Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires republicans to act in good faith.

One lie, alone, tears the fabric of reality.

Fight for a just cause, love your fellow man, live a good life.

Washington Post Catch and Kill, not noticeably better than the Enquirer’s.

Fear or fury? The choice is ours.

Their boy Ron is an empty plastic cup that will never know pudding.

Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.

We can show the world that autocracy can be defeated.

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

“But what about the lurkers?”

Republicans do not pay their debts.

President Musk and Trump are both poorly raised, coddled 8 year old boys.

We know you aren’t a Democrat but since you seem confused let me help you.

It’s a good piece. click on over. but then come back!!

Anne Laurie is a fucking hero in so many ways. ~ Betty Cracker

Since when do we limit our critiques to things we could do better ourselves?

Jesus, Mary, & Joseph how is that election even close?

You are either for trump or for democracy. Pick one.

The media handbook says “controversial” is the most negative description that can be used for a Republican.

We still have time to mess this up!

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

Trump should be leading, not lying.

Speaker Mike Johnson is a vile traitor to the House and the Constitution.

The worst democrat is better than the best republican.

You are here: Home / Foreign Affairs / Late Night Open Thread: Telegram, for Mr. Musk

Late Night Open Thread: Telegram, for Mr. Musk

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Adam has already written about Durov’s arrest in France, but I’m curious about Musk’s latest intermittent FREEZE PEACH!!! outburst in connection with the Telegram bust. Per Fortune, via MSN.com, “Elon Musk calls for release of Telegram founder Pavel Durov as arrest sparks debate whether X owner may be next”:

… The spectacular arrest of Pavel Durov on the tarmac of Paris’s Le Bourget airport just after his private jet touched down on Saturday elicited an intense debate over where exactly the boundaries of protected free speech end and the rule of law begins.

Durov is being held in France initially without formal charges, but authorities could accuse the Telegram founder of failing to police illegal content and commerce conducted via Telegram.

Musk’s X is likewise in the crosshairs of European policymakers, with the EU Commission recently reminding him of its failure to observe the Digital Services Act that requires large platform owners to systematically clamp down on false and misleading content.

The entrepreneur, who is also CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, called on France to “free Pavel”, warning his arrest signalled dangerous times ahead for democracy.

“The 2nd amendment is the only reason long-term that the 1st amendment will be upheld,” he added, referring to the constitutionally-protected right in the United States to bear arms and exercise free speech…

Musk increasingly casts himself as someone trying to stem a rising tide of censorship and government overreach. The X owner, earlier this month, threw a vulgar insult at Brussels for its perceived heavy handed approach to regulation. (Musk has, as of now, yet to criticize China, the manufacturing hub for half of Tesla cars)…

Alexander Vindman, the retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel that testified as a key witness in Trump’s first impeachment, wrote that Durov’s case had broader implications for social media sites like X.

“There’s a growing intolerance for platforming disinfo & malign influence & a growing appetite for accountability,” he wrote. “Musk should be nervous.”

Last month, Musk posted a deepfake video with an AI-generated voiceover of Kamala Harris calling herself a diversity hire and Biden senile. The post didn’t explicitly mention the use of AI in what some argued was a violation of X’s his own terms of service against manipulating content for the purposes of deception…

Musk’s stewardship of X is turning into a financial disaster for the entrepreneur. According to internal company figures cited by the New York Times, U.S. revenue in Q2 plunged to $114 million, representing a steep 84% decline over pre-Musk Twitter just two years prior.

Fidelity has taken a massive charge on the value of its private investment in X, while money managers are treating the company’s debt as if it was radioactive. A consortium of banks that underwrote Musk’s October 2022 buyout have been unable to offload nearly $13 billion of leveraged loans still sitting on their book…

“The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons.”

Also, apart from Russia’s current financial difficulties, the Financial Times has reported that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has been doing some public belt-tightening concerning Dubai’s global investments, which can’t be any more pleasant for Musk than for Mr. Durov.

Reader Interactions

208Comments

  1. 1.

    VeniceRiley

    I would be blissed out if every single one of these tech bros got nicked. I would then like a restoration of Television Without Pity including it’s hardcore moderation team.  (Oooh, I could go back to searching for great fanfic writers too!)

    I would, of course, still read here and forever remain a Jackal.

  2. 2.

    HumboldtBlue

    On this day six years ago, this was the scandal. Yesterday, the media played along with the Arlington scam.

    WASHINGTON (AP) — Bowing to pressure, President Donald Trump on Monday ordered American flags at U.S. buildings lowered to half-staff for Sen. John McCain until his burial on Sunday. Trump’s proclamation came just hours after the White House flag had been returned to full-staff, drawing complaints from right and left.

    Trump, who had traded bitter criticism with McCain since before the election, declared his order “a mark of respect.” At the same time, he said it would be Vice President Mike Pence and other officials who would represent the administration at McCain’s funeral services.

