays don't have human rights?
Anyway, below is a snip from "ThePeople'sview" website on an interview by Chris Hayes of Jeremy Schahil (generally I'm a fan of Hayes but he too fails to differentiate between the TWO issues of Snowden's revelations — the domestic, which I agree with, and the foreign where I think the info dumps and continuing drips have hurt our international, covert networks, revealed some of our anti-terrorist methods, and possibly put lives in danger):
"on his part alone, Hayes skipped over important details when he introduced Scahill, Scahill's new magazine "The Intercept," and the specific article by Scahill that became the topic of the segment. To hear Hayes, one would easily get the impression that Jeremy Scahill was the sole author of the article and proprietor of the magazine. Both Scahill and Hayes conveniently concealed the fact that the article was penned by Scahill and... wait for it... Glenn Greenwald. The Intercept - the magazine fronted by Hayes - is itself a collaborative effort between Scahill, Greenwald, and Laura Poitras. There was no verbal mention of any of these people, and the only way one may have spotted Greenwald's footprint during the interview was looking very carefully at the screenshots of the article where the authors' names are printed in a tiny font.
If the names sound familiar, it is because Greenwald and Poitras are the primary conduits through which the fugitive Edward Snowden has conducted his indiscriminatory dump of sensitive documents and his dumping on the American legal system. Interestingly, Greenwald, Poitras, Scahill and Snowden are all on the Board of a Snowden front-group "Freedom of the Press Foundation" - whose sole job seems to be to protect Edward Snowden and attack the US government and not breathe a word about the fact that their darling is hiding out in a country with a despicable record on the very freedom they are pretending to fight for.
Not that the connection to Edward Snowden completely escaped the discussion between Hayes and Scahill, however. Hayes pointedly faulted President Obama for allowing the NSA to use information gathered through metadata - Snowden's biggest revelation - to determine terrorist targets to strike. Scahill and Hayes proceeded to sound scary and ominous warnings about the report's substance - in essence the allegation that the NSA is using metadata collected, cross-referenced with its targets, and geolocation of SIM cards (the chip inside your phone that contains information on the carrier and tells the phone what its number is) to determine terrorist targets to strike. They argued that the tactic was getting innocent people killed in case these targets handed off their phone to someone else at the precise time the US decides to strike.
Repeatedly, Hayes and Scahill used the pronoun "you" to describe the target, and "your kid" to describe the person one may have handed the phone off to and the innocent life that is therefore taken. The implication being that since the NSA is collecting all telephony metadata (without personal information or content), their algorithm of determining targets may at any time deem a random innocent American child to be such target. That dumbed-down version isn't the substance of the report or the source, of course, as it notes that the source is "adamant that the technology has been responsible for taking out terrorists and networks of people facilitating improvised explosive device attacks against U.S. forces in Afghanistan," although it also claims that innocent lives have been lost as the result of the same.
And this is where the crude, naked, political hackery of Hayes and Scahill shines through. Not only do they fail to mention that metadata is only part of the equation, and that not all electronics signals intelligence is metadata, they completely avoid the reason the source claims the accuracy of the targets have diminished:
One problem, he explains, is that targets are increasingly aware of the NSA’s reliance on geolocating, and have moved to thwart the tactic. Some have as many as 16 different SIM cards associated with their identity within the High Value Target system. Others, unaware that their mobile phone is being targeted, lend their phone, with the SIM card in it, to friends, children, spouses and family members.
Some top Taliban leaders, knowing of the NSA’s targeting method, have purposely and randomly distributed SIM cards among their units in order to elude their trackers. “They would do things like go to meetings, take all their SIM cards out, put them in a bag, mix them up, and everybody gets a different SIM card when they leave,” the former drone operator says. “That’s how they confuse us.”
So... umm, just how did these Taliban leaders find out about NSA's methods? How did the targets find out that the NSA was using metadata? Oh, right. Someone leaked and someone published a gazillion documents on the metadata program as well as other NSA programs targeting terrorists. The leaker is Edward Snowden, and the publisher? Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras.
The conclusion could not be clearer. If innocent people are dying because of NSA's targeted drone strikes, they are dying partly because Glenn Greenwald and Ed Snowden gave America's enemies the sources and methods of America's intelligence operations. To the extent that, as Scahill and Greenwald's own source says, terrorists' knowledge of NSA's operations have helped them and hurt innocent people, the blood of those innocent people is on the hands of Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald. Greenwald may claim that he's only a reporter, but Snowden is now even more clearly guilty of aiding and abetting America's enemies. That is, to the extent that Scahill and Greenwald stands by their reporting, of course.
Since the very inception of the Snowden leaks, Obama administration officials have insisted exactly this: that revealing NSA's methods in this way would let terrorists escape attacks from the United States, and make it more difficult to kill or capture them. Matthew Olsen, the Director of Counterterrorism Center in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence outlined exactly this threat in his testimony to Congress back in November of 2013:
"There is no doubt that those disclosures have made our job harder. We've seen that terrorists or adversaries are seeking to learn about the ways that we collect intelligence and seeking to adapt and change the ways that they communicate," he told a congressional hearing on Thursday. Congratulations to Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill for confirming that exact point."
This should offer a different perspective to those who claim Snowden's foreign revelations hurt no one.
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