Greenwald: Why the CIA Is Smearing Edward Snowden After Paris Attacks (latimes.com)

JoeyRox points out that Glenn Greenwald has some harsh words for the CIA in an op-ed piece for the LA Times. From the article: "Decent people see tragedy and barbarism when viewing a terrorism attack. American politicians and intelligence officials see something else: opportunity. Bodies were still lying in the streets of Paris when CIA operatives began exploiting the resulting fear and anger to advance long-standing political agendas. They and their congressional allies instantly attempted to heap blame for the atrocity not on Islamic State but on several preexisting adversaries: Internet encryption, Silicon Valley's privacy policies and Edward Snowden."

Comments

Good old fashioned crisis management...

[wierd_w]

"You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before."

Rahm Emanuel

Aren't politics grand? Gotta further an agenda while the corpses are still warm. (You lose impact any other way, you see.) /s

Re:Good old fashioned crisis management...

[Mashiki]

Seems to me it's closer to paraphrasing. On top of that, the elaborated sentence can also imply that if you know that a crisis exists and you postpone it for whatever reason(time/public backlash/money/others don't believe it's urgent/etc), you can then use that opportunity to implement things that you wouldn't be able to do so before. That also includes implementing things that the general public would find highly objectionable, but would allow in a crisis moment. Or to ram though legislation that would have failed previously.

Re:Good old fashioned crisis management...

[Em Adespoton]

I don't know... the Paris attacks showed that the CIA as an organization was not doing its job. Their response? Get everyone talking about encryption and Snowden instead of the CIA and their failed intel. And they still get the budget increase for next year.

Sounds to me like SOMEONE at the CIA's got brains.

Re:GG is owned by Sony

[PopeRatzo]

By the way, where are the leaks? Cryptome has been keeping track, and on any scale, he hasn't "leaked" more than 1% of what snowden gave him.

And that's probably why Glenn Greenwald hasn't suffered a "fatal accident". Because he, along with Snowden, Poitras and others, have probably created a "dead man's switch" that releases everything if any of them die in suspicious circumstances.

That's what I'd do, anyway.

Read the article comments

[whoever57]

The comments on the article make for depressing reading. People seem to have swallowed the horror stories about encryption hook, line and sinker.

Re:GG is owned by Sony

[Anonymous Coward]

Snowed himself has called that idea a "suicide switch". It would be idiotic. It means that anyone who wants those documents merely has to kill him, and boom, instant access to the whole deal.

He'd be a moron to do that, given how many non-US actors would quite literally kill to have that material.

Re:Because the CIA is evil.

[ScentCone]

There was never any strong evidence for WMDs regardless of what rumors may have been out there

You're actively pretending that Saddam didn't USE his chemical weapons to kill thousands of people. And you're completely mischaracterizing the UN inspection team's early observations of large caches of VX that could NOT be later accounted for (remember the huge, completely phony "documentation" dump provided by Saddam's people to the UN, followed by active blocking of UN inspectors whenever they asked for unplanned inspections of the very places they thought they might find such things?). Yes, I remember Hans Blix, but you're choosing not to remember how things actually played out on the ground as his inspectors were turned away time and time again.