  3. 3.

    lowtechcyclist

    Whatever cred Snowden may have once had, he’s lost every shred of it during these past few years.

  4. 4.

    Jay

    Anton Gerashchenko
    @Gerashchenko_en
    14h
    France made public the 12 charges against Telegram founder and CEO Pavel Durov:

    1️⃣Complicity for illegal transactions by organized crime groups;

    2️⃣Refusal to provide the authorities with information or documents necessary for criminal investigations;

    3️⃣Complicity – Dissemination of porn featuring minors;

    4️⃣Complicity – Making it possible for organized groups to share porn featuring minors;

    5️⃣Complicity – Acquisition, transport, possession and sale of narcotics;

    6️⃣Complicity – Providing tools for cyber attacks;

    7️⃣Complicity – Organized fraud;

    8️⃣Association of criminals with the intent to commit a crime punishable by 5 years;

    9️⃣Money laundering;

    1️⃣0️⃣Providing cryptology services aiming to ensure confidentiality without certified declaration;

    1️⃣1️⃣Providing a cryptology tool not solely ensuring authentication or integrity monitoring without prior declaration;

    1️⃣2️⃣Importing a cryptology tool ensuring authentication or integrity monitoring without prior declaration.

    These are very serious charges. The fact that the investigation is taking place under JUNALCO (investigating judges, the highest court in France), shows its highest level.

    tribunal-de-paris.justice.fr…

    https://nitter.poast.org/Gerashchenko_en/status/1828119557057237455#m

    Meanwhile, despite being the #1 purveyor of election misinfo, not just the US, the dead Bird Site also offers drug sales, Nazis and Nudes in Bio, Africa Korps recruiting videos, along with countless bots, Crypto scammers and AI fakes.

  7. 7.

    Splitting Image

    @lowtechcyclist:

    Whatever cred Snowden may have once had, he’s lost every shred of it during these past few years.

    There seems to be a lot of that going around. Weird how they all seem to end up supporting Trump, too.

  10. 10.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Spanky: ​
     

    How’s it flowing?

    Still got about three more glasses of that disgusting stuff to drink by 5am. Maybe I’d better go have a glass or two now.

  11. 11.

    piratedan

    @lowtechcyclist: the latest version is him using the cemetery for a photo op with the family honoring their dead daughter during the exit from Afghanistan.  The family blames Biden for her death.  It’s the picture at her gravesite where DJT and her family are giving a thumbs up at the grave.

  12. 12.

    Peke Daddy

    Worried about democracy, Sunk Elmo? A cardinal rule about keeping a Democratic Republic is intolerance of intolerance and subversion. The EU is not messing around here.

  13. 13.

    Brent Wilson

    You mention Dubai in the Financial Times link. I am unable to read the article but I think you probably meant Saudi Arabia.

  14. 14.

    Frankensteinbeck

    A major trait of “You’re not the boss of me!” conservatives is their lack of grasp that the first amendment only applies in the US.  I have heard Musk started out bowing to EU regulations in the EU, but I guess he’s too high on his own farts, now.

    Believing your own hype is the all too common doom of a con man.

    Also, I thought it weird that banks would underwrite his Twitter purchase, but having the ‘offload debt’ thing explained made it clear to me.  They assumed with Musk’s hype they could sell the loan in bits quickly and be long gone with the cash before it went to Hell.  It’s a gross but not stupid plan.

    @Viva BrisVegas:

    Bizarrely, he paid billions of dollars to have it taken away.

    EDIT – Oops, thought you meant Musk.

  15. 15.

    Baud

    @Jay:

    3️⃣Complicity – Dissemination of porn featuring minors;

     
    I didn’t realize Durov was a drag queen.

  16. 16.

    Baud

    Via reddit, more MSM dismissiveness toward Democrats

    Democrats want to turn internet hype for Harris into actual votes

    The enthusiasm is just Internet hype, you guys.

  17. 17.

    Geminid

    @Brent Wilson: Yes, it looks Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund is the subject of the Financial Times article. The reporter quotes a Dubai-based banker and that could be the mix-up.

    The United Arab Emirates are involved in the Pavel Durov story though. He holds Emirati citizenship and the UAE is pressing France for “consular access” to the jailed Telegram founder.

    In other UAE news, the rapper Macklemore just cancelled a concert in Dubai because of the UAE’s role in Sudan’s civil war, which has in fact been terrible.

  19. 19.

    Baud

    According to internal company figures cited by the New York Times, U.S. revenue in Q2 plunged to $114 million, representing a steep 84% decline over pre-Musk Twitter just two years prior.

    Good. Fascism isn’t good for business

  22. 22.

    TBone

    @piratedan: there was more than one photo taken, the one I saw was truly, truly offensive, with two blonde females flashing white power hand signals, everyone sporting shit eating grins while posing at a grave marker.

