The other day I referred to those who "evince zero interest in the substance of the revelations about NSA and GCHQ spying which we're reporting on around the world", 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." There are dozens of examples, one of whom is the author of a post this week at Pando.com which accuses me and Laura Poitras of having "promptly sold [the Snowden] secrets to a billionaire", Pierre Omidyar, and claims we made "a decision to privatize the NSA cache" by joining Omidyar's new media organization and vesting it with a "monopoly" over those documents.
I've steadfastly ignored the multiple attacks from this particular writer over the years because his recklessness with the facts is so well-known (ask others about whom he's written), and because his fixation is quite personal: it began with and still is fueled by an incident where The Nation retracted and apologized for an error-strewn hit piece he wrote which I had criticized (see here and here).
But now, this week's attack has been seized on by various national security establishment functionaries and DC journalists to impugn our NSA reporting and, in some cases, to argue that this "privatizing" theory should be used as a basis to prosecute me for the journalism I'm doing. Amazingly, it's being cited by all sorts of DC journalists and think tank advocates whose own work is paid for by billionaires and other assorted plutocrats: such as Josh Marshall, whose TPM journalism has been "privatized" and funded by the Romney-supporting Silicon Valley oligarch Marc Andreesen, and former Bush Homeland Security Adviser and current CNN analyst Fran Townsend ("profiteering!", exclaims the Time Warner Corp. employee and advocate of the American plundering of Iraq).
Indeed, Pando.com itself is partially funded by libertarian billionaire Peter Thiel, the co-founder of Paypal and CIA-serving Palantir Technologies. The very same author of this week's Pando post had previously described Thiel (before he was funded by him) as "an enemy of democracy" and the head of a firm "which last year was caught organizing an illegal spy ring targeting American political opponents of the US Chamber of Commerce, including journalists, progressive activists and union leaders" (one of whom happened to be me, targeted with threatened career destruction for the crime of advocating for WikiLeaks)).
Moreover, the rhetorical innuendo in the Pando post tracks perfectly with that used by NSA chief Keith Alexander a few weeks ago when he called on the US government to somehow put a stop to the NSA reporting: "I think it's wrong that newspaper reporters have all these documents, the 50,000-- whatever they are, and are selling them and giving them out as if these-- you know, it just doesn't make sense," decreed the NSA chief. This attack is also the same one that was quickly embraced by the Canadian right to try to malign the reporting we're now doing with the CBC on joint US/Canada surveillance programs.
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