Motley Moose – Archive

OK. I’ve asterisked the title so as not to break any rules. And first up, as anyone who knows me

I am the biggest Obamab*t there is

But we seem to be falling out in recent weeks over the issue of the NSA and Snowden revelations. Thanks to my Murdoch investigations here during the Hackgate Scandal (which is still unfolding as you can see from my Daily Beast timeline) I’ve become a big fan of privacy, and antipathetic to corporate blackmail and surveillance.

So, when the extent of digital surveillance became apparent thanks to the Guardian and the Snowden revelations, my concern wasn’t over the Obama administration (most the programmes were established beforehand) nor indeed the character of the government. But one simple thing has always concerned me: the effect of this kind of surveillance on potential government whistleblowers and investigative journalism

One would have thought the chilling effects on whistleblowing and investigative journalism should concern every reporter.

On the vituperation heaped on Greenwald and the Guardian, I urge you to read David Carr in the New York Times

If the revelations about the N.S.A. surveillance were broken by Time, CNN or The New York Times, executives there would already be building new shelves to hold all the Pulitzer Prizes and Peabodies they expected. Same with the 2010 WikiLeaks video of the Apache helicopter attack.

Instead, the journalists and organizations who did that work find themselves under attack, not just from a government bent on keeping its secrets, but from friendly fire by fellow journalists. What are we thinking?

I couldn’t agree more: as I wrote a few days ago

Since when has the emotional complexion of the source been the main point of the story? The attacks on Greenwald display the same problem. He may be partisan, argumentative and thin-skinned (he blocked me on Twitter a year ago for an innocuous comment) but does that disqualify him from landing a major scoop? Attacking a source or intermediary is just another version of the ad hominem fallacy. Even a stopped clock is right twice a day. Journalism is about disclosure and transparency, not heroics and personality. It’s the story, stupid.

I’m still a fan of Obama. But you can’t rely on the governance of good people. As Evgeny Morosov has shown us over the failure of the Green Revolution in Iran, these same tools of social networking and communication can  be easily misused by rogue intelligence agencies, and for an future government, they are a secret policeman’s wet dream.

For the historic background I’d urge you to read James Bamford’s excellent piece in the New York Review of Books. As he says…

One man who was prescient enough to see what was coming was Senator Frank Church, the first outsider to peer into the dark recesses of the NSA. In 1975, when the NSA posed merely a fraction of the threat to privacy it poses today with UPSTREAM, PRISM, and thousands of other collection and data-mining programs, Church issued a stark warning:

That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left, such [is] the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide. If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back, because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology…. I don’t want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.

I’m still an Obamabot. But I also still remember Bush. The issue of massive collusion between state and private corporations over surveillance is, unfortunately, an issue which transcends any particular President.

I hope my fellow Obamabots can take the long view, and not consider this just an attack on this administration. We came together over certain ideas of equality, liberty and justice. Those ends are not served an intelligence system that could quickly be turned to squash civil dissent.  

I’m republishing this diary from 18 months ago on the wonderful news that the mother of Stephen Lawrence, victim of a racist killing that continues to have repercussions among the police and press even now, has been elevated to the House of Lords.

I’m no fan of the honours system or our unelected second chamber, but before it’s abolished, the thought that Doreen Lawrence, who has campaigned tirelessly for twenty years to bring her son’s murderers to justice (and expose the collusion and institutional racism of the police) is to become a Labour peer is the best news I’ve heard in ages.

HT to Denise for the following video which shows Doreen meeting with the Trayvon Martin family in London last year at the Stephen Lawrence foundation

Below is a tribute to her, written by our poet laureate.

Last night the Observer newspaper, a long standing paper in its own right (it actually predates the Guardian by several years) publisheda badly sourced front page story taken from Birtherist Wayne Madsen and the privacy surgeon site about European surveillance

Disaster for the Observer, which has been running on a much reduced staff for several years. It is owned by the Guardian now, but has a long and distinctly different identity and editorial separation.

Not for much longer after a disaster like that.

Complete cock up.

