Yesterday, as the press corps visited the White House to hear briefings on immigration from senior officials, Donald Trump unexpectedly showed up to answer a few questions. Just before he left, he made one of the most egregious off-the-cuff remarks of his presidency thus far: ...read more
The Trump administration has taken it’s first step in retaliating against leakers, showing that the President’s tirades on twitter are more than just rhetorical threats. Charges have been brought under the Espionage Act against a 25 year-old NSA contractor for allegedly providing ...read more
As of 1:45 p.m. New York time, trading on the New York Stock Exchange remains suspended due to an as-of-right-now unknown problem, but officials at the NYSE insist that it's not a malicious cyber-attack. However, and perhaps coincidentally -- perhaps not -- United Airlines' ...read more
With the Patriot Act set to expire on June 1, and the bill that aims to replace and reform it facing razor-thin opposition in the Senate, the White House is ratcheting up the pressure on Republicans to pass the USA Freedom Act. On Thursday morning, White House Press Secretary ...read more
The National Security Agency (NSA) and its spying operations are debatable. Whether the NSA is spying on you personally or whether the agency is solely targeting terrorists and bad actors is a discussion that's ongoing. What's not debatable, and what's perfectly clear is that the ...read more
You might not have heard about the latest revelations about the National Security Agency (NSA) because the banner headlines lasted all of five minutes. No one really cares any more, partly because certain reporters over-played their hands and saturated a half-a-year's worth of ...read more
The Keystone XL pipeline wasn't the only piece of legislation that was killed on Tuesday. Make no mistake, it'll unfortunately be back after the new Congress is sworn in next year, but for now it's been blocked. The other item on Tuesday's agenda was the USA Freedom Act, a bill ...read more
On this week's Bob & Chez Show, the guys discuss Shep Smith's fantastic Ebola monologue; the news media's irresponsible Ebola hype; Chuck Todd and the Kentucky Senate race; Rick Scott's freak-out over Charlie Crist's fan; the New Foo Fighters documentary; Glenn Greenwald's ...read more
During his TED Talk presentation last week, The Intercept's Glenn Greenwald issued a challenge: If you defend the National Security Agency's surveillance activities by insisting that you have nothing to hide, then you should send all of your usernames and passwords to Glenn ...read more
It might as well be the trailer for the next Jason Bourne movie. The first trailer for Laura Poitras's documentary feature Citizenfour went live today, and it's everything you'd imagine it would be. Ominous, melodramatic, paranoid-times-a-thousand and super serious. The trailer ...read more
It's been a year and a half since heroic hacker Edward Snowden touched off a global firestorm with the news that the government was collecting millions of telephone records, but if you think the government is up your ass now, wait until legislators in Washington state get their ...read more
When it was reported last week that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had told U.S. officials, including Secretary of State John Kerry "not to ever second guess me again" regarding Hamas and ceasefire talks, even those aware of the sycophantic nature of U.S. policy ...read more
Photo: Nadine Ajaka Nothing sells a product like fear, whether the threat is real or imagined. This is probably why an entire cottage industry has sprung up over the past year aimed at making a buck off skittish hipsters convinced the NSA is watching their every move. What would ...read more
Bill Maher was absolutely right when he said to Glenn Greenwald, "Every time [Snowden] opens his mouth, he always says something fucking nuts." It's one of two things Snowden has in common with radio conspiracy theorist Alex Jones: they both say things that are nuts, and the ...read more
Not since President George W. Bush hit German Chancellor Angela Merkel with an impromptu double-Vulcan-neck-pinch has there been such an awkward moment in U.S. relations with Germany. Things were already strained after Edward Snowden's revelation that the U.S. monitored Merkel's ...read more
Glenn Greenwald posted a mercifully short article today at The Intercept which details some methods the British counterpart to the NSA, the GCHQ, employs as a means of disrupting various targets, including extremists and malicious hackers. Greenwald describes a menu of tricks ...read more
Throughout the past year, the central angle in my articles about the NSA/Snowden/Greenwald story has been one of journalistic criticism. For the last 25 years, I've worked in print, digital and broadcast journalism and therefore it's naturally among my primary areas of expertise, ...read more
