Glenn Greenwald: "You have no idea what is coming" | Hacker News Reader

Glenn Greenwald: "You have no idea what is coming"

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34 pointseightyone34 comments

This has zero content. Why do we waste time looking at fluff? Once there is actual information to discuss, we can discuss, but for the moment there is just nothing there.

The accusation that Greenwald is using the leaks for self promotion are the same accusations that were/are used to smear Assange.

What else is left? Maybe there is a network of civilian spies, and half the americans are on it? A Flu virus that turns you to an informant?

I 'm not sure i like this tv-series-style unraveling. If it was something the planet depended on they wouldn't tease us with it for Guardian's page views, right? Anyway, i have no idea what is coming, truly

It makes sense really. If you dump everything all at once you risk overwhelming people, and for it to be ignored or forgotten. By dragging it out it remains fresh in minds of the voting public; something that will be remembered for a long time. This makes it more likely that change will result. Doing otherwise would be like running one ad and expecting to create a strong brand. The way a strong brand is created is through repeated exposure.

If you drip drip then it also incentivises public officials to be truthful when answering questions because they don't know whether their claims will be directly contradicted in a weeks time.

Exactly. Look at what happened to Obama. He had his press conference last Friday and told everyone that "No one is listening to your phone calls.". Then we found out yesterday that he was pretty much lying right to us.

You can do that without doing "teasers" like this. Just publish it when it comes.

It's the Guardian, people will see it if it's posted. No need to publicize it beforehand.

No need to publicize it before hand? Why do movie studios run trailers and promote the hell out of what's coming?

Teasers tease and get people interested. It keeps people talking and when people are talking, there is a greater reach. This is really basic marketing at work here and it's a very wise move.

because this isn't a movie. This is about news. The facts will speak for themselves, and people are looking.

I'm not saying it's not good marketing, I'm saying it's a bit tasteless. I'd rather he spent more time looking over his articles so that there don't have to be 100 corrections after the fact.

It's naive to think that just because something has been published, people will beat a path to it. It doesn't matter whether it's a movie, news, or programming language; things have to be promoted if they're going to be widely noticed.

I'm not sure what 100 after-the-fact corrections you're talking about though.

It's not a teaser. It's a refutation to someone else's comment which said, "Sorry, a year from now we'll be snoozing about this. Not against you, just tired of your self-promotion."

Greenwald has said on Twitter he has thousands of documents. I really don't think it's about Guardian page views, but more of doing proper research and, well, journalism. You just don't dump a bunch of documents out there willy nilly.

On the flip side, the Washington Post did the whole Top Secret America story and nobody cared. And that was almost 2 years ago - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_Secret_America

So while I don't like this form of journalism either, it looks like it has a bigger impact and is here to stay.

Thank Reality TV and celeb culture, architected by the advertising industry and marketing departments for the last 30 years.

Today to have mass influence you need spectacle and celebrity. From Presidents to Astronauts to journalists...

As long as the impact is positive, who knows, maybe it can even be a good thing.

I read a lot of news and I didn't even know about Top Secret America before reading this comment. Thank you.

Sometimes it takes a number of attempts to get people to notice. Having said that, reading this series' conclusions leads me to believe that it wasn't as scandalous as these leaks. Everyone knows governments spend a lot of money and employ a lot of people. The NSA's hoovering of 1.7 billion phone calls daily appears to have been the most profound and worrisome finding, but if it was sandwiched within other not-so-shocking information, that other dull information might have had a negative halo effect.

Snowden could release information showing that the intelligence agencies have used their information to blackmail/coerce specific people like judges, congressmen, senators, members of the press, civic leaders, etc. They regularly do this against criminal defendants. This is just applying the known techniques to new targets.

I have no problem with the Guardian making money out of good journalism.

I suspect that they have a better database of our browsing and email habits than Google does. That is, every email sent, website visited, search done, place visited via smartphones and so on. Of course NSA can connect it with a name and a real address.

