16 ms·

Washington Post Is First Paper to Call for Prosecution of Its Own Source

588 points by etiam 10y ago

mtgx 10y ago
WashPost has definitely been on a visible decline since Jeff Bezos bought it. Extremely partisan and it tends to argue for the government (infamous "golden key" editorial, etc), rather than against it (in case we've all forgotten by now, that was supposed to be the job of the press). A lot of its articles are also Buzzfeedy and factfree.
- personjerry 10y ago
  > (in case we've all forgotten by now, that was supposed to be the job of the press) Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought the job of the press was merely to bring relevant information to the masses?
  - sverige 10y ago
    No, it's more than that. They're the "Fourth Estate," supposedly to keep the government from abusing its power. They've abandoned that position. It's not clear that there's anything to replace the accountability they brought for a time. The Internet could have been that, but they've co-opted vast swaths of it already.
  - badlucklottery 10y ago
    The information and narratives governments want you to hear will be freely given in press releases. All other information has to be found via investigation and possibly won't support or at least add complications and caveats to the official narrative. So the press giving the complete picture to the masses does have a adversarial component to it.
  - rodgerd 10y ago
    In that case, you might as well shut them down and at least let businesses and politicians pay for their PR. There is no public interest in re-printing press releases.
- justafool 10y ago
  .
  - AJ007 10y ago
    Amazon definitely has a significant problem with selling both dangerous products and counterfeit products. The move to paid listings has exacerbated a long standing problem with poor quality and fake products (not counterfeit but things such as "Egyptian cotton" sheets that are neither.) There is a big incentive to try to become as government friendly as possible.
conistonwater 10y ago
The title is a bit clickbaity, and I think Greenwald sometimes lets his politics get the better of him, but I think he makes a perfectly valid point here: it is not only difficult, but also impossible, to reconcile Washington Post's past reporting, together with their own claims of that reporting being in the public interest, with that editorial. That said, I'm not sure I buy the explanation that it's about "protecting access". There are many cases where groupthink developed on its own just fine (like maybe the support for the Iraq war way back when), so it could be narrow self-serving interest, but it could also be incompetence. And don't attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity, and so on.
- tome 10y ago
  > Greenwald sometimes lets his politics get the better of him Sometimes? That's his whole raison d'etre. He's a political campaigner in all but name. One may or may not like his politics, but let's not pretend that he's a dispassionate observer.
  - webwanderings 10y ago
    There's nothing wrong with that. I'll let Will McAvoy of Newsroom (Aaron Sorkin) answer that for you. Take a look at one of the first season's episodes.
    - tome 10y ago
      I didn't say there was anything wrong with it. I'm just expressing surprise that someone seemed to think that Greenwald wasn't always extremely political.
      - icebraining 10y ago
        "Let's not pretend" implies it's a purposeful deceit, not a mistake.
        tome 10y ago
raverbashing 10y ago
It's a good thing for future whistleblowers to know who should get their stories. WP just took themselves out of that list.
- ScottBurson 10y ago
  Indeed. The newspaper of Woodward and Bernstein is dead. All that remains is the name.
eadz 10y ago
This is an important article and adds some real context to Washington Post's editorial. This quote sums it up. But still, if the Post editorial page editors now want to denounce these revelations, and even call for the imprisonment of their paper’s own source on this ground, then they should at least have the courage to acknowledge that it was The Washington Post — not Edward Snowden — who made the editorial and institutional choice to expose those programs to the public. The Washington Post's editors decided these stories were in the public interest and should be published, not Snowden.
- lisper 10y ago
  Indeed, it must be emphasized that Snowden deliberately did not disclose any of the information he had collected publicly. He specifically wanted someone else to make the decision about what (if anything) should be disclosed, and he specifically wanted journalists to make that decision. For the Post to stab Snowden in the back this way is the worst treachery, cowardice, and hypocrisy that I have ever witnessed.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - tptacek 10y ago
    The worst. Really? Are you sure you don't mean "the most cognitively available"?
    - unethical_ban 10y ago
      Well, he wasn't there for Caesar, so perhaps. re-edit: I did originally call it a throwaway comment, which while I still kind of feel to be the case, recanted when I saw he put effort lower in the thread.
      - tptacek 10y ago
        It's not a throwaway comment. I do think we've lost some perspective about this issue. You're free to disagree with me!
k-mcgrady 10y ago
It's pretty despicable to profit from printing the information and then argue that the person who provided it shouldn't have done so. Surely if you think Snowden should be prosecuted for providing you with the information you should equally be prosecuted from printing illegally obtained information that you don't think was in the public interest. And to make matters worse that information (specifically PRISM which they call out) is still being published by WaPo [1]. Talk about hypocrisy. [1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/politics/prism-collection-documents/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/politics/prism-...
- mikeash 10y ago
