US spy chief Clapper defends Prism and phone surveillance

[David Guyatt]

A moving email-plea from Sir Herbert Tooth, the legendarily outspoken Tory grandee & CEO of the South East Asian Sex Tool Corporation Inc, has today gone viral after being leaked by unidentified West Country sources.

Tooth's plea was addressed, it should be noted, presumably in a fit of absent-mindedness, to Sir Reginald Pike-Darkness, his fellow-Old Harrovian (and former fag), in the mistaken belief that the latter remained a figure of influence at the Etonian court of Saints David and Gideon. In fact, Pike-Darkness' eminence grise role during the Major years was abruptly terminated following his arrest at Heathrow airport while in possession of what he mistakenly believed were "healing powders with an aphrodisiac quality". A Customs Official subsequently commented that the substance in question would unquestionably "add Life" to any social gathering.

Dear Reggie,

I have been violated & your urgent assistance is solicited.

I learned of this appalling case of accurate identification from an inebriated Orangeman, who sidled up to my faithful amanuensis, Ms. Lola Ferrari, in the course of Elton John's tasteful anti-Sochi fund-raiser last Saturday the one in support of Russkie lesbos and sundry other unlikely current heroes of the FO & Foggy Bottom - to deliver himself of an indecent proposal, a terrible revelation, and technicolour yawn, all in surprisingly rapid succession.

According to the lambeg-beater, he was returning to Stormont-on-the-Thames after a secondment to the electronic knicker-sniffers in Cheltenham, where he found himself burnishing his highly prized computer skills by watching endless hours of Yahoo Webcam footage. If the eternally fragrant Ms. F. didn't play ball, he intimated shortly before expiring, face down, in the fairy cakes, the highlights of your correspondent's weekly transatlantic broadcasts to Ms. Alabama 1964 would be leaked to a malleable blogger.

Intrigued, my favourite typist inquired, most demurely, what it was her venerable employer was supposed to have done. Ask him about his alter-ego, "Major Stroker," came the somewhat cryptic reply. The intrepid Ferrari pressed again. Yes, but what's he supposed to have actually done? "Waved his Old Man at a geriatric sleeping peacefully in her rest home," came the reply.

I shan't dignify this vile farrago with a detailed exposition of the facts, save to note that Emmy-Lou Wartsheimer was Ms. Oklahoma in 1965; does not reside in any home save her own; remains in admirably good trim, thanks, in large measure, to her regular infusions of foetal tissue & botox; and that my nom-de-porn is, in fact, Lieutenant Stroker, an error so major as to require the squiffy securocrat's instant dismissal. If an eminent Englishman cannot enjoy a rank of choice within the walls of his own castle, things have come to a pretty pass.

More seriously still, isn't the whole point of the spy business is to keep the real enemy within under the gimlet-eye of suitable public schoolmen? You know, trade unionists, social workers, university professors, that sort of riff-raff. Have the knicker-sniffers lost all sense of decency, direction & purpose?

I want the footage back, uncopied, of course, but I may need something to trade with. Can you give your contacts at the Charlatans a tinkle and extract some juicy morsels on a senior knicker-sniffer or two? That Prime chap used to work there, so it's not as if they don't have form. A sheep-worrier would be nice, a Saville even better. Do your worst, Reggie, and dig for victory! The share price of SEASTC, in which you retain a significant stake, I remind you, depends on upon it.

Tooth

Poor Tooth, always cocking-up somewhere in the world.

[David Guyatt]

Btw Tooth, following on from your reference about the South East Asian Sex Tool Corporation Inc., Clapper has sent me some of your Selfie's that he tripped across on his way to the bank to check if the deposit had been made. Apparently not old boy.


Therefore, the question I have is this:


What exactly were you doing in Vespers with that greasy candle, the well thumbed book and your tinkle bell?


Just wondering old thing?


Was it legal?

[Magda Hassan]

:: ::

[David Guyatt]

Julian Assange tells SXSW audience: NSA has grown to be a rogue agency'

Wikileaks founder: All of us have to do something'
Interview conducted from Ecuador's London embassy
Snowden and Greenwald also set to appear at SXSW.

