Glenn Greenwald on the brink of revealing the depth to which the NSA is building an Orwellian state.

Deji McGever · Jul 15, 2014

durvasa said: ↑

So spying is OK, so long as there is a national security rationale behind it.

How far should we take this? If the government spots some violent, anti-government groups, are they justified in spying on anyone who espouses anti-government ideologies?
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Of course.

Os Trigonum · Aug 27, 2018

new article about Greenwald in the current New Yorker. Having recently re-watched Oliver Stone's Snowden, my opinion is that Greenwald is someone whose views and opinions need to be taken seriously

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/09/03/glenn-greenwald-the-bane-of-their-resistance

some excerpts:

Glenn Greenwald, the Bane of Their Resistance
A leftist journalist’s bruising crusade against establishment Democrats—and their Russia obsession.
By Ian Parker

***
Greenwald, a former lawyer who, in 2013, was one of the reporters for a Pulitzer Prize-winning series in the Guardian on Edward Snowden’s disclosures about the National Security Agency, is a longtime critic, from the left, of centrist and liberal policymakers and pundits. During the past two years, he has further exiled himself from the mainstream American left by responding with skepticism and disdain to reports of Russian government interference in the 2016 Presidential election. On Twitter, where he has nearly a million followers, and at the Intercept, the news Web site that he co-founded five years ago, and as a frequent guest on “Democracy Now!,” the daily progressive radio and TV broadcast, Greenwald has argued that the available evidence concerning Russian activity has indicated nothing especially untoward; he has declared that those who claim otherwise are in denial about the ineptitude of the Democrats and of Hillary Clinton, and are sometimes prone to McCarthyite hysteria. These arguments, underpinned by a distaste for banal political opinions and a profound distrust of American institutions—including the C.I.A., the F.B.I., and Rachel Maddow—have put an end to his appearances on MSNBC, where he considers himself now banned, but they have given him a place on Tucker Carlson’s show, on Fox News, and in Tennys Sandgren’s Twitter feed. Greenwald is also a tennis fan—and a regular, sweary player. He recently began working on a documentary about his adolescent fascination with Martina Navratilova.

***

In the buildup to the 2016 election, Greenwald detected a conflict between actors defiantly contemptuous of American norms—the Republican Presidential nominee, WikiLeaks, Vladimir Putin—and the establishment forces that he hates, including the U.S. intelligence services, “warmonger” neoconservatives like William Kristol, and big-money Democrats. That August, in an Intercept article that used the word “smear” a dozen times, and ended with an image of Senator Joseph McCarthy, Greenwald argued that “those who question, criticize or are perceived to impede Hillary Clinton’s smooth, entitled path to the White House are vilified as stooges, sympathizers and/or agents of Russia: Trump, WikiLeaks, Sanders, The Intercept, Jill Stein.” He wrote that both Trump and Stein, the Green Party’s Presidential candidate, were being “vilified for advocating ways to reduce U.S./Russian tensions.” (Even though this article included Trump on the list of those being “smeared,” Greenwald told me that he had only ever invoked McCarthyism in reference to “Democrats who accused me and others like me of being Kremlin agents.”) After the election, he scorned those “screaming ‘Putin,’ over and over.” Later, on an Intercept podcast, he said that Democrats had embraced, without evidence, various “conspiracy theories” about collusion; American liberals were caught up in an “insane, insidious, xenophobic, jingoistic kind of craziness.”