  It could be honest, but only if they recommend themselves for prosecution as well. Somehow I don't think they'll be doing that.
justafool 10y ago
.
- eaurouge 10y ago
  I agree. And I should add that Amazon is positioned to become the one global infrastructure layer in multiple areas. And despite Walmart's questionable labor practices, it remains the only viable opposition to Amazon's dominance in ecommerce. We don't know yet what Amazon would do if it achieves world domination and becomes the one button for everything but it's equally questionable labor practices don't leave me with much hope.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- blowski 10y ago
  Took me a while to realise you were saying this because Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post.
danso 10y ago
As Greenwald himself says, the editorial board does not speak for the reporting staff. Usually, few if any of the news editors are on the board. That's why you'll sometimes see the editorial board of a newspaper endorsing a candidate that their investigative reporting team just ransacked. That said, this is probably a first.
draw_down 10y ago
I'll agree with "ignominious".
Aqueous 10y ago
To play the devil's advocate here: this entire article rests on the assumption that the only way public interest could be served by exposing a government program is if that secret program is criminal. But this isn't true - the public's interest could be served even if the program is not criminal. So in my view, Washington Post is not being inconsistent - it is taking the view that while it PriSM was not criminal program, it was in the public's interest to know that it exists. A lot of times we seem to confuse 'is illegal' with 'should be illegal' - these are very different concepts. Washington Post did not necessarily take the position that PriSM was illegal in their articles, they merely supposed it was in the public's interest to know about it. Presumably to have a public debate about whether it should be illegal. (Watches karma points tick downwards.)
- k-mcgrady 10y ago
  >> "it is taking the view that while it PriSM was not criminal program, it was in the public's interest to know that it exists" How did you get to that conclusion? To me it reads that they thought PRISM was not criminal AND not in the public's interest. "...the Post suggests, there was no public interest whatsoever in revealing any of the other programs. In fact, they say, real harm was done by their exposure. That includes PRISM" So essentially the public did not need to know about PRISM and Snowden should not have made information about it public - when it wasn't Snowden, it was WaPo that made it public. They're shifting the blame. Initially they thought it was in the public interest so they printed it. Now they're saying it was not in the public interest.
  - csallen 10y ago
    Was in the process of typing this exact response. Aqueous, I think you misread a bit. WaPo is trying to claim that exposing PRISM served no public interest while simultaneously publishing the information about PRISM. Whether the program is illegal or not is irrelevant -- that's grossly hypocritical behavior.
    - Aqueous 10y ago
      You are correct. I should have read more carefully. They do seem to have changed their minds. I do feel that WaPo should address the inconsistency I think my point about the difference between 'is illegal' and 'should be illegal' still stands though. A lot of the debate was confused about whether or not this program was illegal with a lot of people not caring very much about the very specific ways in which the program avoided skirting the law. Nobody examined the specifics, and everybody assumed it was illegal and unconstitutional. This public reaction may have impeded ongoing investigations, and so it could be that Washington Post ultimately saw that it was not in the public interest to reveal the program.
tptacek 10y ago
Greenwald makes an important point and then sabotages it with over-the-top emotional appeals. He's right that the Editorial Page editors should acknowledge the Post's own role in publicizing NSA foreign ops. He's probably right that Marty Baron would disagree with the Editorial. It is hypocritical for the Post to campaign against clemency for Snowden without acknowledging their (prominent) role in the leaks. But it's not enough for Greenwald to make an interesting point. Anything interesting Greenwald has to say must be deployed in the service of his own campaign against the Post and the New York Times, against the journalistic establishment, and, ultimately, the US Government. So, interleaved among all the grafs establishing the Post's hypocrisy we have a parallel story of cowardice and betrayal, of the Post somehow setting new precedents in how papers handle sources. quelle horreur. The Post can be hypocritical and still, potentially, correct in opining about clemency for Snowden. The Post can be cowardly and still correct. Criminals have been sources for newspapers for as long as there's been newspapers. A reporter takes on some obligations --- created by norms and barely if at all recognized by law --- when engaging a reluctant or vulnerable source. But none of those obligations include full-throated support for the sources interests moving forward. How would that even make sense? Greenwald makes this critique even easier to write when he drags Frad Kaplan into his litany of cowardice. Kaplan wasn't one of the Post's Snowden-sourced journalists, and the piece that has Greenwald outraged is criticism of Oliver Stone's Snowden movie --- criticism that we can quibble with, but that is overall well-founded and seemingly absent from the discussion about the movie. Seemingly for the sole offense of having an opinion that differs from Greenwald's (and for being a member of the evil journalistic establishment), Kaplan too must join the league of cowardice. What's most maddening to me is the narrative (because everything about Snowden needs to be a narrative, with an arc and a resolution that we all collectively evaluate to derive