• Stuart Dredge in Austin, Texas
  
• theguardian.com, Saturday 8 March 2014 19.03 GMT
  
• Jump to comments (262)
  

Julian Assange, here pictured in December 2013, told SXSW all of us have to do something' about government surveillance. Photo: Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP

The Wikileaks founder Julian Assange on Saturday told an audience in Texas that people power is the key to rolling back the power of the National Security Agency and other surveillance agencies.
"We have to do something about it. All of us have to do something about it," he said, in an interview at the SXSW conference in Austin. "How can individuals do something about it? Well, we've got no choice."
Assange was speaking in a "virtual" conversation conducted by video from the Ecuadorian embassy in London, where he has been confined since June 2012. The NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden and former Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald will appear in similar sessions over the coming days.
Interviewed by Benjamin Palmer of the marketing agency the Barbarian Group, Assange discussed issues including government surveillance, online democracy and the future of the internet.
On life within the embassy, he said: "It is a bit like prison. Arguably prison is far worse in relation to restrictions on visitors, for example, and the level of bureaucracy involved." Noting that at any given point there are about a dozen police officers stationed outside, he said: "The UK government has admitted to spending $8m so far just on the police surveillance of the embassy."
Asked for his views on what governments should be doing, after the NSA revelations, about the way surveillance agencies interact with people, Assange said: "The NSA has grown to be a rogue agency. It has grown to be unfettered … the ability to surveil everyone on the planet is almost there, and arguably will be there within a few years. And that's led to a huge transfer of power from the people who are surveilled upon, to those who control the surveillance complex."
Assange talked about a historical "PR campaign based on not existing" for the NSA, which he said had been swept away by the revelations prompted by Snowden's leaking of thousands of documents to media outlets including the Guardian.
"That let everyone see that somehow this was an important element of power, and it had been developed unnoticed to people," he said. "How had it come to this? How is it that the internet that everyone looked upon as perhaps the greatest tool of human emancipation there had ever been, had been co-opted and was now involved in the most aggressive form of state surveillance ever seen?"
Assange said the NSA's traditional practice of not responding to press reports "to give no oxygen" would have to be replaced, although he suggested the Pentagon rather than the NSA would guide any new strategy.
"The internet four years ago was a politically apathetic space," he said, noting that exceptions included the Anonymous group, albeit on an "amateur" basis. Assange suggested that publicity around some of his own organisation's bigger revelations had opened the eyes of more internet users.
"Many people developed a sense that this space that they had enjoyed, the place where people communicated ideas [was] where all their friends were; [it was] their community's interface with the regular power community of what we might call the geriatric quo: the old men with guns who control all the money.
"That spread out in different places in different ways, not just because of our [Wikileaks'] efforts, but through others as well. Through the Arab Spring, though Occupy … and the internet became a political space."
Asked about the motivation behind Wikileaks, Assange talked about the importance of revealing information that had hitherto been kept secret.

"It became clear to me that one of the best ways to achieve justice is to expose injustice. And you can be simplistic about it, which some people are. It's not that when you expose something automatically there is justice," he said. Instead, he said: "There's always a really decent chance that they're not going to get away with it, and the people affected can take some kind of action. And there's no confidence in the power being deployed. No confidence in the injustice."
Assange was asked about whether, thanks to the NSA revelations, the web was under threat. He pointed to comments made this week by a US military figure about a bill being put to Congress to try to "stop publication of material about the National Security Agency", backed by new cyberterrorism legislation.
"There is a really serious attempt to try and stop these revelations and others, and introduce a new international regime of censorship," he said, pointing to the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement as a particular threat.
"Now that the internet has merged with human society … the laws that apply to the internet apply to human society. This penetration of the internet by the NSA and [British spy agency] GCHQ is the penetration of our human society. It means there has been a militarisation of our civilian space. A military occupation of our civilian space … is a very serious matter."
Assange attacked what he sees as the powerlessness of even the most theoretically powerful politicians, and asked what would happen if President Barack Obama said tomorrow he was immediately disbanding the NSA, or even the CIA. "On paper he has that power, but we all know that this is simply impossible," he said. "People would come up with lots of dirt attacking him in some manner … the National Security Agency has dirt on everyone.
Julian Assange beamed in remotely for his SXSW interview. Photograph: Stuart Dredge/The Guardian"We have to do something about it. All of us have to do something about it … How can individuals do something about it? Well, we've got no choice. It's not the case any more that you can hide from the state, and keep your head down, and hope that by sucking up or by being innocuous you can be spared.