The Verison metadata issue was pretty big I thought, but am I the only one who didn't really think much of PRISM? I mean isn't PRISM just a name for "send out NSLs to these companies that have a bunch of data"? Something we've known about forever?

Someone please enlighten me, I'm not trying to be sarcastic/edgy/whatever.

I think there is more to PRISM than we know right now. You should read Glenn Greenwald's latest article if you haven't' already. [1]

In my opinion, he makes a lot of good points in it.

"If, as NSA (and Silicon Valley) defenders claim, Prism is nothing more than a harmless little drop-box mechanism for delivering to the government what these companies were already providing, why would Yahoo possibly be in court so vigorously resisting it and arguing that it violates their users' Fourth Amendment rights? Similarly, how could it possibly be said - as US government officials have - that Prism has been instrumental in stopping terrorist plots if it did not enhance the NSA's collection capabilities? The denials from the internet companies make little sense when compared to what we know about the program. At the very least, there is ample reason to demand more disclosure and transparency about exactly what this is and what data-access arrangements they have agreed to."

[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/jun/14/nsa-part...

I understand that dumping everything at once would probably be a bad idea but the tweeting of teasers? If it's really going to be such a big deal it should be treated with respect.

edit: Hopefully this will come out on Monday, start of the week is always a good time to release stuff that you want eyeballs on.

Greenwald is getting a lot of hate mail via Twitter. I don't blame him for the teasers who are usually aimed at people who are doubting him. If he dumped all the data at once, the story would blow over way faster. It's also been helpful that other people have came semi forward, such as the Democratic congresswoman from California who basically pleaded for someone to leak for information because it's that bad. This strategy also makes it easier to catch the U.S. government and company telling lies and contradictions. Also, it's way harder to run damage control when you don't know what information the other side has.

(From the first tweet at the top of the original link.)

"Ellsberg: "There has not been in US history a more important leak than Snowden's –and that definitely includes Pentagon Papers 40 years ago""

Ellsberg sounds very definitive on the importance of the Snowden's information. I wonder if Greenwald has shown him information that the general public hasn't seen yet.

If he's got facts why does he not present them rather than cocktease?

50% of HN is just conjecture and NSA conspiracy theories.

This was an @-response to another commenter's claim that this story will be forgotten in a year. As such we shouldn't see it as a promotional 'tease' - it wouldn't even appear to all @ggreenwald followers. It's merely a specific refutation of that dismissive commenter's judgement based on incomplete information. (It looks more self-servingly promotional only because it's been ripped from its context.)

Not quite sure what you mean. I'm honestly starting to lose track of what is actually true here. Would be great if somebody who has studied this in some depth could summarize what we actually know for sure.

You have to scroll to the top of the page to see the full conversation. The tweet posted is Glenn Greenwald replying to a Twitter user who sent a tweet at him.

This is how the conversation went down:

Glenn Greenwald: "Ellsberg: "There has not been in US history a more important leak than Snowden's –and that definitely includes Pentagon Papers 40 years ago""

Twitter User: "@ggreenwald Sorry, a year from now we'll be snoozing about this. Not against you, just tired of your self-promotion."

Glenn Greenwald: "@TerenceBegleyNJ You have no idea what is coming; and I'm promoting the leaks, not myself"

Like dropping a thousand pages at 9 PM, EST on a long weekend Friday?

Drip, drip, drip...

This is basically a retweet. Why is this an HN post?

I read this as a statement of fact, not as a teaser. People are doubting the relevance of what he has to say and he simply says: why are you already drawing conclusions about something I haven't published yet?

If he waits too long, nothing will come.

I'm sure that even if the Americans were giving candy to babies Glenn Greenwald would hate it.

I don't know about Glenn, but I certainly would. Why in the world would you try to get them hooked on something so unhealthy so early?

I think Terence Begley is right.

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