Comment by Riaz Haq on October 31, 2021 at 7:20am

Reporters Once Challenged the Spy State. Now, They're Agents of It
News companies are pioneering a new brand of vigilante reporting, partnering with spy agencies they once oversaw
Matt Taibbi May 11


https://taibbi.substack.com/p/reporters-once-challenged-the-spy

After the Capitol riots of January 6th, the War on Terror came home, and “domestic extremists” stepped into the role enemy combatants played before. George Bush once launched an all-out campaign to pacify any safe haven for trrrsts, promising to “smoke ‘em out of their holes.” The new campaign is aimed at stamping out areas for surveillance-proof communication, which CNN security analyst and former DHS official Juliette Kayyem described as any online network “that lets [domestic extremists] talk amongst themselves.”

Reporters pledged assistance, snooping for evidence of wrongness in digital rather than geographical “hidey holes.” We’ve seen The Guardian warning about the perils of podcasts, ProPublica arguing that Apple’s lax speech environment contributed to the January 6th riot, and reporters from The Verge and Vice and The New York Times listening in to Clubhouse chats in search of evidence of dangerous thought. In an inspired homage to the lunacy of the War on Terror years, a GQ writer even went on Twitter last week to chat with the author of George Bush’s “Axis of Evil” speech about imploring the “authorities” to use the “Fire in a Crowded Theater” argument to shut down Fox News.

Multiple outlets announced plans to track “extremists” in either open or implied cooperation with authorities. Frontline, ProPublica, and Berkley Journalism’s Investigative Reporting Program used “high-precision digital forensics” to uncover “evidence” about the Boogaloo Bois, and the Huffington Post worked with the “sedition hunters” at the Twitter activist group “Deep State Dogs” to help identify a suspect later arrested for tasering a Capitol police officer. One of the Huffington Post stories, from February, not only spoke to a willingness of the press to work with law enforcement, but impatience with the slowness of official procedure compared to “sleuthing communities”:

The FBI wants photos of Capitol insurrections to go viral, and has published images of more than 200 suspects. But what happens when online sleuthing communities identify suspects and then see weeks go by without any signs of action…? There are hundreds of suspects, thousands of hours of video, hundreds of thousands of tips, and millions of pieces of evidence… the FBI’s bureaucracy isn’t necessarily designed to keep organized.

The Intercept already saw founding members Poitras and Greenwald depart, and shut down the aforementioned Snowden archive to, in their words, “focus on other editorial priorities” — parent company First Look Media soon after launched a partnership with “PassionFlix,” whose motto is, “Turning your favorite romance novels into movies and series.” Last week, they announced a new project in tune with current media trends:

Are there legitimate stories about people with racist or conspiratorial views who for instance shouldn’t be working in positions of authority, as cops or elected officials or military officers? Sure, and there’s a job for reporters in proving that out, especially if there’s a record of complaints or corruption to match. It gets a little weird if the newsworthiness standard is “person with a job has abhorrent private opinions,” but it’s not like it’s impossible that a legit story could be found in something like the Gab archive, especially if it involves a public figure.

Comment by Riaz Haq on October 31, 2021 at 7:21am

Reporters Once Challenged the Spy State. Now, They're Agents of It
News companies are pioneering a new brand of vigilante reporting, partnering with spy agencies they once oversaw
Matt Taibbi May 11


https://taibbi.substack.com/p/reporters-once-challenged-the-spy


But that depends on the media people involved having a coherent standard for outing subjects, which hasn’t always (or even often) been the case.

Here The Intercept is announcing it considers QAnon devotee Marjorie Taylor Greene and Alex Jones “violent white supremacists” — they’re a lot of things, but “violent white supremacists”? In the first piece about “extremists” on Gab, reporter Micah Lee claimed to have found an account belonging to a little-known conservative youth figure; the man’s attorney later reached out to deny the account was his, leading to a correction. When asked about his process, Lee responded, sarcastically, that he “certainly wouldn't want to accidentally do investigative journalism about white supremacist domestic terrorists.” When asked how he defined a terrorist, and if he’d be naming public figures only, the sarcastic answer this time was, “Of course I won't be naming anyone. Racist white people must be defended at all costs.”

Greenwald left the organization among other things after an editor asked that he address the “disinformation issue” in a piece about Hunter Biden’s laptop, a reference to a claim made by 50 intelligence officers that the story had “the classic earmarks of a Russian disinformation campaign.” He found it inappropriate then for a publication with The Intercept’s history to be pushing an intelligence narrative, and the Gab project struck him in a similar way.