  23. 23.

    Jay

    It get’s “interesting”.

    Durov claimed to have been a ruZZian dissident,

    Yet Telegram is the dominant ruZZian military/nat sec app.

    He was in the ‘stans’ at the same time as Pootie Poot, and there may or may not have been “meetings”,

    And yet, he flew from the ‘stans’, to France, where there was a open warrant for his arrest.

    Curious.

  27. 27.

    TBone

    PSA what history in film can teach us while entertaining:

    https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/tcm-screening-most-significant-political-films-1235982453/

    I am really looking forward to this, starts on Sept. 6.  Might be a good topic here!

    In the run-up to Election Day, TCM is going after the movie lovers’ popular vote by showing 50 films over nine successive Fridays under the banner Making Change: The Most Significant Political Films of All Time.

    If it weren’t for TCM, my TV would have been smashed with a big hammer long ago. I ADORE them!

  28. 28.

    Adam L Silverman

    Durov’s arrest is most likely for the CSAM being spread through telegram. And that despite the protesting too much, Durov works for the Kremlin. Given that musk has allowed a notorious purveyor of that material back on Twitter, I’d expect that’s what he should also be worried about.

  30. 30.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Baud: ​
     

    If I read the story correctly, he played for both teams in the same at-bat. Jansen was batting and had one strike on him when the rain delay was called, and by the time they finished the game several weeks later, he’d been traded and was behind the plate when a pinch-hitter finished his AB.

  34. 34.

    Gloria DryGarden

    Two items from an earlier thread are bugging me. Couldn’t find them to copy paste here, but I’m sure it was earlier Monday. I think they each warrant some discussion
    1 In Nebraska, a law has been passed that ex felons can vote. 2 men in government decided to not implement this new law.

    that’ll keep a bunch of people from voting.

    2 in Texas, some kkk folk have raided the homes of people working to register voters. Seems partly against Latinos.

    I don’t feel relaxed or complacent about these things. More like too angry for words.

    voter suppression, and voter intimidation is vile. Calling someone a vote suppressor doesn’t seem like a dirty word, yet, so I’ll try this one:

    daughter-fucking pedophile spreaders of CSAM!

  36. 36.

    TBone

    Early in President Trump’s term, McSweeney’s editors began to catalog the head-spinning number of misdeeds coming from his administration. We called this list a collection of Trump’s cruelties, collusions, and crimes, and it felt urgent then to track them, to ensure these horrors—happening almost daily—would not be forgotten. This election year, with the very real possibility of Trump returning to office, we know it’s important to be reminded of these horrors and to head to the polls in November to avoid experiencing new cruelties, collusions, corruption, and crimes.

    https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/the-complete-listing-atrocities-1-1-056

    “Lest We Forget”

  37. 37.

    Gloria DryGarden

    @TBone: I didn’t see her yet. I love Heather.
    I like your cute swear words frowning face emoji. Very nice, very apropos.

  39. 39.

    David 🐝KHive🐝 Koch

    Snowjob had no problem with Dubya collecting penny ante telephone metadata, he just couldn’t stand it when a black guy was doing it.

  41. 41.

    Gloria DryGarden

    @lowtechcyclist: what has Snowden done?

     

    @Jay: I don’t get the part about cryptology tools, services, and “without certified declaration”

    can you explain what that means? It’s way over my head.

  42. 42.

    evodevo

    @Frankensteinbeck: ​
      Yep, the Musk debt trap LOL – looks like the banksters didn’t learn anything from the 2008 debacle. Offloading dubious debt quickly to some third party was the whole underpinning of that catastrophe, and here they are still doing it. Couldn’t happen to a more deserving bunch of MOTUs…

  43. 43.

    Baud

    First, they came for the fascists. And I said “yes” because I am one with the people who come for the fascists before they come for us.

  46. 46.

    Gloria DryGarden

    @TBone: yes. My proposed epithets don’t even address the thing mentioned. It was just the worse thing I could think of, at all related to known common epithets.
    vile voter suppressing villagers…

    I might just start using your line, “ I had to take a deep breath.”

    oh! you mean when I read Heather, I’ll be outraged some more, and might need a zillion deep breaths?

    I’ll go in prepared.

  47. 47.

    hueyplong

    @evodevo: In the 2000s, not just the unloading of bad debt but the accelerated creation of bad debt once they saw they had a way to unload it without consequences. And then when they got caught, no consequences anyway.

    Pretty good gig.

  50. 50.

    Searcher

    The charges against Snowden, when he fled to Russia, had a maximum sentence of ten years.

    I wonder if he ever thinks about how, if he’d stayed put, he’d be out by now.

  51. 51.

    evodevo

    @TBone: Yep…after they did away with Glass-Steagall, it was only a matter of time. And Dodd-Frank was a pale shadow, easily outmaneuvered by the BSDs…

  52. 52.