the Metacritic score for this part of American history) that Snowden has through bravery somehow transcended accountability, and that entities like the Post through cowardice have surrendered any future claim to reason or judgement. We can argue all day about Snowden's bravery (the other side of the Snowden debate has another side of the bravery argument, too, and just as unproductive). But stipulate that he was unimpeachably courageous. So what? Lots of brave people do counterproductive things. Abortion clinic bombers are brave. Bank robbers are brave. The dude who phished all those celebrity iCloud accounts and published the photos --- I don't know if he knew how "brave" that was, but that took some stones. Firefighters are brave and so were the medics on the beaches of Normandy. In evaluating someone's actions, we need more data than "courage" or even best intentions to come to a conclusion. There are no doubt many good arguments for total clemency for Snowden. I probably don't agree with them (cards on the table: in my own fictional narrative of the Snowden story, he's convicted of something meaningful and has his sentence immediately suspended). But none of those arguments should have much to do with "bravery".
kordless 10y ago
The Post is in dissonance. Their comments are in conflict. They are speaking for the public's right to reasonable privacy that is not susceptible to what occurs when you exploit technology to gain an upper hand. The game theory around government is that it thinks it has the right to "protect us" at some X% cost to trustworthiness between them and the public. Driven by that value, they will continue to rationalize higher levels of untrustworthiness.
- justafool 10y ago
  .
  - kordless 10y ago
    I think it's more than what we perceive as propaganda. I wouldn't put it past Bezos to put a double bind on the government for a damn good reason.
marcoperaza 10y ago
There's a difference between the freedom to publish what is already leaked, and leaking in the first place. The former is protected by the First Amendment. The latter is not.
aphextron 10y ago
Even as a vehemently anti-Trump person, I find the Washington Post has become insufferably partisan to the point of making the left look bad. This is the final nail in the coffin of their legitimacy, to me.
- beerbajay 10y ago
  The Post is not now not has it ever been "the left"
jackgavigan 10y ago
Glenn Greenwald clearly doesn't understand the difference between journalism and editorialising. Does he seriously believe that the WaPo should have ignored the Snowden revelations about legitimate overseas intelligence operations, despite the fact that they knew that other news outlets were going to publish them? Does he not understand that the newspaper's job is to report the news? What a douchenozzle.
- voxic11 10y ago
  They published the documents snowden gave them. They could have chosen not to and in fact they did in many other cases, only a small portion of the documents were ever published. None were published by snowden himself. He specifically wanted wapo to make the determination about what is actually in the public interest. They decided to publish the prism documents themselves.
- timv 10y ago
  If The Post believed that publishing the details of these programs was not in the public interest, then the news would have been "The Guardian newspaper recklessly endangers national security by leaking details of legitimate classified programs" Actually leaking the details themselves isn't a neutral act, they willfully participated in the process that their editorial board is now condemning.
williamle8300 10y ago
PULITZER: "Hey WaPo you did a great service to the public with those Snowden articles. Take this Pulitzer Price for Public Service!" WAPO: "Sure!" [few months later] WAPO: "Edward Snowden didn't do this country a public service. He should be prosecuted!"
oneloop 10y ago
Guys, we all know that Bezos is a micromanaging maniac. Because of this, he must have known (and approved) the stance that the Washington Post was taking on Snowden, right? What do you think? I must say that I'm disappointed with Bezos... (Separate point, I've recently been discovering that The Intercept is an outstanding paper. They have some real investigative journalism)
- Jerry2 10y ago
  Snowden's revelations cost Amazon billions of dollars in AWS fees. In fact, it cost tens of billions of dollars to Silicon Valley companies over the past 3 years. This is why all these SV companies hate him so much.
  - yolesaber 10y ago
    Source on these claims? I don't doubt it, but i'd be interested in seeing the data
    - Jerry2 10y ago
      Do some googling on your own but here's one estimate: >“It’s clear to every single tech company that this is affecting their bottom line,” said Daniel Castro, a senior analyst at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, who predicted that the United States cloud computing industry could lose $35 billion by 2016. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/22/business/fallout-from-snowden-hurting-bottom-line-of-tech-companies.html http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/22/business/fallout-from-snow...
    - spydum 10y ago
      I can say with first hand knowledge, yes, US businesses have lost out on international contracts immediately following the leaks. There are plenty of industries (legal ones), in which the realization of government monitoring caused them to change course and keep business local (or at least, significantly shift the amount of information they would trust to a US-hosted business). Doesn't matter if it's irrational or not, real money was lost to US businesses, and I'm sure Amazon would have been party to that (whether they could even distinguish it in their monsterous growth or not, who knows).
sunstone 10y ago
Besos is a shithead. Tell us something we don't know already.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
kazinator 10y ago
In its defense, it has Washington in its name. I.e. what's "in the box" is what the label says.

