By Privatizing Secrets, Greenwald and Omidyar Are Turning Them Into a Blockbuster

The Glenn Greenwald bashing taking place in certain corners of the media is nothing short of ferocious. Plenty of loud voices are pissed that the former Guardian reporter is teaming up with Ebay founder Pierre Omidyar in a new media venture called NewCo that will alone disseminate Edward Snowden’s infamous leaks on US government surveillance, which Greenwald and Laura Poitras, his filmmaker partner-in-crime, have sole access to. How dare he monopolize and profit from the cache of over 50,000 pages of confidential NSA documents, is the consensus of the outraged party, and to have the gall to tease that “the worst is yet to come”.

And boy has Greenwald profited. Beyond the journalist’s ascension to international freedom fighter and overnight fame as Snowden’s primary mouthpiece, having been honored with the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Pioneer Award for 2013 and included in Foreign Policy Magazine’s list of the Top 100 Global Thinkers of the year, there’s the fortune, like the lucrative book deal, a possible Hollywood film, and, most egregiously to some, the “once-in-a-career dream journalistic opportunity”, his very own $250 million newsroom, funded by a billionaire that once sat on the board of Paypal, a company notorious for what the EFF considers “legal censorship”. Not only is Greenwald rich and famous, he’s canoodling with the enemy, while poor Ed Snowden is trapped in frigid Russia.

One early critic was Mark Ames of PandoDaily—which was, by the way, partially funded by PayPal founder Peter Thiel. Ames quickly decried the “privatization of Snowden’s leaks”, calling Greenwald a sellout operating “purely on grounds of self-interest” and Omidyar “a guy with a history of putting profits before public interest”. Sibel Edmonds, FBI whistleblower, soon chimed in, lamenting the “fortune-seeking” journalist, an “implicated billionaire”, and a “public in the dark”. Six months after Snowden went public, only 1 percent of his documents have been released.

The deep irony that Snowden’s leaks of secret NSA operations—information he believed belonged to the public and to be important enough that he was willing to sacrifice his cushy six-figure salary and beautiful dancer girlfriend for life on the run—have become the trade secrets of an equally opaque private corporation backed by a man we know nothing about is undeniable. But much of this indignant vitriol is dubious, too.

Greenwald’s windfall aside, most of the anger comes in the form of ad hominem attacks against Omidyar, cherry-picking the financier’s past business dealings and philanthropy.

Ames points to an investment by his foundation, the Omidyar Network, which is run by managing partner Matt Bannick, in a microfinance company “whose savage bullying of debtors resulted in mass suicides” in Andhra Prades, India. An internal investigation by the company in question, market leader SKS Microfinance, linked its employees to seven deaths, while a second investigation by an industry group connected the firm to two additional cases that ended in suicide, according to an AP report. In all, more than 200 debtors killed themselves in 2010, according to government compiled media reports, which laid the blame on the microfinance industry.

If it feels like Ames is grasping at straws, it’s because he mostly is. It’s difficult to extrapolate Omidyar’s personal responsibility in for the actions of a company his foundation once invested in, if any, and being a vocal and generous supporter of microfinance, a concept that won its creator Muhammad Yunus the Nobel Peace prize in 2006, doesn’t immediately make him a loan shark. It certainly doesn’t preemptively undermine NewCo’s journalistic integrity.

But by far the most popular angle is Omidyar’s passive involvement in PayPal’s practice of placing arbitrary financial blockades on politically troublesome customers, where he once served on the board of directors.

"How can you take something seriously when the person behind this platform went along with the financial boycott against WikiLeaks," wonders WikiLeaks staffer and Snowden collaborator Sarah Harrison. PayPal shut down WikiLeaks’ account in 2010 amidst Julian Assange’s growing legal woes. Such actions were likely in response to government directives, acknowledges Harrison. If he was powerless to stop it, he could have at least spoken up, nevermind the company’s other four board members, which includes Elon Musk, and five executives.

“He can't shake off responsibility that easily,” Harrison told the German news weekly Stern. “He didn't even comment on it. He could have said something like: 'we were forced to do this, but I am against it'.” Except he didn’t, which, in the eyes of Harrison, Edmonds, and other Greenwald-Omidyar haters, including a handful of prominent whistleblowers, is damning proof that the tech titan cannot be trusted. Would that then make the founder of Tesla Motors and SpaceX an incidental tyrant of financial oppression?

“I completely agree with these whistleblowers,” NSA whistleblower William Russell told Edmonds. “This is a major conflict of interest and highly convoluted. Omidyar has billions at stake if the details of his cooperation with government is ever exposed. So this guy pays $250 million and buys out the 2 journalists who have the entire cache?! Simply outrageous!”

Though NewCo has yet to publish a single piece, Edmonds is already speculating what the company might preferentially hold back based on these alleged conflict of interests, citing a tip from a former NSA official that Snowden’s leaks contain “extensive documentation of PayPal Corporation’s partnership and cooperation with the [NSA]”. Indeed, the public would have a right to be incensed if no documents detailing the activities of the largest online payment service never come to light—but again, right now that's only speculation.

Aware that peripheral and circumstantial evidence is ultimately unconvincing, Edmonds highlights “documented evidence” undeniably tied to the man himself that illustrates his “historical attitude and position on publishers, reporters and whistleblowers who publicize incriminating government documents”. What’s more direct and incriminating than their Twitter feed?

@loic I said ystrdy: [@techcrunch]( https://twitter.com/ TechCrunch ) and anybody else who pubs stolen info should help catch the thief. Shldnt pub in the 1st place.