“The leap from disseminating CIA propaganda to doing the police work of security state agencies is a short one,” says Greenwald, “and with its statements about what they are doing with this Gab archive, The Intercept and its trite liberal managers in New York have now taken it.”

In a separate mailer, the Intercept — owned by Omidyar, whose net worth has risen from $11 billion just a few years ago to $22 billion now — complained that “while the right wing’s culture warriors will always be able to turn to the super-rich for financial resources, progressive organizations and independent news outlets are struggling for support.” As The Columbia Journalism Review reported a few years ago, the company has long struggled to attract enough outside funding to maintain its 501(c)3 status as a public charity, which may explain why an outlet owned by the world’s 81st richest person complains about a lack of access to “the super-rich” as it solicits donations from individuals.

When asked about the company’s public charity status, Intercept editor Betsy Reed said that because these and other questions were “filled with errors and more bad-faith distortions,” she would not be commenting.

It hasn’t escaped the notice of some current and former Intercept staffers that combing through the hacked private communications of ordinary people in an FBI-like hunt for “extremists” is more or less the exact opposite of the company’s original mission, which focused on the institutional abuses of the very counterintelligence and law enforcement bureaucracies they now seem anxious to aid.

“What a turnaround,” one former Intercept employee, who was there for the company’s early years, said last week. “The answer to white supremacy is not to bring the War on Terror home.”

“That a media outlet founded in order to battle mass surveillance of ordinary citizens and to safeguard privacy rights is now trolling through stolen digital data of private citizens in order to expose and punish them for thought crimes and ideological dissent is as grotesque as it is ironic,” says Greenwald.

The giveaway that these deviance hunts have little to do with holding the powerful to account is that they’re taking place as news outlets have given up even the pretense of interest in spy agency abuses.

Comment by Riaz Haq on October 31, 2021 at 7:21am

Reporters Once Challenged the Spy State. Now, They're Agents of It
News companies are pioneering a new brand of vigilante reporting, partnering with spy agencies they once oversaw
Matt Taibbi May 11


https://taibbi.substack.com/p/reporters-once-challenged-the-spy


Just last week, CNN explained that the Department of Homeland Security was thinking of pairing with non-governmental entities to conduct more aggressive surveillance of “potential domestic terrorists” than they would be legally allowed, by themselves:

The Department of Homeland Security is limited in how it can monitor citizens online without justification and is banned from activities like assuming false identities to gain access to private messaging apps used by extremist groups such as the Proud Boys or Oath Keepers…

The plan being discussed inside DHS, according to multiple sources, would, in effect, allow the department to circumvent those limits.

CNN added that if the public-private surveillance partnership went through, the “DHS could produce information that would likely be beneficial to both it and the FBI, which can't monitor US citizens in this way without first getting a warrant or having the pretext of an ongoing investigation.” They added: “The CIA and NSA are also limited on collecting intelligence domestically.”

News that the government is considering using private citizens to help it conduct what amount to vigilante intelligence operations for the DHS, FBI, CIA, and NSA — an end-run around once-cherished liberal values like the exclusionary rule — inspired almost no reaction in the op-ed pages of ostensibly liberal outlets. The perceived targets are white supremacists, as unsympathetic as al-Qaeda once was. Who cares?

Just last week it was announced the FBI had been caught, again, in abuses of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Also censured by the FISA court in 2011, 2016, and 2018, the Bureau was busted for “widespread” use of an NSA-managed surveillance tool meant for foreign cases only, using FISA to investigate “health care fraud, transnational organized crime, violent gangs, domestic terrorism, public corruption, and bribery.” The declassified report also worried the NSA might be passing to the FBI intercepts of attorney-client conversations, not that anyone in the press cares about that principle anymore, either. Except for one Fox story about Jim Jordan complaining, editorialists mostly took a pass on the FISC news.

All of this is taking place as a slew of War on Terror programs are being retooled for domestic use. A month ago, the New York Times casually reported that “The White House is also discussing… executive orders to update the criteria of terrorism watch lists to potentially include more homegrown extremists.”

Politico also reported the DHS was considering “analyzing the travel patterns” of right-wing suspects, expanding the No Fly List to include “domestic extremists,” and stopping such targets at customs, where officials may “search their phones and laptops” before allowing them back in-country (I know of at least one not-at-all-conservative African-American to whom this has already happened).

Vigilante press efforts at outing “domestic extremists” will function as an auxiliary watch list. Do we need help remembering how the last version worked out? Over 1.1 million names were entered on a list that was shared with 1,400 private groups, from hospitals to universities to prospective employers, resulting in people losing jobs, being denied banking services, having travel restricted, and experiencing all sorts of other difficulties.