"We are now all involved in this. We are all involved in what we traditionally called the state, whether we like it or not. So we have no choice but to try to manage the behaviour of the state that we have been forced to be part of."
Assange also described what he sees as an "unprecedented theft of wealth from the majority of the population to those people who already have a lot of power … doing that in part by stealing information from all of us. Knowledge is power, and as a result they're getting more power."
He portrayed Wikileaks' mission as "going after" organisations that accumulate knowledge and "putting it back into our common intellectual record, our common history … and that empowers us".
Assange also suggested that 20-year-olds now are "much more worldly" than 20-year-olds were 10 years ago, as a result of this transfer of knowledge, which he thinks Wikileaks takes some of the credit for. He talked about future plans for Wikileaks, saying that it is preparing an "important" new release of material, but warned that he prefers not to give "the alleged perpetrator the heads up before the alleged victims … they simply prepare to counterspin".
Assange was asked about The Intercept, the new online publicationfounded by Greenwald and funded by billionaire tech investor Pierre Omidyar.

"Pierre Omidyar has seen that there is not even liberty for people who have $8bn any more," he said. "Omidyar is a symptom of a new elite in the United States that feels it is genuinely threatened by what is going on with the National Security Agency, and that is important."
Assange also talked about his future targets, suggesting that there is a need for many more "grand disclosures", both from Wikileaks and other sources.
"We are actually living in a world that we don't understand," he said. "Before all this material came out, CableGate or what we did with the Iraq war, or Edward Snowden's revelations about the NSA, we were going about our business in what we thought was the world. But we weren't living in the world: we were living in some fictitious representation of what we thought was the world. And we are still living in this fictitious representation.
"We are walking around constantly in this fog where we can't even see the ground. We think we can see the ground, but we're wrong. And every so often a clearing in the fog happens when there is one of these grand disclosures. And we see the ground, and we are surprised."

.

[David Guyatt]

Edward Snowden: NSA whistleblower's leaks prompt US to make control of internet truly worldwide







Stakeholders' invited to take over governance of the net

TIM WALKER

LOS ANGELES

Tuesday 18 March 2014

The web may be thought of as being worldwide, but from its inception the internet was created, controlled and overseen largely by a single country: the United States. Now, however, the US Government has said it intends to yield the reins to the global digital community.

The US Commerce Department has announced that it has asked the California-based Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (Icann) to plan a handover to an as-yet-undefined group consisting of both private and public "stakeholders".
Fadi Chehadé, the president and chief executive of Icann, said: "We are inviting governments, the private sector, civil society, and other internet organisations from the whole world to join us in developing this transition process… All stakeholders deserve a voice in the management and governance of this global resource as equal partners."
Observers say the decision was prompted by the whistle-blower Edward Snowden's recent revelations, and that the subsequent backlash may have forced the administration to relinquish its historical control over the administration of the internet. As Rob Atkinson of the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, a Washington DC think-tank, put it, the US is "giving up its traditional bodyguard' role of Internet governance".
The internet was developed as a US Defence Department initiative during the 1960s, and it remained an American project even as it grew into a global consumer tool. In order to maintain a unified, worldwide web, a single master list of web addresses was created, called the Domain Name System (DNS). Jon Postel, a computer scientist at the University of California in Los Angeles, was the first person responsible for DNS, a privilege that earned him the nickname "God".
When Mr Postel died in 1998, the Commerce Department created Icann, a non-profit organisation headquartered in Los Angeles which took over control of the web's crucial address list. Although Icann is nominally overseen by a selection of governmental and private "stakeholders", it remains under contract from the US government.
In the short-term, the changes are likely to have little effect on internet users' online experience. But observers say the planned handover is a concession designed to reassure other countries suspicious of the power the US wields over the web.
The information leaked by Mr Snowden regarding the extent of the National Security Agency's digital surveillance activities, drew criticism not only of the US government, but also of major American web businesses accused of co-operating with the NSA. In February, the EU's digital tsar Neelie Kroes called on the US to end its oversight of the internet.
In the past, the US has resisted demands from China, Russia and other countries to cede control of the internet to the United Nations. In its handover of Icann, the administration has stipulated that the replacement oversight body must be representative of "the global multistakeholder community", and said it would not condone a "government-led or an inter-governmental organisation solution".
Some were nonetheless concerned by the prospect of a globally controlled internet. The Republican former House Speaker and presidential contender Newt Gingrich said the handover "risks foreign dictatorships defining the Internet".
Yet Dr Stephen Crocker, the chairman of Icann's board, said the end of US government control was long-planned. "We have all long known the destination," he said. "Now it is up to our global stakeholder community to determine the best route to get us there."

