So What’s This About a Private NSA Document Reading Room?
I know, I know you’re tired of hearing about Snowden and Greenwald and Omidyar and First Look and I feel your pain, I really do. I want an end to this as much as you do, I do, but see we’re in the final, definitive stages of a historic event, the country’s first neoliberal whistleblowing. Yes, that’s right! I mean, look, here we have a public resource in the form of government documents affecting everyone on earth and paid for by the good people of the United States, the only complete cache of which has been effectively privatized, by a bunch of rich white people, mostly dudes, who are also touting the private sector as the vessel of our deliverance from state surveillance evil. Yay Apple! Yay Google! Yay Whisper Systems! All of it wrapped in a tightly controlled, corporate mediated, relentlessly commodified narrative that is as much, if not more, about the self-actualization of the whistleblower and members of his inner circle as the global violation of human rights by the United States government. If that’s not neoliberal, I’m Augusto Pinochet! To make matters even more disquieting, this is being presented as a grand act of disobedience, a leftist act of disobedience. Can you believe it?
Yes, apparently many of you can!
But sorry, I can’t. You know me! Purist. I expect words to mean things. Words like “left”, for instance. In my world, left presupposes a politics that are at least a little communal. This ain’t that. This is the opposite of that. To be honest, I don’t think I have seen anything defended as ardently by the anglophonic internet Left this year as Mr. Glenn Greenwald’s right to squeeze every last dime and every last ounce of social capital out of these leaks, unimpeded by questions or criticism. Nevertheless, as grimly interesting as I find this ingenius neoliberal colonizing of left imaginations, I would happily acquit myself of blogging about it if something remotely like journalism were happening on the left in regard to it.
Bu of course, that is the great paradox of this renaissance in transparency and investigatish journaling we are so lucky to be witnessing: its own near-complete immunity from investigative journalism!!! Even Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting can’t be bothered to raise any questions, let alone hard ones. Hell, FAIR’s Peter Hart even applauded Ryan Devereaux’s awful hit piece on Gary Webb. So as long as Team Omidyar keeps inadvertently trolling me with newsworthy bullshit, and people like Peter Hart still aren’t taking it up, I will struggle somewhat unsuccessfully to ignore it.
http://ohtarzie.wordpress.com/2014/11/18/so-whats-this-about-a-private-nsa-document-reading-room/
It's theoretically open for the general public, but Greenwald will still be the bouncer at the door...If anyone wants to see it, I hope they know the secret boys club handshake...
= new reply since forum marked as read
Apparently, Corporation Omidyar/Greenwald will be the sole determiners (aka "the Deciders"
of who can see these documents, which had to be stolen because in their view the government was was not making them public.
Talk about your ironies.