On Wednesday, Glenn Greenwald published a very important piece of journalism on The Intercept that should -- in any society that cares how the government decides which citizens it spies on -- be part of a meaningful discussion about government transparency. The report is based on ...read more
Glenn Greenwald's "grand finale fireworks display" finally appeared online early Wednesday and, indeed, there were fireworks but not the "spectacular multicolored hues" he predicted. The fireworks instead came in the form of a bombshell that exploded in a mushroom cloud of shoddy ...read more
Throughout the past year of covering the shoddy journalism orbiting the NSA story, it never ceases to amaze that so many award-winning journalists, some veterans, some not-so-much, are unable to adequately explain things. Decide for yourself whether this murky reporting is ...read more
UPDATED Below. Last week, Glenn Greenwald was supposed to have published a "fireworks grand finale" NSA article drawn from documents leaked by Edward Snowden. The article was evidently going to reveal the names of various NSA surveillance targets, but as we reported on Tuesday, ...read more
You may or may not have heard about Glenn Greenwald's forthcoming "grand finale" article, to be pulled from his Snowden NSA files. Greenwald has been teasing it as being similar to the end of a fireworks display -- the biggest bangs, the "wow-factor," etc. What we know so far is ...read more
When Bill Clinton was in office and his Attorney General Janet Reno decided to send Cuban refugee Elian Gonzales back to Cuba to be with is father, Sean Hannity was a huge opponent of the force federal agents used to break into the young boy's relatives home in Miami in order to ...read more
UPDATE below. Who would've guessed that users of social media and the internet, the home of free and unlimited porn and all varieties of widely accepted debauchery, would regularly behave like a clique of second-graders, snickering at "wee-wees" and "pee-pees?" It doesn't matter ...read more
Over the weekend, Tommy Christopher posted a recap of Paul Rieckhoff's bust up with Glenn Greenwald on Bill Maher over Ed Snowden and the NSA leaks. Tommy's summary of the exchange was fairly explicit in his headline: "Iraq War Vet Mops Floor With Glenn Greenwald On Real Time ...read more
Life and Other Four Letter Words: D A R K The Internet is, and I’m not exaggerating, the best thing ‘we’ have ever done. It makes the pyramids look like the piles of old rocks they are and the moon-landing look like a Muppet Show sketch. If I meet Sir Tim Berners Lee, inventor of ...read more
If you search Media Matters for "Rush Limbaugh," there are around 7,100 pages about the controversial right-wing radio talker. A search for "Glenn Beck" delivers over 8,000 pages. I've personally written hundreds of blog posts about those two characters. And yet because I've been ...read more
Author's note: It's been just about a year since this essay was written, and aside from the fact that "Red Wedding" is no longer the hot Game of Thrones reference, it's even truer today than it was then. In the year since, the media has only become more Snowden-crazed, and there ...read more
In the interest of full disclosure, I honestly believe Oliver Stone's JFK is one of the greatest movies of our generation. That said, and factually speaking, there's a lot of hooey in there, too. But that's what filmmaking is ultimately about: making the unbelievable believable, ...read more
In mid-June of last year, at the vanguard of the Edward Snowden revelations, a Hong Kong attorney named Albert Ho met with Snowden to assist the NSA contractor's plans to leave the Chinese city-state for points unknown. Following the meeting, Ho told The New York Times, "He ...read more
Last night, while watching Brian Williams' interview with Ed Snowden, I actually agreed with Glenn Greenwald about something. Back in 2012, Greenwald referred to Williams as "NBC News’ top hagiographer," using "his reverent, soothing, self-important baritone" to deliver ...read more
Two months ago, the National Rifle Association (NRA) joined an American Civil Liberties Union lawsuit over the National Security Agency's (NSA) phone metadata collection program, most recently published by Glenn Greenwald based on leaked documents from Edward Snowden. The NRA, ...read more
UPDATE: Wikileaks announced late Thursday that the redacted nation is Afghanistan:Although, for reasons of source protection we cannot disclose how, WikiLeaks has confirmed that the identity of victim state is Afghanistan. This can also be independently verified through forensic ...read more