    ItinerantPedant

    Snowden always was a GRU asset. He’s just conned a bunch of glibertarians into believing his schtick even after getting caught and fleeing to the Rodina.

  53. 53.

    MagdaInBlack

    It is 78 degrees in nw Chicago-land, and no breeze. I am glad last week was perfect weather for the convention. This woulda sucked.

  54. 54.

    Gloria DryGarden

    @TBone: cool. That guy was really good, too. But famous musicians are just folks that started out playing and jamming w each other, and it builds from there. I loved billy Joel just flat out saying yes. Love it.

    makes me think of the famous actors I’ve met, and film crew, who all seemed kind, friendly, collaborative, and into learning, and often were  into spiritual and personal growth. (Of course they had to be personable to me, I was massaging them, and they needed my help.)

    kudos to billy Joel

  56. 56.

    Betty Cracker

    @MagdaInBlack: Wow, hotter there than it is here in Florida, by a little. It’s 75 here and a bit foggy. From my vantage on the porch, I just watched an extra-large Great Blue Heron fly past. I’ll try to phonetically render its call: EECH, Eech, eech, wow (wow).

  57. 57.

    Gloria DryGarden

    @TBone: thank you. Made me smile.

    this whole blog is like an endless source of writing prompts; I keep finding I have a lot to say.

  58. 58.

    MagdaInBlack

    @Betty Cracker: I was out on the balcony earlier, just before 5 am. Clear sky, sliver of the moon, and 3 very bright stars/planets whose names I should know but am too lazy to look up just now.

    also too, high today supposed to be 99.

  60. 60.

    gene108

    the Financial Times has reported that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has been doing some public belt-tightening concerning Dubai’s global investments,

    The FT article is paywalled for me. Why is the Saudi Crown Prince controlling Dubai’s sovereign wealth fund?

  61. 61.

    TBone

    We’ve already had mornings down in the 40s here in central PA.  Every morning for the past 2 or 3 weeks I can see my breath.  While I don’t like to complain, it feels like our already too short for me summer season has been cut shorter because it takes until late afternoon to get warm enough to want to swim.  The climate differences between DelCo (what I was accustomed to) and just three hours north by car are huge – we get 60 more days of cold weather here in Union County, and now even more!  I want Indian Summer for an after Labor Day trip to a (seasonally now less expensive) beach in NJ.

  65. 65.

    gene108

    @lowtechcyclist:

    Whatever cred Snowden may have once had, he’s lost every shred of it during these past few years.

    Snowden’s a spy and a thief.

    Gave a cover story that his theft of government technology was for the greater good to Glen Greenwald, and then sold what he stole to the highest bidder.

    Fuck him.

  66. 66.

    TBone

    @gene108: so many opportunities to use your last sentence.  Too many to count.

    Fuckerberg was featured on the GMA “news” today.  Gah!  Dredging up tired, weak bullshit for attention, again.

  71. 71.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @hueyplong:

    Pretty good gig.

    The whole point of deregulation was to make this stuff legal, so the rich could do things that in any sane world would be crimes with no consequences.

  72. 72.

    TBone

    @Dorothy A. Winsor: I expect that weather to work its way east to me and thus allow more summer activities enjoyment!  It’s been too weird here to plan days at the lake (was gonna go yesterday but the temps too low to swim in spring water).  Think of today during windy wintertime!

  73. 73.

    Baud

    @Frankensteinbeck:

    In all these years, I don’t think I’ve heard anyone propose a fix to the problems that led up to the Great Recession that involved making some action that happened criminal.

  74. 74.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @MomSense:

    Never had any cred with me.

    I don’t remember if I was against him from the start or just way, way earlier than the consensus.  I looked at the stories Greenwald was spreading and saw they didn’t actually say what he claimed they did.

    EDIT – @Baud:

    We wouldn’t have heard if it was in the financial regulations package that passed afterwards.  Only real experts know the nitty gritty of those laws.  Retroactive prosecution is a big no-no, so we wouldn’t hear about the people who did it the first time getting arrested.

  76. 76.

    Ken

    @Gloria DryGarden: US law controls the export of cryptographic software, and requires registration of any service providing cryptography as a service.

    If French law is similar, those three charges amount to saying Telegram offered crypto in their apps without telling the French government what they were using — they mesh with the other charges about providing a platform for criminal activity.

  80. 80.

    TBone

    @Ken: for those of us keeping up before enough coffee:  think encryption:

    Relating to cryptography: written in secret characters or in cipher, or with sympathetic ink.

  81. 81.

    MomSense

    @Frankensteinbeck:

    Greenwald was always terrible and when he was vicious to ABL still a lot of people here supported him. General Stuck and I left for awhile.  ABL had her own blog that was really good but didn’t have as many commenters.

  83. 83.