— Pierre Omidyar (@pierre) [July 16, 2009]( https://twitter.com/ pierre/statuses/2666071620 )

It looks bad at first, which is how Edmonds presented it, in screenshot form, along with a link to a WikiLeaks tweet that also shares an image of Omidyar’s alleged ideology toward altruistic truth-seekers. Perhaps its Edmonds’ background as a whistleblower that she values raw information over proper context. If she had provided the actual tweet in question, and it’s unclear if she ever saw it firsthand, she and her readers would know that the Silicon Valley executive was referring to the criminal hacking and publishing of Twitter’s confidential business model—not government secrets or evidence of corporate wrongdoing.

Meanwhile, NewCo isn’t unique in its sugar daddy business model, considering Rupert Murdoch’s ownership of the Wall Street Journal, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ recent $250 million acquisition of the Washington Post, and the arrival of Qatari-backed Al Jazeera America. Countless organizations, many of sound integrity, are by definition owned by billionaires. And for a man worth $8.5 billion, Omidyar’s history is relatively untarnished, what Reuters columnist Jack Schaefer describes as “close to being a clean slate”.

But for Edmonds, there’s also the issue of Omidyar’s friends, who, unsurprisingly, also happen to be billionaires, like Yelp founder and PayPal board member Max Levchin, who recently told Charlie Rose that he supports the NSA's mission. For idealists like Edmonds, it’s a stance that implies an inherent disdain for civil liberties, even if that doesn’t quite make sense, at least according to the fallacy of the converse. It is possible, after all, to be simultaneously in favor of more restraint, accountability, and oversight while staying philosophically in favor of a digital intelligence agency.

Which is the problem with most of the reactionary Greenwald-Omidyar backlash; a lot of it’s baseless. Much of it is logically fallacious, and supported by what mostly amount to personal attacks. And let’s not forget about Edward Snowden, who Ames adoringly compares to “major whistleblowers such as Daniel Ellsberg, Chelsea Manning and Jeffrey Wigand”. Greenwald is his guy, who Time’s runner-up for man of the year presumably hand-picked for his rather unblemished track record as a journalist of conviction, a body of work, which includes three New York Times best-selling books, that earned him accolades like the inaugural Izzy Award in 2009 for independent journalism and the 2010 Online Journalism Award for Best Commentary years before he became a household name.

“Laura and I have been working on surveillance issues for many, many years - when few people were paying attention and there were zero rewards from doing so,” Greenwald wrote in a response to Ames’ Pando post. “I spent almost every day for two straight years—in 2006 and 2007—writing about little other than the Bush-era NSA scandal. Indeed, the very first New York Times article about my work on the Snowden story tried to suggest that my interest in this topic was virtually freakish, saying that I have been ‘writing intensely, even obsessively, for years about government surveillance.’”

[@sibeledmonds You're actually too stupid and/or crazy to even know your own accusations. That's actually sad. I'm sorry I bothered with you.]( https://twitter.com/ sibeledmonds )

[— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald)]( https://twitter.com/ sibeledmonds ) [December 12, 2013]( https://twitter.com/ ggreenwald/statuses/ 410925002901303296 )

An obviously tetchy Greenwald, who now resides in Rio de Janeiro, has been vociferous in defending his honor. But Greenwald doesn't have to be likeable. Tellingly, Snowden, who claims he no longer has access to the full set of documents, remains mum. By WikiLeaks’ own logic, if the whistleblower had an issue with the way things are playing out, wouldn’t he have a responsibility to speak up? And if so, wouldn't his silence imply his tacit endorsement?

Conceivably, what we are witnessing isn’t necessarily the capitalist corruption of some supposed whistleblower pact, but the execution of cunning partnership. While one gets his hands dirty, the other maintains his image as the selfless saint. Snowden may fully trust Greenwald to forward his agenda, which movie deals and bottomless financial resources help achieve to maximum effect. It’s a model tag team that represents a new breed of whistleblower, an evolution that the likes of Ames, Edmonds, and all the other haters haven’t yet come to terms with, if only because they’re missing the bigger picture, perhaps clouded by envy, romantic idealism, or unadulterated cynicism. And sure, there is a solid case to be made for making secrets public immediately, too, as Wikileaks did—but the 'dump' model has its problems too.

Greenwald and Snowden have learned from the disheartening downfall of Assange, whose anti-establishment streak and rock star proclivities alienated his supporters and distracted from the leaks themselves, while his uncompromising beliefs and attention-seeking arrogance burned vital bridges to the real world and left him isolated. Instead, the pragmatic pair are playing the long game and so far, they’re succeeding by not only maintaining the conversation with a persistent trickle of leaks, but also constructing the necessary infrastructure to properly and freely disseminate them in the future. It’s no wonder then that the Columbia Journalism Review gushes over NewCo’s “extraordinary promise” while Schaefer warmly welcomes the “bottomless optimism of billionaire publishers”.

Admittedly, we may never know the true intentions of NewCo’s billionaire backer, Pierre Omidyar, or that of any person in power for that matter. From the NSA to the one percent to brash investigative journalists, everyone has secrets.

But there are also checks and balances. Snowden’s influence is fueled by public support and the gravity of his leaks. Greenwald’s credibility is founded on the infamous whistleblower’s unwavering support and the impact of his future publications. Omidyar’s legacy will be judged by the outcome of his investment and the perceived moral fiber of his venture. And thanks to their unlikely union, the NSA’s reach and power will be now consistently put into question by a spunky, well-capitalized upstart. For all their baseless quibbles, even the trio’s most ardent critics would be rash to deny that this could end up being a very good thing.

@sfnuop