Today, Glenn Greenwald tweeted the following announcement about his current employer, First Look Media: Interesting. The Freedom of the Press Foundation received $350,000 from First Look, while the Electronic Frontier Foundation received less than a third of that sum: $100,000. ...read more
This might be faint praise, but I actually have to compliment author Glenn Greenwald. For nearly a year now, Greenwald has been badgered by libertarian hackers, crypto-extremists and Wikileaks supporters to dump all of his Snowden NSA documents in the same way Julian Assange ...read more
In early 2013, before Glenn Greenwald was convinced that Edward Snowden, who assumed the pseudonym "Cincinnatus," was who he said he was, Snowden evidently created a video tutorial in order to coach Greenwald through the process of installing encryption software on his computer ...read more
If you're wondering why there's been a bump in Glenn Greenwald sightings, his new book, No Place To Hide, about Edward Snowden and the National Security Agency, was released today, and so for a short period of time we've been experiencing a natural surge in Greenwald hyperbole ...read more
The Wall Street Journalreports today that a "web intelligence" company called Recorded Future has determined that in the months following the initial NSA revelations by former contractor Edward Snowden, al-Qaeda operatives switched to new encryption software for the first time in ...read more
If you happen to be a fan of Edward Snowden, yesterday was either a great day or a terrible day. A great day if you're an American, a terrible day if you're Russian. Last night, the House Judiciary Committee passed the USA Freedom Act in a unanimous bipartisan committee vote. The ...read more
Maybe you spotted the headlines today. They were everywhere, conveying the same message: Google Met With the Big, Bad NSA After All! RUN! But this time, it's not The Guardian or The Intercept with the hyperbolic, misleading banner headlines. It's Al Jazeera America and as you ...read more
During an interview at the University of Connecticut, the prospective 2016 Democratic frontrunner and former Secretary of State was asked about Snowden's theft and leaking of NSA files, and Clinton delivered both an excoriation of the document theft, and chiefly Snowden's journey ...read more
It's been about a week since Edward Snowden's epic blunder on RT in which he foolishly handed Vladimir Putin a major propaganda victory, then followed up the appearance by authoring a hamfisted clarification published in The Guardian. In the article, Snowden explained that his ...read more
With heroes like these, who needs heroes? As we discussed last week, Edward Snowden derped his way into handing Vladimir Putin a major propaganda victory live on the state-run RT network. So phenomenal a blunder it was for Team Snowden, he almost immediately fired off a mea ...read more
On a televised question-and-answer session with Vladimir Putin on the Russian state-controlled RT network, Edward Snowden made an appearance via video and asked Putin about whether Russia engages in mass surveillance. That's a generous explanation of what happened. The reality is ...read more
Yesterday, tax day, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) posted an article titled "Tea Party, Taxes and Why the Original Patriots Would’ve Revolted Against the Surveillance State," and it wouldn't surprise me if the authors were wearing tri-corner hats with hand-written "Rand ...read more
(Photo: Greenwald arriving at JFK airport in New York. John Minchillo / AP) So Glenn Greenwald returned to the United States today to receive a Polk Award for his Edward Snowden scoop, and, shocker, he was neither arrested nor droned. The only question that remains is whether the ...read more
Over the Summer we reported on a new product that was essentially a tinfoil hat for your smartphone, released at the height of the Edward Snowden revelations hyped by Glenn Greenwald on The Guardian and elsewhere. Known as the OFF Phone, it wasn't the first product to be ...read more
This afternoon, the following tweet appeared in my timeline: Naturally, I thought for sure this was regarding another Glenn Greenwald screed based on an Edward Snowden PowerPoint slide, and so I hunkered down for another mind-numbingly long and hyperbolic read about the ...read more
If it turns out to be true, President Obama's decision to end the National Security Agency's metadata storage program is absolutely a lateral move, both politically and practically. Politically, it scores him some points on his left flank while disarming libertarian cranks like ...read more
Happy Tuesday! There is snow on the East Coast...on March 25th...Here's what's happening on the interweb: 1. Obama to Call for End to N.S.A.’s Bulk Data Collection The Obama administration is preparing to unveil a legislative proposal for a far-reaching overhaul of the ...read more