    TBone

    @Baud: per my link above at #49:

    The Glass-Steagall Act served this country incredibly well for 66 years until Wall Street lobbyists finally forced its repeal in 1999. It worked because of its simplicity – and its threat of five years of jail time for those who violated its key provisions.

  84. 84.

    MomSense

    @Baud:

    It also had a lot of gaps because the financial world had changed a lot since it was passed.

    The other thing that people tend to forget is that there is a regulatory framework and the agencies have a lot of leeway when it comes to enforcement and assigning resources.  W Bush’s financial regulators were abysmal.  Enforcement is just as important as the law itself.

  85. 85.

    Cheryl from Maryland

    @VeniceRiley: YES.  I miss Television Without Pity!  And when Russia took over, most of the English speaking fan fic writers fled or quit.

  86. 86.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Frankensteinbeck: The moment that really made me think something was wrong when Greenwald was when he threw a fit complete with attacks from his flying monkey squad over mild criticism from Fred “Slacktivist” Clark. Someone compared it to picking a barroom brawl with Mr. Rogers.

  88. 88.

    Geminid

    I saw an interview  with Ambassador Jeff Flake. The former Arizona Senator has spent the last 3 years in Ankara helping mend relations between Turkiye and the US. Evidently Flake is coming home now after a job well done.

    I sometimes imagine an alternate timeline where there was a mixup, and Flake was sent to Tokyo and Rahm Emanuel ended up in Ankara. I bet Rahm and R.T. Erdogan would have gotten along great!

  90. 90.

    Gloria DryGarden

    @MomSense: Enforcement is just as important as the law itself.

    see the Nebraska thing, where some top leaders decided not to implement the law allowing ex felons to vote.

    I think I’m extra mad about Nebraska, because it borders my state, and people go there for a vacation (at lake mcConahey.) I’ve spent money in Nebraska myself. It’s personal, because Nebraska is just 4-5 hours away.

  91. 91.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @MomSense:

    I miss ABL.  I learned so much from her, and I think the most valuable lesson was “Shut up and listen.”

    And yeah, I knew Greenwald was trash way early, from when he was hyping the assassination list bullshit.  I read the stories he was taking it from and found out Al-Alwaki actually had due process and his day in court twice.  It turns out there is established law that if you work hard enough to avoid trial, you forfeit your right to one.  Even the judge Greenwald liked to quote saying the whole thing was troubling had followed up saying “But it’s legal” and ruled in the government’s favor.

    Greenwald left out everything that proved he was wrong, and which he had to know.  He used his status as an expert to lie.

  93. 93.

    TBone

    Palate cleanser: doing for music what TCM does for movies.  My hero! 💜

    https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgl7ld1glk3o

    By day, he’s a 41-year-old working in business development for a London law firm. By night, he’s a music industry crusader – digging up obscure gems and persuading record labels to make them available online.

  94. 94.

    hueyplong

    @Frankensteinbeck: Even when he was pretending to be on the left, he was flamboyantly an asshole, so pretty easy to dislike regardless of the team for which he was playing.

  96. 96.

    satby

    @Dorothy A. Winsor: The forecast for today here just went from 99° to 100° and chance of rain went from 80% down to 40% both today and tomorrow. The heat and lack of rain is really stressing the trees and most peoples’ grass is dormant to dead.

  97. 97.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @hueyplong:

    Ah, the golden days, when people criticized him for praising racist Ron Paul.  Greenwald’s counter argument was that mainstream liberals hate Ron Paul because they don’t want to admit they like killing babies.  He truly was and is a top tier bad faith asshole.

  98. 98.

    Betty Cracker

    It’s a shame that, of all the old school bloggers, Greenwald is one of the few who made the jump to a form of mainstream respectability and billionaire sponsorship. Apart from his sketchy claims, serial exaggerations, hysterical reactions to even mild criticism, he’s a lousy writer.

    Even Snowden, who was the vehicle Greenwald rode to acclaim, was ignored by Greenwald when he initially reached out and “discovered” by Laura Poitras. Greenwald was just along for the ride.

  99. 99.

    The Audacity of Krope

    @Frankensteinbeck: What really bugged me about the whole Snowden issue is that nothing was revealed that attentive people wouldn’t have expected after understanding the USA PATRIOT Act.

    Snowald and Greeden just broke the news for normies and made the whole national security apparatus somehow Obama’s fault.

  102. 102.

    Baud

    @The Audacity of Krope:

    Consistent. The Great Recession was also Obama’s fault, and Covid was Biden’s.

    The best thing to happen to FDR was the Great Depression hitting in Hoover’s first year rather than his third or forth.

  103. 103.

    TBone

    Intent to impeach Macron had been announced (sounds familiar🙄) and the tankies are indeed going as nutso weird as I speculated they would.

  104. 104.