In the period since then—these months of Guccifer 2.0 and Natalia Veselnitskaya and Carter Page—Greenwald has continued to portray the Trump-Russia story as, essentially, one of rotten American élites and unruly insurgents. Although he has acknowledged the failings (not to mention the indictments) of some people in the insurgent category, he has focussed his editorial energy on documenting the past infractions and continuing misjudgments of people—in the intelligence agencies, the Department of Justice, Congress, and the media—who have provided apparent evidence of Russian interference and Trump-campaign collusion. Greenwald has questioned their reliability, and has disputed their evidence, to a degree that has frustrated even some colleagues at the Intercept. On Twitter, Greenwald recently described the self-identified “resistance” to Trump as “the first #Resistance in history that venerates security state agencies.” He has denounced the congressman Adam Schiff, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, who has sought to investigate Trump-Russia in the face of Republican obstruction, as “one of the most hawkish, pro-militarism, pro-spying members of the Democratic Party.” He has tweeted, “I don’t regard the F.B.I. as an upholder of the rule of law. I regard it as a subverter of it.” Greenwald told me, “Robert Mueller was the ****ing F.B.I. chief who rounded up Muslims for George Bush after 9/11, and now, if you go to hacker conferences, there are people who wear his image, like he’s Che Guevara, on their shirt.” Maddow and other liberals may show respect to the former C.I.A. director John Brennan when he accuses Trump of colluding with Russia, but Greenwald’s view is that Brennan, who sanctioned extraordinary rendition, should be shunned.

These critiques have changed Greenwald’s place in American political life. “My reach has actually expanded,” he told me. “A lot of Democrats have unfollowed me and a lot of conservatives or independent people have replaced them, which has made my readership more diverse, and more trans-ideological, in a way that’s actually increased my influence.” His audience now ranges from leftist opponents of Hillary Clinton, such as Susan Sarandon and Max Blumenthal, to right-wing figures such as Sebastian Gorka and Donald Trump, Jr.

To liberals grateful for institutional counterweights to the Trump Administration’s crookedness, cruelty, and mendacity, Greenwald has been discouraging: U.S. institutions have long been broken, he maintains, and can offer only illusory comfort. To protest the flouting of American norms is to disregard America’s perdition—from drone strikes and unwarranted surveillance to the Democratic Party’s indebtedness to Wall Street and Silicon Valley. Shortly before Trump’s Inauguration, Greenwald wrote an article for the Intercept titled “The Deep State Goes to War with President-Elect, Using Unverified Claims, as Democrats Cheer.” The Drudge Report promoted the article, and it went viral. This had the effect of offering the phrase “deep state”—which, until then, had been a murmur among political scientists and fringe bloggers—as a gift to Trump defenders. Roger Stone referred to the article in an interview with Alex Jones, on Infowars; Greenwald spoke of “deep-state overlords” on “Tucker Carlson Tonight.” According to data from the gdelt Project, the phrase “deep state” then took off—first on Fox, then on other networks, and then in the tweets of the President and his family.

Betsy Reed, the editor-in-chief of the Intercept, recently told me that “Glenn has a core of incredibly passionate and dedicated followers.” But, she added, she is wary of “a kind of pale imitation of Glenn—people who may be partly inspired by him, but don’t have the nuance or intelligence that he has.” She was referring to Russia skeptics of the left, on Twitter and elsewhere, “who are so convinced that they are being lied to all the time that anything that the intelligence community says can’t possibly be true.” Reed’s view is that, at this point, “it’s not helpful to the left and to all the candidates and causes we favor to continue to doubt the existence of some kind of relationship between Russia and the Trump campaign. We know some basic contours of it now, thanks to Mueller, but I think we may learn more. And we can’t refuse to see what’s in front of us.”

Joan Walsh, the national-affairs correspondent of The Nation, and Greenwald’s former editor at Salon, recently said that left-wing Trump-Russia skepticism contains “real disdain for what the Democratic Party has become.” She went on, “That would mean its closeness to finance, and Wall Street.” But she thinks that it also means “the ascendance of women and people of color in the Party, and the fact that that coalition defeated Bernie Sanders.” (After the election, in an e-mail to the Intercept staff, Greenwald, a Sanders admirer, defended himself vigorously against internal suggestions that the site’s coverage of Clinton had been “anti-woman.”) A former Intercept staff member told me, “I feel bad for Glenn. I feel that Trump winning is the worst possible thing that could have happened to him, and it sort of ruined him as a valuable voice in American discourse.” Reed told me that Greenwald would surely have been “more comfortable being part of the #Resistance” had Clinton become President.
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Glenn Greenwald on the brink of revealing the depth to which the NSA is building an Orwellian state.

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Glenn Greenwald on the brink of revealing the depth to which the NSA is building an Orwellian state.

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