.

[Albert Doyle]

Why are heroes like Assange and Snowden threatened by an American government that has now become the enemy of the freedom it supposedly espouses?

[David Guyatt]

I guess Albert, it's because the freedom and democracy it espouses are blatant lies, and have been for decades.

[Paul Rigby]

Btw Tooth, following on from your reference about the South East Asian Sex Tool Corporation Inc., Clapper has sent me some of your Selfie's that he tripped across on his way to the bank to check if the deposit had been made. Apparently not old boy.


Therefore, the question I have is this:


What exactly were you doing in Vespers with that greasy candle, the well thumbed book and your tinkle bell?


Just wondering old thing?


Was it legal?

Ms. Cecily Vespers is a BBC Producer of outstanding integrity, imagination and vitality, currently on secondment to the lustrated & reconstituted Kyiv Broadcasting Corporation, where is she is working tirelessly on the pilot for a Ukrainian version of East Enders, provisionally entitled "Newland." I have made her aware of this vile slur, and you may confidently anticipate, upon her return, prompt action from her crack brief, Farter-Crook.

The footage to which you allude with such slavering relish is a mash-up of unused scenes from an episode of my last BBC series, The Tooth About Britain, the one in which I sought to find the seeds of Christian renaissance beyond the drear hand of our dessicated Anglican establishment.

From the church of Holy Christ at RAF Slaughter, where patriotic drone pilots learn to handle snakes under the watchful eye of Pastor Hamm Shank, to the apostolic bell-ringers of The Last Days Church in Lower Thrall, where a community of penitent bankers with divorce issues sang lustily - "Ding-dong the bell is rising/Your ring is quite surprising" - I found great hope that all is not yet lost, not least for a pre-emptive nuclear attack on Boris and/or the Yellow Peril.

Quite how this footage made it onto Youtube remains a minor administrative mystery: your motives, sir, by contrast, are not.

Yours in disgust,

Sir Herbert Tooth

[David Guyatt]

Be it known Tooth, that Vesper's crack has already made herself known to me.

(Correction: "Vespers crack brief)

I had no idea that Eastenders could still threaten to do that in this day and age, at least without police assistance and a double-jointed circus performer?

In my own extended sojourn around the holy shrines of Britain's military bases, one site stands out above all others, namely the the Holy Church of Gary Christus the Genuflecting Warrior of God.

I stood in awe inside this magnificent former nuclear blast protected aircraft hanger at the once American airbase, RAF Cold-Bottom, now converted to ecumenical duties. There was still the thrilling hint of incense in the air; a feint smell of jet fuel, underslung munitions and sandalwood.

Speaking of underslung munitions Tooth, are you still in any discomfort from the recent rushed surgery? I understand the surgeons are very effective these days and I suppose a new wardrobe is now required? I'm sure you urgently needed a stiff one to recover from the alterations?

That's what Clapper said anyway. And he sent another video to back up his assertion, with the suggestion that a sizeable donation from your global charity, Save the Utterly Wealthy, to his Viennese contingency account, would ensure his rapid cooperation in your planned PR campaign.