    Matt McIrvin

    @The Audacity of Krope: By 2016, the Iraq War was basically Hillary Clinton’s fault, as if she’d been President during George W. Bush’s term

    (She did bear some small degree of responsibility, as a Senator. But Trump successfully memory-holed his own support for the war, and Republican responsibility for it in general–it somehow became a war of liberalism.)

  106. 106.

    The Audacity of Krope

    @Matt McIrvin: (She did bear some small degree of responsibility, as a Senator. But Trump successfully memory-holed his own support for the war, and Republican responsibility for it in general–it somehow became a war of liberalism.)

    The great part about being a Republican; no one in any type of leadership role need fear being held responsible for decisions, actions, or even rhetoric.

  107. 107.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Frankensteinbeck: The old online, uh, quasi-friend I saw go from unclassifiable quasi-lefty to full-MAGA Trump supporter got there through “antiwar” support for Ron Paul, and I think Greenwald’s stuff was a contributor. One of the stages was “liberals voted for the babykiller Obama just because he was black”, and that last bit turned out to be a really persistent hook.

  108. 108.

    lowtechcyclist

    @ItinerantPedant: ​

    Snowden always was a GRU asset.

    @gene108: ​

    Snowden’s a spy and a thief.
    Gave a cover story that his theft of government technology was for the greater good to Glen Greenwald, and then sold what he stole to the highest bidder.

    Lord knows I’ve seen plenty of trashing of Snowden over the years, but these two claims are new to me. Cites?
    Also, people like you must be furious at Booz Allen Hamilton (and at the NSA for contracting shit like that out, rather than keeping it strictly in house) for making it so easy for a low-level guy like Snowden to steal stuff worth selling (or worth the GRU’s trouble), yet it’s never about NSA or Booz Allen, it’s always and only Snowden.
    Y’all are mad at the guy who took advantage of this hole in our security, but none of you Snowden-haters ever seem to be concerned about the hole. I’ve never understood that.​

  109. 109.

    OlFroth

    Interesting that Musk brought up the 1st and 2nd Amendments, which are not applicable in France.  Or anywhere else outside the US for that matter.

  110. 110.

    The Audacity of Krope

    @lowtechcyclist: Also, people like you must be furious at Booz Allen Hamilton (and at the NSA for contracting shit like that out

    Outsourcing this and many other forms of government work while not retaining expertise is among the worst practices common in modern policy making.

    From what I can tell; not only does society lose out on building its own reliable workforce, but this outsourcing is more expensive for taxpayers even before factoring in the increases in grift.

  111. 111.

    The Audacity of Krope

    @OlFroth: Interesting that Musk brought up the 1st and 2nd Amendments, which are not applicable in France. Or anywhere else outside the US for that matter.

    Our aspirations reach the world over. They just don’t have force of law.

  112. 112.

    TBone

    Macron:

    I have seen false information regarding France following the arrest of Pavel Durov. France is deeply committed to freedom of expression and communication, to innovation, and to the spirit of entrepreneurship. It will remain so. In a state governed by the rule of law,…

    https://www.seattletimes.com/business/frances-macron-says-arrest-of-the-head-of-telegram-messaging-app-pavel-durov-wasnt-political/

    ☝️history lesson

    Also, RT says U.S. “orchestrated” Durov’s arrest (in France 😆).

  113. 113.

    Geminid

    @The Audacity of Krope: I’ve always assumed the NSA collects everything. I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re the ones who blew the whistle on Trump holding those documents at Mar-A-Loco. They might have heard some spies talking about what was on offer and tipped off the Justice Depargment. Then Merrick’s people would have found a way to develop the evidence on their own; reverse engineer the investigation, so to speak. I’d be surprised if that ever got reported though.

    On the other hand, I wouldn’t be surprised if some Mar-A-Loco employee tried to fence a document and the fence informed a contact in the FBI, and that was how the feds got on to the case.

  115. 115.

    JML

    Saw Tulsi Gabbard endorsed TFG. How things change. (I was never a fan, but I had a lot of people trying to sell me on her pre-2020)

  116. 116.

    The Audacity of Krope

    @Geminid: Oh I saw your post about Auchincloss the other day. Much later.

    It’s good to see him reaching out beyond his original coalition and looking for cred on major, existential issues.

  119. 119.