However, it wasn’t long before many were claiming that this cock up undermined all of the Guardian’s reporting on the Snowden issue. To me, that would be like assuming that News of the World’s hacking undermined the Wall Street Journal’s financial reporting, just because they have the same owner. In a long a protracted twitter exchange with Charles Johnson at Green Footballs (beginning somewhere round here) I noticed the claim had gone from ‘Observer screws up’ to “Guardian repeatedly used Madsen as a source.”

Well, no. A source of a story in journalistic terms is the ‘source/origin’ of a story. Apart from the Observer debacle, he is cited five times by the Guardian, for one line quotes, often taken from other news sources. All but one of these were from before 2003, when he launched towards birtherism

Having put paid to the idea he’s a major source for the Guardian, perhaps it would be worth watching this excellent Charlie Rose interview with Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger and US editor Janine Gibson to see their real motivations.

Three things are apparent to me

1. They verified everything

2. The redacted anything that was a threat to national security

3. They think it’s bigger than Snowden, and digital surveillance, for the first time in history, compromises the right to protest and the possibilities of investigative journalism

The latter is my biggest fear as expressed in the New Republic last week

Enjoy

Meanwhile Der Spiegel is reporting about surveillance on the EU parliament (Germans have a historical reason for mistrusting this level of intrusion) and the Washington Post is reporting that the NSA capture was of live information, with 49 per cent risk the target is domestic.  

First off: Moose I miss You. My long absences are only explained by manic writing sessions covering lots of breaking news (and a new novel). But I’m hoping, as so well displayed by Shaun in previous post, to have a sensible discussion about the NSA leaks without it reverting to the usual Rox/Sux Obama debate, or framing intelligence services as all good, or all bad.

I’ve published a piece today in The New Republic which (going beyond the personalities of either Manning or Snowden or their interlocutors Assange and Greenwald) tries to look at the role of whistleblowing and the press in the modern age.

More below the flip

My heart is in my throat. For the last few years (as I’ll demonstrate below) I’ve seen real hatred take root and both Europe and the US. As I wrote a Daily Beast piece about the horrific killing of an off duty soldier in London last week, I was expecting it. But the hundreds of nasty, ignorant hateful comments underneath only confirmed something I’ve seen for years now – phrased less execrably on respectable blogs, by respectable oommentators:

The crass generalities and cultural stereotypes  of Islamophobia have become a normal and acceptable form of current discourse in most public debate.

Words lead to actions. In the aftermath of the killing of Drummer Rigby by two Brits with Nigerian backgrounds – there have been over 200 attacks on Muslims, Mosques and threats of violence

There was nothing like this in 1982, when the IRA killed 16 soldiers in the Mall. There was nothing like this in France, when a lone gunman killed shot French soldiers a few years ago.

A politically acceptable form of bigotry, whipped up the the papers, and given validation by countless intellectuals is now spilling over in backlash much worse than the inciting incident.

Below the follow I’ll link back and quote to some of the previous pieces I wrote on this terrifying phenomenon over the two years ago. I urge all responsible progressives to fight this new tide of hatred – combat its lies and exaggerations – before it’s too late.  

OK. So this is a completely self-serving hit and run diary, letting all my Moozog friends know that they can get my Murdoch book, with stunning illustration by Eric Lewis of DKos Fame, for a bargain two bucks fifty.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Fall…

Fairly stunned, but Alec Baldwin retweeted this:

My book on #Hackgate “Fall of the House of Murdoch” great bargain at only $2.43 this weekend http://www.amazon.com/The-Fall… …

UK Kindle Edition here

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Fa…

Thanks for reading, and thanks for tolerating this act of self publicity: but on the other hand, the subject is firmly in the public interest

Cheers

I tend to avoid cross posting material from my work at the Daily Beast, but this is an important unintended consequence of Murdoch’s reaction to the Phone Hacking scandal which has sent a chilling effect through Fleet Street

News Corp. chief Rupert Murdoch holds up a copy of the newly launched The Sun on Sunday newspaper last February in London. (Carl Court/AFP/Getty)

Murdoch Journalists Thrown Under the Bus in Phone-Hacking Scandal

“What Rupert Murdoch has done is unprecedented in the free world,” says the veteran journalist Nick Cohen, author of a recent award-winning book about censorship, You Can’t Read This Book. “Managers have been tasked to go over every expense claim and emails for signs of wrongdoing,” he told The Daily Beast. In the process, Murdoch has “basically given up his journalists and their sources.”

