Keeping Secrets:
Pierre Omidyar, Glenn Greenwald
and the privatization of Snowden’s leaks
BY MARK AMES
http://pando.com/author/markamespando/
- Who “owns” the NSA secrets leaked by Edward Snowden to reporters Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras?
- Given that eBay founder Pierre Omidyar just invested <http://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/oct/16/pierre-omidyar-ebay-glenn-greenwald> a quarter of a billion dollars to personally hire Greenwald and Poitras for his new for-profit media venture, it’s a question worth asking.
- It’s especially worth asking since it became clear that Greenwald and Poitras are now the only two people with full access to the complete cache of NSA files, which are said to number anywhere from 50,000 to as many as 200,000 files. That’s right: Snowden doesn’t have the files any more, the Guardian doesn’t have them, the Washington Post doesn’t have them… just Glenn and Laura at the for-profit journalism company created by the founder of eBay.
- Edward Snowden has popularly been compared to major whistleblowers such as Daniel Ellsberg <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Ellsberg> ,Chelsea Manning <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chelsea_Manning> and Jeffrey Wigand <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeffrey_Wigand> . However, there is an important difference in the Snowden files that has so far gone largely unnoticed. Whistleblowing has traditionally served the public interest. In this case, it is about to serve the interests of a billionaire starting a for-profit media business venture. This is truly unprecedented. Never before has such a vast trove of public secrets been sold wholesale to a single billionaire as the foundation of a for-profit company.
- Think about other famous leakers:
Daniel Ellsberg neither monetized nor monopolized the Pentagon Papers.
Instead, he leaked them to well over a dozen different newspapers
and media outlets such as the New York Times and Washington Post,
and to a handful of sitting senators — one of whom, Mike Gravel,
read over 4,000 of the 7,000 pages into the Congressional record
before collapsing from exhaustion. The Papers were published in
book form by a small nonprofit run by the Unitarian Church, Beacon
House Press.