588 points by etiam 10y ago

mtgx 10y ago

WashPost has definitely been on a visible decline since Jeff Bezos bought it. Extremely partisan and it tends to argue for the government (infamous "golden key" editorial, etc), rather than against it (in case we've all forgotten by now, that was supposed to be the job of the press). A lot of its articles are also Buzzfeedy and factfree.

personjerry 10y ago
> (in case we've all forgotten by now, that was supposed to be the job of the press) Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought the job of the press was merely to bring relevant information to the masses?
- sverige 10y ago
  No, it's more than that. They're the "Fourth Estate," supposedly to keep the government from abusing its power. They've abandoned that position. It's not clear that there's anything to replace the accountability they brought for a time. The Internet could have been that, but they've co-opted vast swaths of it already.
- badlucklottery 10y ago
  The information and narratives governments want you to hear will be freely given in press releases. All other information has to be found via investigation and possibly won't support or at least add complications and caveats to the official narrative. So the press giving the complete picture to the masses does have a adversarial component to it.
- rodgerd 10y ago
  In that case, you might as well shut them down and at least let businesses and politicians pay for their PR. There is no public interest in re-printing press releases.
justafool 10y ago
.
- AJ007 10y ago
  Amazon definitely has a significant problem with selling both dangerous products and counterfeit products. The move to paid listings has exacerbated a long standing problem with poor quality and fake products (not counterfeit but things such as "Egyptian cotton" sheets that are neither.) There is a big incentive to try to become as government friendly as possible.

conistonwater 10y ago

The title is a bit clickbaity, and I think Greenwald sometimes lets his politics get the better of him, but I think he makes a perfectly valid point here: it is not only difficult, but also impossible, to reconcile Washington Post's past reporting, together with their own claims of that reporting being in the public interest, with that editorial. That said, I'm not sure I buy the explanation that it's about "protecting access". There are many cases where groupthink developed on its own just fine (like maybe the support for the Iraq war way back when), so it could be narrow self-serving interest, but it could also be incompetence. And don't attribute to malice what can be explained by stupidity, and so on.

