UT Documents

Name:

I was previously a constitutional law and civil rights litigator and am now a journalist. I am the author of three New York Times bestselling books -- "How Would a Patriot Act" (a critique of Bush executive power theories), "Tragic Legacy" (documenting the Bush legacy), and With Liberty and Justice for Some (critiquing America's two-tiered justice system and the collapse of the rule of law for its political and financial elites). My fifth book - No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA and the US Surveillance State - will be released on April 29, 2014 by Holt/Metropolitan.

Friday, November 29, 2013

Wall Street Journal's Alistair MacDonald "reports" an outright lie

(updated below - Sat.)

The Wall Street Journal's Toronto-based reporter, Alistair MacDonald, last night published what can only be described as an outright lie. Here's what he claimed:
And this:
Not only is it patently false to say that the CBC paid me for "access to Snowden's documents" - more on that in a minute - but MacDonald must know that his claim about what CBC "admits" is also patently false. Here's what the CBC's Director of News Content, David Walmsley, actually wrote about our relationship:
For those of you wondering, CBC News is currently in a freelance relationship with Glenn Greenwald. As both a journalist and a commentator, Greenwald has written for many prestigious media outlets in recent years, ranging from The Guardian to the New York Times to Salon.com. 
He will write and report for CBC News and will help provide context and analysis on the documents from the NSA. Greenwald knows these files well. He has spent months exploring the global role of the NSA working with material taken by a former National Security Agency employee, Edward Snowden.  
As with all CBC News content, stories generated by CBC reporters and Mr. Greenwald that are connected to these documents will be held to CBC journalistic standards.
Indeed, that is exactly what the contract provides and is exactly what I'm doing for CBC: writing news stories for them as a freelance journalist, alongside CBC staff journalists and editors. What is particularly laughable is MacDonald's self-praising boast that he was the one who uncovered this relationship: in fact, the very first (and so far only) article we published at the CBC on this story featured my byline right at the very top of the article:



So the breaking discovery from this intrepid, fearless Wall Street Journal investigative reporter is that the freelance journalists who reported on a big story for a large media outlet with a byline were paid for their work. Is that ever not the case?


Does MacDonald write his articles for free for the Wall Street Journal, or is he paid for his work? How much is he paid? Why has he not disclosed this? What is he hiding? Let the journalists who write articles for big media outlets without being paid for their work step up and be the first to support this attack.


MacDonald's claim that CBC paid for "access to Snowden's documents" is equally false. The CBC does not have "access to Snowden's documents". They only have access to the specific, carefully selected documents that we are reporting on together. What they're paying for - under a standard joint freelance contract with both me and my freelance colleague Ryan Gallagher - is the work that freelance reporters always do: selecting and analyzing the material to be reported and then participating in the drafting and finalizing of the article and reporting (for both TV and print): extensive work we all did together.


Aside from being completely standard, having a genuine freelance contract with media outlets is the only way to report on these documents. If we did not have such a contract, then the US government and its apologists (the very same people now criticizing us for having these contracts), would claim (dubiously but aggressively) that we were acting as a "source" or a distributor of documents, rather than as journalists in reporting them, and thus should lose the legal protections accorded to the process of journalism. As a result, we ensure that we negotiate a standard freelance contract so that nobody other than charlatans (such as those employed by the Wall Street Journal) could contest their authenticity and normalcy (for the extensive work we did in reporting and writing this story - one that broke news all over Canada and then the world - Ryan Gallagher and I were paid a joint freelance fee of $1,500).


This is, yet again, nothing more than the standard tactic of distraction we see over and over. Just as was true of the Manning war crimes disclosures: there is a small cottage industry of pundits, bloggers, and journalists who evince zero interest in the substance of the revelations about NSA and GCHQ spying which we're reporting on around the world. The people I'm referencing literally almost never mention any of the actual revelations, but are instead obsessed with spending their time personally attacking the journalists, whistleblowers, and other messengers who enable the world to know about what is being done.


Everyone having any sort of public impact merits critical scrutiny, and that certainly includes me. But when that scrutiny comes in the form of blatantly absurd and false attacks like the one from the Wall Street Journal - and from people who devote no time or attention to the substance of the revelations - then it seems clear that the attacks are little more than means of doing the NSA's dirty work for it: trying to discredit the journalists reporting on the story to ensure attention is shifted away from the spying revelations.


As I said from the start, I'll answer these kinds of attacks now and then but it won't succeed in distracting attention from what matters. In the last six weeks alone, we've reported on NSA and GCHQ documents in Germany, France, Spain, Norway, Holland, the U.S., the UK, and now Canada. More stories are coming in these and other countries in the next two weeks. Nothing is going to stop or even impede our reporting the newsworthy stories around the world that show what is being done to internet freedom and individual privacy by the world's most powerful factions operating in the dark and with no real accountability.


UPDATE (Sat.): On Twitter yesterday, MacDonald acknowledged that his accusations were fundamentally false, but tried to pass it off as merely a "clarification" of his defamatory claims:

Those, evidently, are the ethics of The Wall Street Journal: if you publish radically inaccurate but incendiary accusations that are then proven totally false, don't retract them or apologize for them: just pretend you're "clarifying".

Moreover, after devoting numerous tweets to publicly demanding that I disclose my compensation arrangement for the story I worked on with CBC, MacDonald acknowledged that I fully answered his questions, but repeatedly refused to disclose his own compensation. He first tried to justify that double standard this way:
Apparently, MacDonald, though claiming to be a journalist, does not campaign for transparency. Isn't that rather elemental to the job? He then justified his refusal to adhere to his own disclosure demands this way:
The idea that journalists should be forced to disclose their compensation arrangements is moronic, but if you're going to impose that demand on others, you don't get to exempt yourself. So add that to the journalistic ethics of the Wall Street Journal: disclosure of compensation is for other journalists, but not for themselves.

Tuesday, November 26, 2013

Bamford, 11/26/2013


Tuesday, November 05, 2013

Email: Glenn.Greenwald@riseup.net

Public key here


-----BEGIN PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----
Version: GnuPG v1.4.14 (GNU/Linux)
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=ZVEq
-----END PGP PUBLIC KEY BLOCK-----