The related No-Fly List, Kill List, and other suspect databases were fraught with similar problems, all stemming from the same issue: a lack of procedural oversight, combined with the absence of any requirement that targets commit a crime or be reasonably suspected of planning a crime before they were put on lists.

Comment by Riaz Haq on October 31, 2021 at 1:24pm

TUCKER CARLSON GOES FULL 1/6 TRUTHER IN NEW FOX DOC
The Fox News star came under fire for framing the Trump-incited Capitol attack as a false flag operation, with colleague Geraldo Rivera calling “bullshit” and Liz Cheney urging Rupert Murdoch to step in.
BY CALEB ECARMA

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2021/10/tucker-carlson-january-6-tr...

“The helicopters have left Afghanistan, and now they’ve landed here at home.” While discussing the three-part series on Tucker Carlson Tonight, Fox’s most popular host said that he believes “it answers a lot of the remaining questions” regarding the Capitol riot. “Our conclusion? The U.S. government has in fact launched a new war on terror. But it’s not against al-Qaida, it’s against American citizens,” he added.

On this week’s edition of Carlson’s Fox Nation program, he went as far to say that “you can see why the people who showed up in Washington on January 6 were mad,” and in September, he said that “the vast majority of people inside the Capitol on January 6 were peaceful. They were not insurrectionists, they shouldn’t have been there. They weren’t trying to overthrow the government. That’s a total crock.” Carlson’s remarks echo those of Republican lawmakers who have tried to downplay the deadly attack perpetrated by Trump’s supporters and fueled by his lies—with one congressman even characterizing the riot as a “normal tourist visit.”

In an interview with The New York Times, Fox News host Geraldo Rivera criticized his colleague’s new project. “Tucker’s wonderful, he’s provocative, he’s original, but—man oh man. There are some things that you say that are more inflammatory and outrageous and uncorroborated,” he said. “I worry that—and I’m probably going to get in trouble for this—but I’m wondering how much is done to provoke, rather than illuminate.” He continued: “Messing around with January 6 stuff…. The record to me is pretty damn clear, that there was a riot that was incited and encouraged and unleashed by Donald Trump.” When asked whether or not he would advise the network against airing Carlson’s series, Rivera declined, saying, “That’s not my job. He’s my colleague. He’s my family. Sometimes you have to speak out about your family.” Though Rivera was willing to call “bullshit” on Carlson’s false flag claims in a Thursday-morning tweet.

Fox News did not respond for comment on criticism of Carlson’s series, which was flowing on Twitter.

Comment by Riaz Haq on June 26, 2022 at 6:32am

NY Times's Review of "Legacy of Ashes" by Time Weiner:

https://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/22/books/review/Thomas-t.html

The C.I.A. never did have much luck operating inside Communist China, and it failed to predict the Iranian revolution of 1979. “We were just plain asleep,” said the former C.I.A. director Adm. Stansfield Turner. The agency also did not foresee the explosion of an atom bomb by the Soviet Union in 1949, the invasion of South Korea in 1950, the popular uprisings in Eastern Europe in the 1950s, the installation of Soviet missiles in Cuba in 1962, the Arab-Israeli war of 1973, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, the explosion of an atom bomb by India in 1998 — the list goes on and on, culminating in the agency’s wrong call on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction in 2002-3.


Tim Weiner’s engrossing, comprehensive “Legacy of Ashes” is a litany of failure, from the C.I.A.’s early days, when hundreds of agents were dropped behind the Iron Curtain to be killed or doubled (almost without exception), to more recent humiliations, like George Tenet’s now infamous “slam dunk” line. Over the years, the agency threw around a lot of money and adopted a certain swagger. “We went all over the world and we did what we wanted,” said Al Ulmer, the C.I.A.’s Far East division chief in the 1950s. “God, we had fun.” But even their successes turned out to be failures. In 1963, the C.I.A. backed a coup to install the Baath Party in Iraq. “We came to power on a C.I.A. train,” said Ali Saleh Saadi, the Baath Party interior minister. One of the train’s passengers, Weiner notes, was a young assassin named Saddam Hussein. Weiner quotes Donald Gregg, a former C.I.A. station chief in South Korea, later the national security adviser to Vice President George H. W. Bush: “The record in Europe was bad. The record in Asia was bad. The agency had a terrible record in its early days — a great reputation and a terrible record.”

And yet the myth of the C.I.A. as an all-knowing, all-powerful spy agency persisted for years, not just in the minds of America’s enemies but in the imagination of many American television-watchers and moviegoers. Among those fooled, at least initially, were most modern presidents of the United States. The promise of a secret intelligence organization that could not only spy on America’s enemies but also influence events abroad, by sleight of hand and at relatively low cost, was just too alluring.

