Tag: glenn greenwald

The French Interior Ministry on Monday ordered that five websites be blocked on the grounds that they promote or advocate terrorism. “I do not want to see sites that could lead people to take up arms on the Internet,” proclaimed Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve. No judge reviews the Interior Ministry’s decisions. When the block functions properly, visitors to those banned sites, rather than accessing the content of the sites they chose to visit, will be automatically redirected to the Interior Ministry website. There, they will be greeted by a graphic of a large red hand, and text informing them that they were attempting to access a site that causes or promotes terrorism: “you are being redirected to this official website since your computer was about to connect with a page that provokes terrorist acts or condones terrorism publicly.”

WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange sits down with Democracy Now! inside the Ecuadorean embassy in London, where he has been living in political asylum for over two years. Assange explains his critique of “big power” First Look Media and The Intercept for agreeing not to name a country targeted by bulk National Security Agency spying, following U.S. government concerns that doing so could lead to increased violence. Assange and WikiLeaks went on to reveal the targeted country, Afghanistan, which along with the Bahamas had all of its cell phone calls recorded. “That is as great an assault to sovereignty as you can imagine, other than completely militarily occupying a country, to record the intimate phone calls of every single Afghan citizen,” Assange says. “My perspective is, [this is] up to the Afghan people.” Assange also gives an overview of the close to eight million documents WikiLeaks has released since 2007 about nearly every country in the world; details how WikiLeaks helped Edward Snowden evade U.S. arrest and find political asylum in Russia; and addresses his prospects for ever being able to leave the Ecuadorean embassy without fear of arrest.
Glenn Greenwald reflects on the Pulitzer Prize, adversarial journalism and the corporate media’s response to his reporting on Edward Snowden’s leaked National Security Agency documents. “We knew that once we started publishing not one or two stories, but dozens of stories … that not just the government, but even fellow journalists were going to start to look at what we were doing with increasing levels of hostility and to start to say, ‘This doesn’t actually seem like journalism anymore,’ because it’s not the kind of journalism that they do,” Greenwald says. “It doesn’t abide by these unspoken rules that are designed to protect the government.”
The first digital venture co-led by Glenn Greenwald is now live. The Intercept, an online magazine edited by Greenwald and fellow journalists Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill and backed by billionaire Pierre Omidyar, made its much-anticipated debut today. Its first article was written by Greenwald and Scahill, and looked at the NSA’s role in the U.S. drone strike program. The piece was, of course, based on documents leaked by Edward Snowden. The magazine is just one of the multiple sites being created by First Look Media, the Omidyar-funded organization providing the cash for Greenwald and his colleagues.