    Kay

    Interesting. I wonder if the shift is being driven by the fact that people are sick to fucking death of Donald Trump and aren’t reading or watching media promotion of him now:

    The Harris bump: A common refrain among a certain set of left-leaning critics is the idea that many members of the news media are biased in favor of Trump because they believe his return will help with television ratings and online audience numbers. There was a degree of truth to this in 2016, but all recent data suggest the narrative needs a serious correction.
    Washington Post CEO Will Lewis shared an internal memo this week saying the paper has seen a surge in subscriptions over the past month. Another prominent political news figure called Semafor this week to emphasize just how much stories about Harris were driving reader interest, compared to pieces about Trump.
    Television network data showed intense audience interest as well. Harris’ convention was a massive ratings winner last week for MSNBC and CNN. Over four days, the DNC averaged 21.8 million viewers a night in prime time, an improvement on 2020’s four-night average of 21.6 million viewers, and a notable increase over the RNC’s 19.1 million average viewers in prime time over four nights. Online traffic for stories about Harris at both networks are up across the board. MSNBC led all networks in viewership and in the key audience demographic of 25 to 54-year-olds over the four nights, making it the network’s largest audience for a Democratic convention since it began broadcasting.

    I’m amused all these media executives got it so wrong. Just the most unimaginative and RIGID people in the world- they thought they could follow the same playbook they’ve had since 2016 and still rake it in.
    Donald Trump is not as good for their bottom line anymore – we’ll be able to watch the shift in coverage in real time.

    James Carville said “the most thunderous sound in politics is the public turning a page” – rings true to me this cycle.

  120. 120.

    Chris

    @lowtechcyclist:

    Whatever cred Snowden may have once had, he’s lost every shred of it during these past few years.

    It’ll always be a point of pride that I thought he and his stories smelled funny right from the start.

  123. 123.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @Kay:

    It will be useful to see if they do change, because if they don’t it means chasing ratings is not their primary motivation.

  124. 124.

    Geminid

    @lowtechcyclist: Snowden may have ended up supplying Russia with a trove of valuable informion, but I doubt that he was a GRU agent. Or at least, not when he joined Booz Allen and ended up working on system managent(?) for the NSA. My guess is that he decided that the operations he was supporting were objectionable, and went rogue after downloading everything he could.

    The Russians might not have heard Snowden’s name until he ended up in Hong Kong, I believe, and the Chinese told the Russians, “Hey, we’ve got this hot potato here and you’ll be glad to catch him. His name is Snowden. Yeah we got our copies. Funny thing though; the ones you’re getting contain no information whatsoever on China!”

  125. 125.

    Kay

    Elon Musk and his online influencer friends like Glenn Greenwald and Edward Snowden don’t respect the laws of any country. Musk doesn’t follow laws in the US (or anywhere else) regarding his car company or Space X and never has. They think they are entitled to violate any law they want.

    I hope France hammers them. The US should have enforced our own laws against Musk years ago. It’s not too late if any US regulatory or police agency official wants to start doing their job.

  126. 126.

    Leto

    If you’re a federal employee who has BlueCross BlueShield Federal (FepBlue), you should pay specific attention to this.

    Her Life Was at Risk. She Needed an Abortion. Insurance Refused To Pay.

    Ashley and Kyle were newlyweds in early 2022 and thrilled to be expecting their first child. But bleeding had plagued Ashley from the beginning of her pregnancy, and in July, at seven weeks, she began miscarrying.

    The couple’s heartbreak came a few weeks after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned the federal right to abortion. In Wisconsin, their home state, an 1849 law had sprung back into effect, halting abortion care except when a pregnant woman faced death.

    Insurance coverage for abortion care in the U.S. is a hodgepodge. Patients often don’t know when or if a procedure or abortion pills are covered, and the proliferation of abortion bans has exacerbated the confusion. Ashley said she got caught in that tangle of uncertainties.

    …

    But even with an arsenal of medical documentation, Ashley’s health insurer, the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program, did not cover the abortion procedure. Months later, Ashley logged in to her medical billing portal and was surprised to see that the insurer had paid for her three-night hospital stay but not the abortion.

    “Every time I called insurance about my bill, I was sobbing on the phone because it was so frustrating to have to explain the situation and why I think it should be covered,” she said. “It’s making me feel like it was my fault, and I should be ashamed of it,” Ashley said.

    Eventually, Ashley talked to a woman in the hospital billing department who relayed what the insurance company had said.

    “She told me,” Ashley said, “quote, ‘FEP Blue does not cover any abortions whatsoever. Period. Doesn’t matter what it is. We don’t cover abortions.’”

    University of Wisconsin Health, which administers billing for UnityPoint Health-Meriter hospital, confirmed this exchange.

    The Federal Employees Health Benefits Program contracts with FEP Blue, or the BlueCross BlueShield Federal Employee Program, to provide health plans to federal employees. In response to an interview request, FEP Blue emailed a statement saying it “is required to comply with federal legislation which prohibits Federal Employees Health Benefits Plans from covering procedures, services, drugs, and supplies related to abortions except when the life of the mother would be endangered if the fetus were carried to term or when the pregnancy is the result of an act of rape or incest.”

    Those restrictions, known as the Hyde Amendment, have been passed each year since 1976 by Congress and prohibit federal funds from covering abortion services.

