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Comment by starkd | Hacker News Reader

You can't do that if its censored.

It hasn't been, though. Private citizens of a private company opted not to publish it in their paper, and that's not the same thing.

And he says that they're threatening litigation if he publishes it anywhere else because it could make them look bad.

Where did he say that? Towards the top of the linked substack, he says: "The censored article will be published on this page shortly."

Edit: I dunno if I agree that this counts.

"But Intercept editors in New York are demanding I not only accept their censorship of my article at The Intercept, but also refrain from publishing it with any other journalistic outlet, and are using thinly disguised lawyer-crafted threats to coerce me not to do so (proclaiming it would be “detrimental” to The Intercept if I published it elsewhere)."

> are using thinly disguised lawyer-crafted threats

I don't think there's any other way to interpret that than "threatening litigation". You don't receive a message from a company's lawyers because they're having a friendly conversation about not intending to do anything.

Greenwald published his email exchange with his editor. He brought up his contractual right to publish elsewhere if he likes, in his first response to his editor. He started accusing them of censorship in the second email (which he sent after the first before he got a reply back). WHen they did respond, they said it would be "harmful and detrimental to The Intercept" if he published it elsewhere. Glenn can call that a "lawyer crafted threat", I see it as a true and accurate statement from his editor.

Guess what I'm saying is, he didn't receive a message from the company's lawyers that I've seen yet.

Here's the Merriam-Webster definition of censored: "suppressed, altered, or deleted as objectionable : subjected to censorship".

Government censorship is a subset of censorship. Private citizens of a private company are perfectly capable of suppressing, altering, or deleting material they consider objectionable, which seems to have been what happened in this case.

You also can't say for sure whether it's true or not if it's not censored. At best you can judge plausibility, but plausibility isn't truth.

Most evidence can be faked. The chain of custody for evidence is important, and that's not a property of the evidence, but of its history.

There's no substitute for trust in the person or organization reporting the news.

They can be cross referenced with the information that's in the emails. Many have already done this. A business partner, Bobulinski, and a gmail account of one of his partners serving in prison. This is a moving story. The non-interest in even trying to verify it, as pointed out by Greenwald, is very concerning.

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