Over a hundred people have been arrested since the phone hacking scandal engulfed Murdoch’s UK paper in the summer of 2011. Fifty five of them journalists. And the reason is not as simple as you would think:

During the height of the phone-hacking crisis that hit Murdoch’s London subsidiary in 2011, parent company News Corp. faced an even greater threat-an investigation in by the U.S. Department of Justice into alleged breaches of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which bans payments to foreign officials. To reduce the potential hefty corporate fines and indictments of senior executives in New York, Murdoch created a beefed-up Management and Standards Committee (MSC), with access to a recovered database of more than 300 million emails from its London newspapers and a remit to cooperate with the police.

Since the phone-hacking scandal that shuttered the News of the World broke, there have been more than 100 related arrests. Fifty-five of these have been of journalists, and the majority not for suspicion of phone hacking, as in the six new arrests Wednesday, but on suspicion of corrupt payments to public officials, most of it on evidence provided by the MSC.

“Seriously,” Cohen points out, “more journalists have been arrested in Britain this year than in Iran.”

Also available in Orange

So this is brief provocation rather than a proper essay, and I truly hope to inspire some contrary points rather than nods of assent. Without going into the emotional question about assault weapons after Newtown, or indeed concealed hand guns etc, I’m just querying a suggestion – often put – that rifles are essential to US life because so many rely on hunting.

Tendentious one sided image of a Moose Hunter to get y’all riled up

So here’s a comment I put on Orange which I hope you will (pardon the pun) shoot down, or at least discuss in animated (but always civil) terms.

Ya all know them roolz.  

Just a heads up about some news here in the UK which should give those campaigning for equal same sex marriage rights some hope. (I’ll quote from my impending Daily Beast piece and link when the whole thing is published early tomorrow)

By a resounding majority of 400 votes to 175 the House of Commons voted on Tuesday night for the second reading of a bill according equal rights same sex couples.  The government sponsored bill represented an overwhelming victory for those campaigning for gay marriage – a victory many didn’t expect to see in their lifetime. But how did the UK, which often lags behind the US on civil liberties, manage to steal another march on gay rights?

UPDATE: link to the Full Daily Beast article

Hope the Moose don’t mind if I share the English language version of an article for the Polish weekly magazine Krytyka Polityczyna about Scientology. The story of my father is the subject of my next book for Unbound, which should go live in the next two weeks. This is a more impersonal take the religious claims of Scientology which will also form the basis for a talk I have to give in May. Comments therefore very much welcome, both for that and the forthcoming book

Crossposted at Daily Kos

Though it claims to be one of the world’s fasting growing religions, and now holds over $1 billion in liquid assets, last year wasn’t great for the Church of Scientology.  The news that its most famous public adherent and advocate, Tom Cruise, was divorcing fellow actor Katie Holmes brought with it a rash of renewed criticisms of the futuristic religion, including a tweet from the media mogul Rupert Murdoch that it was “creepy – maybe evil’.  This year started out even worse with the publication of a major expose into the practices of the religion. Lawrence Wright, who won the Pulitzer prize in 2007 for his analysis of Al Qaeda, The Looming Towers, has just released his next big opus: Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and the Prison of Belief. The book isn’t available in the UK thanks to our draconian libel laws, but Wright’s damaging allegations about bullying, mismanagement and intimidation have been widely reviewed and publicised. Rarely, in its 60 year history, has Scientology’s reputation in its American heartland and homeland been at such a low.

Nonetheless, a greater threat to the new age church may not lie in US free speech but in European legislation. A month ago, after five years of investigation, Belgian prosecutors announced they were charging the church as a ‘criminal organisation’ on the basis it practiced extortion, "pseudo-medicine" and the keeping of records that contravene privacy laws. Though there are only a five hundred Scientologist s in Belgium, Brussels houses the church’s European HQ, and the legal case could be crippling to the group in Europe.