When presidents finally faced the reality that the agency was bumbling, they could be bitter. Reviewing the C.I.A.’s record after his two terms in office, Dwight Eisenhower told the director, Allen Dulles, “I have suffered an eight-year defeat on this.” He would “leave a legacy of ashes” for his successor. A fan of Ian Fleming’s spy stories, John F. Kennedy was shocked to be introduced to the man described by C.I.A. higher-ups as their James Bond — the fat, alcoholic, unstable William Harvey, who ran a botched attempt to eliminate Fidel Castro by hiring the Mafia. Ronald Reagan went along with the desire of his C.I.A. director, William Casey, to bring back the mythical glory days by “unleashing” the agency — and his presidency was badly undermined by the Iran-contra affair.

Comment by Riaz Haq on June 26, 2022 at 6:33am

NY Times's Review of "Legacy of Ashes" by Time Weiner:

https://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/22/books/review/Thomas-t.html


In Weiner’s telling, a president trying to use the C.I.A. resembles Charlie Brown trying to kick the football. The role of Lucy is played by scheming or inept directors. Dulles is particularly egregious, a lazy, vain con artist who watches baseball games on television while half-listening to top-secret briefings (he assesses written briefings by their weight). Casey mumbles and lies and may have been almost mad from a brain tumor by the end. Even the more honorable directors, like Richard Helms, can’t resist telling presidents what they want to hear. To fit the policy needs of the Nixon White House in 1969, Helms doctored a C.I.A. estimate of Soviet nuclear forces. In a draft of the report, analysts had doubted the Soviet will or capacity to launch a nuclear strike. Helms erased this crucial passage — and for years thereafter, until the end of the cold war, the C.I.A. overstated the rate at which the Soviets were modernizing their arsenal. The C.I.A.’s bogus intelligence on Iraq in 2002-3, based on the deceits of dubious sources like the one known as Curveball, was hardly unprecedented. To justify the Johnson administration’s desire for a pro-war Congressional resolution on Vietnam in 1964, the intelligence community manufactured evidence of a Communist attack on American destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin.

Weiner, a reporter for The Times who has covered intelligence for many years, has a good eye for embarrassing detail. High-ranking officials, it appears, were often the last to know. When Iraq invaded Kuwait in August 1990, Robert M. Gates, who is now the secretary of defense but at the time was the first President Bush’s deputy national security adviser, was at a family picnic. A friend of his wife’s joined the picnic and asked him, “What are you doing here?” Gates asked, “What are you talking about?” “The invasion,” she said. “What invasion?” he asked. A year earlier, when the Berlin Wall fell, Milt Bearden, the leader of the C.I.A.’s Soviet division, was reduced to watching CNN and deflecting urgent calls from White House officials who wanted to know what the agency’s spies were saying. “It was hard to confess that there were no Soviet spies worth a damn — they all had been rounded up and killed, and no one at the C.I.A. knew why,” Weiner writes. (The American agents in Moscow had been betrayed by the C.I.A. mole Aldrich Ames.)


Weiner is not the first reporter to see that the C.I.A.’s golden era was an illusion. After the 1975 Church Committee hearings exposed the agency as “the gang that couldn’t shoot straight,” various authors began to deconstruct the myth of the C.I.A., most notably Thomas Powers in “The Man Who Kept the Secrets.” But by using tens of thousands of declassified documents and on-the-record recollections of dozens of chagrined spymasters, Weiner paints what may be the most disturbing picture yet of C.I.A. ineptitude. After following along Weiner’s march of folly, readers may wonder: Is an open democracy capable of building and sustaining an effective secret intelligence service? Maybe not. But with Islamic terrorists vowing to set off a nuclear device in an American city, there isn’t much choice but to keep on trying.

Comment by Riaz Haq on September 10, 2022 at 5:36pm

Dan Rather calls Sinclair news anchors reading the same script "propaganda" and "Orwellian"

https://www.primetimer.com/item/Dan-Rather-calls-Sinclair-news-anch...

The former CBS News anchor was reacting to Deadspin's viral video, which has been viewed more than 10 million times in the past two days (between Twitter and YouTube). "News anchors looking into camera and reading a script handed down by a corporate overlord, words meant to obscure the truth not elucidate it, isn't journalism," he tweeted. "It's propaganda. It's Orwellian. A slippery slope to how despots wrest power, silence dissent, and oppress the masses." ALSO: One Sinclair-owned station said it rejected the announcement.