[David Guyatt]

From Boiling Frogs Post

An extract from the full article pated in lower down

"I think there's also some very serious confusion floating around here, because I heard people talk aboutWell, he's a lawyer.' Well, he may be a lawyer, but Snowden is not his client. Greenwald needs to decide who the fuck he is. If he's a lawyer, let him start practicing law. If he's an agent, let him start making movies and get on with his life. If he's a journalist, he needs to stop deciding what is in the best interest of the public's right to know."

Yes, who the fuck is Greenwald?

Anyway, on with the piece:

BFP Exclusive: And an Oligarch Shall Lead Them: Omidyar, Greenwald & First Look Media's Attack on the Future of the Press

MARK MONDALEK | APRIL 3, 20146 COMMENTS
"Now, if you want to take the position that people should not work at organizations funded by oligarchs, or that journalism is inherently corrupted if funded by rich people with bad political views…" Glenn GreenwaldThe long-term mission of the news blog The Intercept, launched in February 2014 by First Look Mediathe recently developed news organization created and entirely funded by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar to the tune of $250 millionis "to produce fearless, adversarial journalism across a wide range of issues." However, the vital basis behind its creation really lies in its short-term mission, which is "to provide a platform to report on the documents previously provided by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden."
That's because two of the website's three founding editorsformer Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald and documentary filmmaker Laura Poitrasare the only two people that are known to possess the entire cache of what Snowden stole from the National Security Agency's networks, estimated to be anywhere in the range of 58,000 to 1.7 million documents, and possibly more.
The third founding editor, war correspondent and Dirty Wars author Jeremy Scahill, is a fitting example of the types of professionals that First Look Media has actively pursued: independent-minded journalists with a history, be it perceived or real, of conducting adversarial, investigative reportage against the most powerful governmental and corporate bodies.
This, all under the direct financial backing of Omidyar, The Intercept's publisher, whose personal fortune is worth $8.2 billion (according to the most recent Forbes estimate).
The Deciders
In a December interview with The Washington Post reporter Barton Gellman (with whom he additionally leaked selected documents to), Snowden said that he wanted to give society "a chance to determine if it should change itself," and that all he wanted was "for the public to be able to have a say in how they are governed."
Such an opportunity was never actually afforded to the public directly, however. This noble task was instead entrusted to only a select group of journalists. According to Greenwald, Snowden "carefully selected which documents he thought should be disclosed and concealed, then gave them to a newspaper with a team of editors and journalists and repeatedly insisted that journalistic judgments be exercised about which of those documents should be published in the public interest and which should be withheld."
It is his "agreement" with his "source" that has become something of a faux-journalistic maxim for Greenwald to vigilantly cite ad nauseam.
As he wrote in January via his personal blog:

Anyone who demands that we "release all documents" or even release large numbers in bulk is demanding that we violate our agreement with our source, disregard the framework we created when he gave us the documents, jeopardize his interests in multiple ways, and subject him to far greater legal (and other) dangers. I find that demand to be unconscionable, and we will never, ever violate our agreement with him no matter how many people want us to.

Current calculations made by Cryptome read as follows:

Rate of release over 6 months, 132.8 pages per month, equals 436 months to release 58,000, or 36.3 years. Thus the period of release has decreased in the past month from 42 years.

