Woodward and Bernstein did it without computers

[Guardian photo]

Adding a bit to my earlier post on trusting BigMedia, here's The Guardian on the destruction of their computers. Not sure which iteration of the story this might be but I'm told this is not a photograph of destroyed hard drives.

Read it and see if it makes more sense to you, but for me the real tell was the last graf:

"I hope what [the Miranda detention row] will do is to send people back to read the stories that so upset the British state because there has been a lot of reporting about what GCHQ and the NSA are up to. What Snowden is trying to do is draw attention to the degree to which we are on a road to total surveillance."

As I said when the story broke, Miranda's detention was entirely predictable. And as I asked John Cole, who would have known Mr. Miranda was even traveling if he hadn't been detained? I didn't. And really? No other route  to Brazil available except going through Heathrow?

Clickbait journalism is all about traffic. As Politico editor-in-chief John F. Harris said in an interview, "We have an obligation to be interesting. We don’t think of ourselves as the electric company or the water company: Well, we have a responsibility ...”2 That was a mindset in a previous generation of journalists. That mindset might have even been legitimate."

In other words, the big money is in infotainment. It's about amusing the people for profit, not some quaint, last century concept about a responsibility to inform the public.

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Considering the source on Snowden

Honestly, I'm rather tired of the Edward Snowden story but another slow news cycle and the main source of entertainment today seems to be arguing about him. Given that the Snowden saga has dragged on for so long, I suppose it was inevitable that his motives would come into question.

On that point I agree with Nate Silver's tweet from a few days ago:

@fivethrityeight: Journalists shouldn't care about whether sources are good people, but about whether the source's account is reliable and accurate.

That being said, I did find this hit piece on Snowden mildly interesting. He does of course have a history on the internets and was once an active poster on the Ars Technica site. The consensus there is Snowden was pretty much a collosal dick. There are a lot of quotes at the link, including one exchange where he suggests we should let all the olds die rather than suck up our limited resources but this bit struck me as even more significant.

“Fuck old people”? An objectivist view if ever there was one. The other issue is the Second Amendment:

User: the restrictions were made to appease the conservatives to get another bill passed. fucking cons.

SNOWDEN: See, that’s why I’m goddamned glad for the second amendment. Me and all my lunatic, gun-toting NRA compatriots would be on the steps of Congress before the C-Span feed finished.

Not sure what to make of that but it's not shouting thoughtful concerned citizen to me.

In any event, whatever his motives are, while I remain grateful Snowden resurrected the objections to the surveillance state, if his goal really was to curtail it, and not simple attention seeking, he's utterly failed in that mission. All he appears to have accomplished at this point is to further polarize the debate.

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You don't have to go home, but you can't stay here

Echoing the catch phrase of bartenders everywhere, it's last call for Snowden in Russia.

Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said Russia had received no request for political asylum from Snowden and he had to solve his problems himself after 11 days in the transit area of Moscow's Sheremetyevo airport.

President Vladimir Putin has refused to extradite the American and Russian officials have delighted in his success in staying out of the United States' clutches since revealing details of secret U.S. government surveillance programs.

But Moscow also has made clear that Snowden is an increasingly unwelcome guest because the longer he stays, the greater the risk of the diplomatic standoff causing lasting damage to relations with Washington.

"He needs to choose a place to go," Ryabkov told Reuters.

Of course, Snowden's problem is nobody wants to take him. I imagine this is not the scenario he had in his head when he decided to go public. It seems he didn't calculate the geopolitical complications in seeking asylum. Kind of surprising. You might think a guy smart enough to hack closely guarded NSA data would have anticipated this in advance.

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No where to run to, no where to hide

Well it seems our self-imagined international spy, Edward Snowden, is running out of options.

Snowden has prepared asylum requests in countries including India, China, Brazil, Ireland, Austria, Bolivia, Cuba, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Nicaragua, Norway, Poland, Spain, Switzerland and Venezuela, WikiLeaks has said.

Unfortunately for our intrepid leaker, after Snowden released a rather bizarre statement, only Venezuela has publicly indicated any real support for asylum but didn't actual offer to take him in. Several others have essentially said not going to happen and Russia has had quite enough of hosting their hapless house guest and would very much appreciate it if he could find new accommodations.

Meanwhile, Hendrick Hertzberg gets it exactly right on the traitor or hero question. The answer is neither. In the end, Snowden is just a kid who broke the law and is going to have to suffer for it in ways that he didn't properly anticipate before he decided to step into the klieg lights.

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Edward Snowden is screwed

For guy who's smart enough to hack into the NSA's database, Ed Snowden was shockingly unprepared for the aftermath of publicly admitting his crime. For one thing, he clearly didn't think through his route to asylum thoroughly. It's like he believed he could just cleverly sneak aroung the globe until he found a comfortable home in self-imposed exile where he would live out his days as a folk hero or something. It's as if, in his head, he was living out a spy novel but Snowden's immediate reality is grim in ways that suggest an unhappy ending to his story.

Ecuadorian President Rafael Correa on Sunday said that the fate of National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden is in the hands of Russia, where he is currently staying, awaiting asylum from the South American country.

"This is the decision of Russian authorities," Correa told the Associated Press in an interview. "He doesn't have a passport. I don't know the Russian laws, I don't know if he can leave the airport, but I understand that he can't. At this moment he's under the care of the Russian authorities.

Correa said that Ecuadorian officials would only consider an asylum request if Snowden was able to make it to an embassy or their country.

The problem is without a valid passport, he may well be living in limbo in the holding area at the Moscow airport under Russian security for a long time, which as Steve M discovered is an unpleasant existence for those without the proper papers.

Equally surprising is how clueless Snowden appears to be about how the internets works in the age of Twitter. It seems he expected to drop his bombshell into the news cycle and still be able to maintain as he once put it, "a quiet life." Neither does it appear he understands the new business model of BigMedia which Bussfeed's Ben Smith described perfectly a few days ago in response to the debate over Snowden's morals and motives that's been raging on the internets for days on end. This is the new reality of the Beltway media:

...These seem like good questions for a philosophy class. They are terrible, boring, ones for reporters, and have more to do with the confusing new news environment than with the actual news.

Snowden’s flight is a great, classic international story. It is, as Glenn Greenwald tweeted today, a kind of global White Bronco moment. His roots in web culture; his ideology; his decision-making; these are all great stories. He’s a much more interesting figure than Mark Felt because, at least, he’s a new figure, not a familiar one.

You might think a computer wunderkind like Snowden would have understood and considered the 24/7 news beast's insatiable hunger for fresh meat in his dealings with the media. Apparently, you would be wrong. The kid really is screwed.

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