Comment by Riaz Haq on December 11, 2022 at 4:03pm

Politico’s new German owner has a ‘contrarian’ plan for American media
Mathias Döpfner has global ambitions for what he calls a more ‘nonpartisan’ kind of journalism — even as his own politics are hard to pin down
Image without a caption
By Sarah Ellison

https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2022/09/06/mathias-dopfner-tru...

While calling for political neutrality from his U.S. media properties, Döpfner comes from a tradition of European publishers who are very much at ease blending ideology with news. Axel Springer staff in Germany are required to sign a pledge committing to principles that include a disavowal of racism, sexism and political or religious extremism; but also support for a united Europe, Israeli statehood and a free-market economy.

--------

“These values are like a constitution,” he told the Wall Street Journal last year.

Last year, Döpfner ordered the Israeli flag be flown in solidarity at company headquarters for a week after several antisemitic outbursts at demonstrations in Germany that followed a deadly eruption of violence in Gaza. Some employees bristled, seeing it as taking sides in the fraught Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Döpfner responded sharply in a staff video call: “I’m being very frank with you: A person who has an issue with an Israeli flag being raised for one week here, after antisemitic demonstrations, should look for a new job.”

Comment by Riaz Haq on December 11, 2022 at 4:06pm

Politico’s New Owner Plans to Grow Staff, Launch Paywall
Axel Springer, whose $1 billion acquisition of Politico is expected to close next week, also eyes foreign-language editions

https://www.wsj.com/articles/politicos-new-owner-plans-to-grow-staf...

BERLIN—Axel Springer SE plans to eventually put Politico’s content behind a paywall and immediately boost the political-news publisher’s head count by more than 10% once the German conglomerate’s $1 billion deal to buy the company closes, expected next week.

Axel Springer Chief Executive Mathias Döpfner said in an interview he expects to hire 100 people across the company’s management and editorial staff, which currently numbers 900 in the U.S. and Europe. He also laid out tentative plans for an international push—including intentions to publish in several different languages.

Mr. Döpfner said he plans to grow Politico’s footprint both in the U.S. and overseas by introducing new industry-focused products and services and by broadening the scope of coverage. He said he expects Politico’s main news offerings, now free, to go behind a paywall in the medium term.

He also said he expects Politico staffers to adhere to Axel Springer-wide guiding principles that have raised controversy at times at its German properties—though they won’t be required to sign a written commitment to the principles like employees in Germany. The principles include support for a united Europe, Israel’s right to exist and a free-market economy, among others.

“These values are like a constitution, they apply to every employee of our company,” Mr. Döpfner said. People with a fundamental problem with any of these principles “should not work for Axel Springer, very clearly,” he said.

Mr. Döpfner said he expects Politico and Axel Springer’s other U.S. titles will embody his vision of unbiased, nonpartisan reporting, versus activist journalism, which, he said, is enhancing societal polarization in the U.S. and elsewhere.

Mr. Döpfner has led Axel Springer for almost two decades, taking over what at the time was a loss-making print publisher and turning it into a profitable, digital-first publishing giant. He has built up a personal stake in the company, owning more than 22% of its shares.

“I spent many years managing restructuring, cost-cutting, layoffs, digital transformation and creating a new corporate culture,” he said. “But now is the time to focus on growth and investment” in the U.S.

Launched in 2007, Politico reshaped Washington coverage with its blanket reporting on politics. That later paved the way for a move toward events and high-price subscription services—so-called verticals—centered on various industries.

Axel Springer owns the German newspapers Bild, Europe’s bestselling tabloid, and Die Welt, a center-right-leaning broadsheet, and currently operates in 40 countries and employs over 16,000 people across its portfolio of media and tech companies. The Politico deal, which The Wall Street Journal previously reported valued the company at about $1 billlon, rounded up a recent U.S. shopping spree. Axel Springer earlier purchased Business Insider, for about $500 million, and Morning Brew, a digital publisher that has focused largely on business.

Axel Springer is “step by step developing the U.S. into our most important market and engine of growth for digital publishing,” Mr. Döpfner said.

Axel Springer, he said, believes in anti-cyclical growth and has hired over 1,600 people during the worst period of the coronavirus pandemic. That approach, he said, will be applied to Politico and the other U.S. titles: “There will be no restructuring, no synergies, no mergers and no cost-cutting,” he said.

Axel Springer and Politico entered a joint venture in 2013 to set up Politico Europe, a Brussels-based news operation. It agreed to buy the whole European entity as part of the deal for Politico, announced in August. Politico’s newsrooms in the U.S. and Europe will remain separate, Mr. Döpfner said.

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