tome 10y ago
> Greenwald sometimes lets his politics get the better of him Sometimes? That's his whole raison d'etre. He's a political campaigner in all but name. One may or may not like his politics, but let's not pretend that he's a dispassionate observer.
- webwanderings 10y ago
  There's nothing wrong with that. I'll let Will McAvoy of Newsroom (Aaron Sorkin) answer that for you. Take a look at one of the first season's episodes.
  - tome 10y ago
    I didn't say there was anything wrong with it. I'm just expressing surprise that someone seemed to think that Greenwald wasn't always extremely political.
    - icebraining 10y ago
      "Let's not pretend" implies it's a purposeful deceit, not a mistake.
      - tome 10y ago

raverbashing 10y ago

It's a good thing for future whistleblowers to know who should get their stories. WP just took themselves out of that list.

ScottBurson 10y ago
Indeed. The newspaper of Woodward and Bernstein is dead. All that remains is the name.

eadz 10y ago

This is an important article and adds some real context to Washington Post's editorial. This quote sums it up. But still, if the Post editorial page editors now want to denounce these revelations, and even call for the imprisonment of their paper’s own source on this ground, then they should at least have the courage to acknowledge that it was The Washington Post — not Edward Snowden — who made the editorial and institutional choice to expose those programs to the public. The Washington Post's editors decided these stories were in the public interest and should be published, not Snowden.

lisper 10y ago
Indeed, it must be emphasized that Snowden deliberately did not disclose any of the information he had collected publicly. He specifically wanted someone else to make the decision about what (if anything) should be disclosed, and he specifically wanted journalists to make that decision. For the Post to stab Snowden in the back this way is the worst treachery, cowardice, and hypocrisy that I have ever witnessed.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- tptacek 10y ago
  The worst. Really? Are you sure you don't mean "the most cognitively available"?
  - unethical_ban 10y ago
    Well, he wasn't there for Caesar, so perhaps. re-edit: I did originally call it a throwaway comment, which while I still kind of feel to be the case, recanted when I saw he put effort lower in the thread.
    - tptacek 10y ago
      It's not a throwaway comment. I do think we've lost some perspective about this issue. You're free to disagree with me!

k-mcgrady 10y ago

It's pretty despicable to profit from printing the information and then argue that the person who provided it shouldn't have done so. Surely if you think Snowden should be prosecuted for providing you with the information you should equally be prosecuted from printing illegally obtained information that you don't think was in the public interest. And to make matters worse that information (specifically PRISM which they call out) is still being published by WaPo [1]. Talk about hypocrisy. [1] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/politics/prism-collection-documents/ http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/special/politics/prism-...

mikeash 10y ago
It could be honest, but only if they recommend themselves for prosecution as well. Somehow I don't think they'll be doing that.

justafool 10y ago

eaurouge 10y ago
I agree. And I should add that Amazon is positioned to become the one global infrastructure layer in multiple areas. And despite Walmart's questionable labor practices, it remains the only viable opposition to Amazon's dominance in ecommerce. We don't know yet what Amazon would do if it achieves world domination and becomes the one button for everything but it's equally questionable labor practices don't leave me with much hope.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
blowski 10y ago
Took me a while to realise you were saying this because Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post.

danso 10y ago

As Greenwald himself says, the editorial board does not speak for the reporting staff. Usually, few if any of the news editors are on the board. That's why you'll sometimes see the editorial board of a newspaper endorsing a candidate that their investigative reporting team just ransacked. That said, this is probably a first.

draw_down 10y ago

I'll agree with "ignominious".