That means that, judging by the current release rate, it will be another 36 years before the full scope of the NSA's massive surveillance apparatus is actually revealed to the public.
To help provide context to what appears to be a dubious conflation of journalistic ethics and legalities, I sought the opinion of civil rights attorney Stanley L. Cohen, whose penchant for defending activists spans some three decades, ranging anywhere from the IRA to Hamas.
"Every time a journalist raises these arguments aboutOh, I've got agreements' and I've cut deals'it is a blow against all journalists," says Cohen, "because ultimately what protects the journalist from government over-reaching is the journalist's privilege.
"The intent behind the journalist's privilege is not that a journalist is going to exercise discretion to decide what he or she thinks is in the public's best interest, but is designed to facilitate the free-flow of information from a source to an intermediary who performs the function of keeping the public in the know, the loop; informed. It doesn't contemplate this kind of unique vetting, self-censorship, and selection process that seems to give such strength to Mr. Greenwald."
As established in Cohen v. Cowles Media Co. (1991), the Supreme Court previously affirmed that a promise to a source does create an enforceable agreement, with the Court ruling that the First Amendment does not bar a promissory estoppel suit against the press. Additionally, the journalist's privilege asserts that reporters have a right to protect the identity of those to whom confidentiality was promised, including also the unpublished information provided by the sourcethough such a privilege is still far from being averse to legal challenge.
Greenwald, a lawyer-turned-blogger-turned-journalist, operates somewhere in the middle grounds of this legal hodgepodge.
"He's positioned himself very nicely," Cohen concedes. "Greenwald apparently tries to be all things to all people. The real problem is he's not only done damage to the journalist's privilege, he's also violating legal privilege. He picks and chooses what is all too convenient at various crossroads.
"I think there's also some very serious confusion floating around here, because I heard people talk aboutWell, he's a lawyer.' Well, he may be a lawyer, but Snowden is not his client. Greenwald needs to decide who the fuck he is. If he's a lawyer, let him start practicing law. If he's an agent, let him start making movies and get on with his life. If he's a journalist, he needs to stop deciding what is in the best interest of the public's right to know."
Cohen recently represented a hacktivist involved in the December 2010 Anonymous-affiliated "denial of service attack" conducted against PayPal, a wholly owned subsidiary of eBay, in response to the company's decision to block donations to the Wikileaks website. 11 of the 14 defendantswho came to be known as the "PayPal 14"accepted a plea deal this past December. In reference to Omidyar's late call for leniency in the case, Cohen noted in a De-Manufacturing Consent interview with Guillermo Jimenez that "the notion that all of a sudden [Omidyar] woke up and became egalitarian because he really had concerns about people he had persecuted for two years is absolute bullshit."
Legitimizing Billionaire Benefactors
In late February, Pando ran an article by Mark Ames revealing that Omidyar's Omidyar Network had co-funded Ukraine revolution groups, investing hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of several years into the same NGOs as the US governmentwhich ultimately helped propel regime change in Ukraine.
As Pando's Paul Carr noted: "Omidyar and First Look have made statement after statement about how they aim to be a thorn in the side of the US government, and yet in several cases Omidyar has co-invested with that same US government to shape foreign policy to suit his own worldview."
Such a collaboration is incredibly significant (as is Carr's more recent reportage on the high volume of White House visits that have been made by Omidyar and senior Omidyar Network officials since 2009) and further validates the prospect that compartmentalizing discourse and controlling dissent is First Look Media's true modus operandi.
Interestingly enough, Greenwald's lengthy, scoffing response to the Pando exposé, entitled "On the Meaning of Journalistic Independence," proved almost more telling than the article itself.
Summoning strength through ignorance, he writes:

Despite its being publicly disclosed, I was not previously aware that the Omidyar Network donated to this Ukrainian group. That's because, prior to creating The Intercept with Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill, I did not research Omidyar's political views or donations. That's because his political views and donations are of no special interest to me any more than I cared about the political views of the family that owns and funds Salon (about which I know literally nothing, despite having worked there for almost 6 years), or any more than I cared about the political views of those who control the Guardian Trust.
There's a very simple reason for that: they have no effect whatsoever on my journalism or the journalism of The Intercept. That's because we are guaranteed full editorial freedom and journalistic independence. The Omidyar Network's political views or activities or those of anyone else have no effect whatsoever on what we report, how we report it, or what we say.

Newsroom pressures between those who produce and those who pay their salaries are obviously nothing new. "The pressure is applied subtly," explain Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols in their book, The Death and Life of American Journalism. "Successful editors and reporters tend to internalize the necessary values so no pressure is necessary. At other times, the pressures can be explicit. The effect is that the news is altered, unbeknownst to the public, in a manner it would never had been had the newsroom been independent and freestanding."
In an article that he wrote for Salon in August 2009 on General Electric's editorial influence over NBC and MSNBC, Greenwald even echoes those very sentiments, noting that "corporate employees don't need to be told what their bosses want. They know without being told."
That same year, Greenwald was a recipient of the Ithaca College's Park Center for Independent Media's first annual Izzy Award for special achievement in independent media. In a quote attributed to that event, he states the following:

Media outlets controlled by large corporations and all of their conflicting interests not only have proven largely ineffective at serving as an adversarial check on the government, but worse, have become mindless amplifiers of government claims. Being outside that system is now virtually a prerequisite to genuinely [critical] reporting on the actions and statements of the government.