Aqueous 10y ago

To play the devil's advocate here: this entire article rests on the assumption that the only way public interest could be served by exposing a government program is if that secret program is criminal. But this isn't true - the public's interest could be served even if the program is not criminal. So in my view, Washington Post is not being inconsistent - it is taking the view that while it PriSM was not criminal program, it was in the public's interest to know that it exists. A lot of times we seem to confuse 'is illegal' with 'should be illegal' - these are very different concepts. Washington Post did not necessarily take the position that PriSM was illegal in their articles, they merely supposed it was in the public's interest to know about it. Presumably to have a public debate about whether it should be illegal. (Watches karma points tick downwards.)

k-mcgrady 10y ago
>> "it is taking the view that while it PriSM was not criminal program, it was in the public's interest to know that it exists" How did you get to that conclusion? To me it reads that they thought PRISM was not criminal AND not in the public's interest. "...the Post suggests, there was no public interest whatsoever in revealing any of the other programs. In fact, they say, real harm was done by their exposure. That includes PRISM" So essentially the public did not need to know about PRISM and Snowden should not have made information about it public - when it wasn't Snowden, it was WaPo that made it public. They're shifting the blame. Initially they thought it was in the public interest so they printed it. Now they're saying it was not in the public interest.
- csallen 10y ago
  Was in the process of typing this exact response. Aqueous, I think you misread a bit. WaPo is trying to claim that exposing PRISM served no public interest while simultaneously publishing the information about PRISM. Whether the program is illegal or not is irrelevant -- that's grossly hypocritical behavior.
  - Aqueous 10y ago
    You are correct. I should have read more carefully. They do seem to have changed their minds. I do feel that WaPo should address the inconsistency I think my point about the difference between 'is illegal' and 'should be illegal' still stands though. A lot of the debate was confused about whether or not this program was illegal with a lot of people not caring very much about the very specific ways in which the program avoided skirting the law. Nobody examined the specifics, and everybody assumed it was illegal and unconstitutional. This public reaction may have impeded ongoing investigations, and so it could be that Washington Post ultimately saw that it was not in the public interest to reveal the program.

tptacek 10y ago

Greenwald makes an important point and then sabotages it with over-the-top emotional appeals. He's right that the Editorial Page editors should acknowledge the Post's own role in publicizing NSA foreign ops. He's probably right that Marty Baron would disagree with the Editorial. It is hypocritical for the Post to campaign against clemency for Snowden without acknowledging their (prominent) role in the leaks. But it's not enough for Greenwald to make an interesting point. Anything interesting Greenwald has to say must be deployed in the service of his own campaign against the Post and the New York Times, against the journalistic establishment, and, ultimately, the US Government. So, interleaved among all the grafs establishing the Post's hypocrisy we have a parallel story of cowardice and betrayal, of the Post somehow setting new precedents in how papers handle sources. quelle horreur. The Post can be hypocritical and still, potentially, correct in opining about clemency for Snowden. The Post can be cowardly and still correct. Criminals have been sources for newspapers for as long as there's been newspapers. A reporter takes on some obligations --- created by norms and barely if at all recognized by law --- when engaging a reluctant or vulnerable source. But none of those obligations include full-throated support for the sources interests moving forward. How would that even make sense? Greenwald makes this critique even easier to write when he drags Frad Kaplan into his litany of cowardice. Kaplan wasn't one of the Post's Snowden-sourced journalists, and the piece that has Greenwald outraged is criticism of Oliver Stone's Snowden movie --- criticism that we can quibble with, but that is overall well-founded and seemingly absent from the discussion about the movie. Seemingly for the sole offense of having an opinion that differs from Greenwald's (and for being a member of the evil journalistic establishment), Kaplan too must join the league of cowardice. What's most maddening to me is the narrative (because everything about Snowden needs to be a narrative, with an arc and a resolution that we all collectively evaluate to derive the Metacritic score for this part of American history) that Snowden has through bravery somehow transcended accountability, and that entities like the Post through cowardice have surrendered any future claim to reason or judgement. We can argue all day about Snowden's bravery (the other side of the Snowden debate has another side of the bravery argument, too, and just as unproductive). But stipulate that he was unimpeachably courageous. So what? Lots of brave people do counterproductive things. Abortion clinic bombers are brave. Bank robbers are brave. The dude who phished all those celebrity iCloud accounts and published the photos --- I don't know if he knew how "brave" that was, but that took some stones. Firefighters are brave and so were the medics on the beaches of Normandy. In evaluating someone's actions, we need more data than "courage" or even best intentions to come to a conclusion. There are no doubt many good arguments for total clemency for Snowden. I probably don't agree with them (cards on the table: in my own fictional narrative of the Snowden story, he's convicted of something meaningful and has his sentence immediately suspended). But none of those arguments should have much to do with "bravery".

kordless 10y ago

The Post is in dissonance. Their comments are in conflict. They are speaking for the public's right to reasonable privacy that is not susceptible to what occurs when you exploit technology to gain an upper hand. The game theory around government is that it thinks it has the right to "protect us" at some X% cost to trustworthiness between them and the public. Driven by that value, they will continue to rationalize higher levels of untrustworthiness.

justafool 10y ago
.
- kordless 10y ago
  I think it's more than what we perceive as propaganda. I wouldn't put it past Bezos to put a double bind on the government for a damn good reason.

marcoperaza 10y ago

There's a difference between the freedom to publish what is already leaked, and leaking in the first place. The former is protected by the First Amendment. The latter is not.

aphextron 10y ago

Even as a vehemently anti-Trump person, I find the Washington Post has become insufferably partisan to the point of making the left look bad. This is the final nail in the coffin of their legitimacy, to me.

beerbajay 10y ago
The Post is not now not has it ever been "the left"

jackgavigan 10y ago

Glenn Greenwald clearly doesn't understand the difference between journalism and editorialising. Does he seriously believe that the WaPo should have ignored the Snowden revelations about legitimate overseas intelligence operations, despite the fact that they knew that other news outlets were going to publish them? Does he not understand that the newspaper's job is to report the news? What a douchenozzle.

voxic11 10y ago
They published the documents snowden gave them. They could have chosen not to and in fact they did in many other cases, only a small portion of the documents were ever published. None were published by snowden himself. He specifically wanted wapo to make the determination about what is actually in the public interest. They decided to publish the prism documents themselves.
timv 10y ago
If The Post believed that publishing the details of these programs was not in the public interest, then the news would have been "The Guardian newspaper recklessly endangers national security by leaking details of legitimate classified programs" Actually leaking the details themselves isn't a neutral act, they willfully participated in the process that their editorial board is now condemning.

williamle8300 10y ago

PULITZER: "Hey WaPo you did a great service to the public with those Snowden articles. Take this Pulitzer Price for Public Service!" WAPO: "Sure!" [few months later] WAPO: "Edward Snowden didn't do this country a public service. He should be prosecuted!"

oneloop 10y ago

Guys, we all know that Bezos is a micromanaging maniac. Because of this, he must have known (and approved) the stance that the Washington Post was taking on Snowden, right? What do you think? I must say that I'm disappointed with Bezos... (Separate point, I've recently been discovering that The Intercept is an outstanding paper. They have some real investigative journalism)

Jerry2 10y ago
Snowden's revelations cost Amazon billions of dollars in AWS fees. In fact, it cost tens of billions of dollars to Silicon Valley companies over the past 3 years. This is why all these SV companies hate him so much.
- yolesaber 10y ago
  Source on these claims? I don't doubt it, but i'd be interested in seeing the data
  - Jerry2 10y ago
    Do some googling on your own but here's one estimate: >“It’s clear to every single tech company that this is affecting their bottom line,” said Daniel Castro, a senior analyst at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, who predicted that the United States cloud computing industry could lose $35 billion by 2016. http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/22/business/fallout-from-snowden-hurting-bottom-line-of-tech-companies.html http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/22/business/fallout-from-snow...
  - spydum 10y ago
    I can say with first hand knowledge, yes, US businesses have lost out on international contracts immediately following the leaks. There are plenty of industries (legal ones), in which the realization of government monitoring caused them to change course and keep business local (or at least, significantly shift the amount of information they would trust to a US-hosted business). Doesn't matter if it's irrational or not, real money was lost to US businesses, and I'm sure Amazon would have been party to that (whether they could even distinguish it in their monsterous growth or not, who knows).

sunstone 10y ago

Besos is a shithead. Tell us something we don't know already.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

kazinator 10y ago

In its defense, it has Washington in its name. I.e. what's "in the box" is what the label says.