In his acceptance speech, further pontification over his valiant views on journalistic independence and the importance of remaining distant from the political power structure: "I think that's absolutely vital to being a real journalist," he states. "If anything, the independence of journalism means keeping a distance from, rather than blending intobecoming an appendage of the entities of political power structure, the financial elites, that you intend to cover."
Fast-forward to 2014, and such idealism has evidently faded quickly from Greenwald's point-of-view.
Take this blog excerpt from January, for example:

For me, "activism" is about effects and outcomes. Successful activism means successful outcomes, and that in turn takes resources. It's very easy to maintain a perception of purity by remaining resource-starved and thus unable to really challenge large institutions in a comprehensive and sustained way. I know there are some people on the left who are so suspicious of anyone who is called "billionaire" that they think you're fully and instantly guilty by virtue of any association with such a person.
That's fine: there's no arguing against that view, though I would hope they'd apply it consistently to everyone who takes funding from very rich people or who works with media outlets and organizations funded by rich people including their friends and other journalists and groups they admire (or even themselves).

Though repetitive in rhetoric, it is relevant to note that this is the exact same line being drawn two months later in his Pando response:

That journalistic outlets fail to hold accountable large governmental and corporate entities is a common complaint. It's one I share. It's possible to do great journalism in discrete, isolated cases without much funding and by working alone, but it's virtually impossible to do sustained, broad-scale investigative journalism aimed at large and powerful entities without such funding. As I've learned quite well over the last eight months, you need teams of journalists, and editors, and lawyers, and experts, and travel and technology budgets, and a whole slew of other tools that require serious funding. The same is true for large-scale activism.
That funding, by definition, is going to come from people rich enough to provide it. And such people are almost certainly going to have views and activities that you find objectionable. If you want to take the position that this should never be done, that's fine: just be sure to apply it consistently to the media outlets and groups you really like.

Not only does Greenwald now openly advocate the fusing of journalism with the same corporate-capitalist powers that he once deplored, but he even appears to be making a concerted effort to link activism into the fray as well, thereby successfully commoditizing all forms of dissent into one big pre-packaged, for-profit bundle to the masses.
Notice too the Romney-esque "billionaires-are-people" motif being casually floated, along with the notion that those who abhor the influence of billionaire benefactors on both the press and activism on a general scale are really just succumbing to their own naive, unrealistic worldview and will therefore never be able to effect policy or produce change on any significant level.
*** *
Thomas Jefferson called the free press "the only security of all," describing the agitation that it produces as something that must be submitted to, "to keep the waters pure."
No matter how unique or trying are the times, the raw autonomy of such a freedom should never be made available to alteration. Allowing even the smallest of amendments could easily imperil the very fabric of our democracy.
With every new step that Greenwald takes to justify his own actions, he consequently leads us that much deeper into the murky, authoritarian waters that our founding fathers feared the most.
Acceptance of the endless regurgitation of government secrets slowly served up by the teaspoon doesn't appear to be the only concession being forced upon a public bedazzled by the spectacle.
We are being told, against all reason and better judgment, that Omidyar is somehow the two hundred and fifty million dollar exception to the rules, and that Greenwald and the select few journalists with access to the Snowden-NSA treasure-trove are thusly incorruptible and pure.
We are to ignore the blatant corporate-government collusion that plagues this entire affair and accept the defeatist standpoint that those afflicted with the disease of integrity will never be able to bring about any real, lasting change to society without the essential aid of "philanthropic" billionaires along the way.
Taking all of this into account, along with the slow crawl of NSA documents being promised to us as our eventual reward for our complete compliance to the corporate state, it is imperative that we ask ourselves: Do the ends really justify the means?
# # # #Mark Mondalek BFP contributing author, is a writer and editor based in Detroit.