    The entire article is infuriating. While I’m happy to have insurance (we have BCBS Federal), they’re also a shit service. Part of the reason I was discharged too early from the hospital when I had my motorcycle accident was they refused to pay anymore. They told the hospital, we’re not paying anymore after this date. My doctors were saying to me, we don’t agree with this but we don’t have a choice. I can only imagine the pain of a situation where your fetus has died, or will die, you’re bleeding out, and 1) it takes Herculean efforts just to get basic care, and then 2) having your insurer then deny your claims potentially leaving you with a massive amount of debt, on top of your infinite grief. Just another day of “conservatives can fuck off into the sun, forever”.

  127. 127.

    Another Scott

    @lowtechcyclist: It’s yet another both-and thing.

    People can violate their oath no matter who signs their checks (Uncle Sam or BAH).

    People can break the rules (“don’t give anyone your password!!11”) no matter who signs their checks.

    Yes, there are too many beltway bandits and more government functions should be rolled back into the government.

    That doesn’t excuse Snowden in any way.

    Whether he was “always” GRU or something flipped in his head at some point, I dunno.  Doesn’t much matter to me.  He was a traitor as soon as he hatched his plans to gain access to things that he had no right to access, things he (as a 20-something IT person) did not and could not understand, even before he hopped on the plane to Hong Kong.

    Grr…,
    Scott.

  128. 128.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Frankensteinbeck: I confess, I was still surprised when, after years of bashing Obama for escalating the drone war, Trump got in and escalated it some more, and Greenwald mostly went after Trump’s critics, not Trump. I’d pegged him as anti-whoever was in power and assumed he’d go back to attacking Republicans, but that wasn’t what he did.

    Biden ended the drone war. No credit from Greenwald.

  129. 129.

    Kay

    @Frankensteinbeck:

    Oh. they’ll change. They followed Sarah Palin around like lemmings for a full year after the public was sick of her.

    They’re the most conventional, rigid, unimaginative industry in the country but even these dumbos eventually get it. They are SLOW and kind of lazy as an industry, not ideologically conservative.

  132. 132.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Kay:

    James Carville said “the most thunderous sound in politics is the public turning a page” – rings true to me this cycle.

    And yet, we’re still at an Electoral College tossup and Trump could easily still win this. What I don’t think will happen, though, is the people just shrugging and rolling over if he does.

  133. 133.

    geg6

    @TBone: ​
     
    Enjoy the cool nights while you can. If the weather in the western part of the state comes your way, it will be miserably hot soon enough. It was 75 when I woke up this morning here in Beaver County.

  134. 134.

    Itinerantpedant

    @lowtechcyclist: I say he was an asset because I don’t think you do what he did (at the time and subsequently) without knowing where you’re gonna jump, and I know where he ended up.

    But at the time I said that turning over government functions to the private sector was a bad idea. You need the same skill set, the product is human skill so there’s no way to automate it, and with the added need for profit, you end up paying the experts even less.

    When I say he was an asset, I mean that he was ripe for some kind of co-opting. I don’t know if he was recruited by an Intelligence Officer (nor whether it was originally Chinese intelligence or Russian at first) before or after he stole the data, but he had been by the time he started running. And no, there is no cite possible, until and unless Russia comes apart and we get to see GRU and FSB files like we got to see Stasi files after German unification.  I say GRU because the former military intelligence agency somehow absorbed the KGBs foreign intelligence assets, while FSB inherited the domestic (as if the CIA came apart and the FBI picked up all the counterintelligence offices, and DIA picked up the rest).

  136. 136.

    Kay

    @Frankensteinbeck:

    I hope the entire NYTimes political team become irrelevant as the public moves on from their hometown hero, Donald Trump. Couldn’t happen to a bigger group of careerist assholes. How long did they think they could write the same fucking garbage and still make money? They really thought there would be another round of Trump books? Christ. Work harder. Be better at the private sector.

  137. 137.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @Matt McIrvin:

    I think like many of Trump’s fans Glenn fell victim to the ‘black president’ effect.  There’s a moderate amount of evidence he’s racist as shit.  It’s not hard to slide from “I hate whoever is in power” to “I hate Obama personally” to “I hate Democrats.”

  139. 139.

    Kay

    @Matt McIrvin:

    This thing is competitive. It’s a competition. You aren’t going to be able to win it w/out an opponent. There’s no set of circumstances where 50 million Republicans wake up one day and become liberals. There’s risk. There’s uncertainty. That is the NATURE of the hobby you have chosen.

    There’s no conflict free or risk free competitions. Those don’t exist. If you’re seeking conflict free or risk free you are always going to be upset when following politics.

  140. 140.

    TBone

    @geg6: hubby told me our TV weather guy is calling for low 70s all week!  I can’t believe it – I expect heat here as you say.

  141. 141.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Frankensteinbeck: The conventional way to launder it is the “affirmative action” dodge: “I have nothing against black people, I just hate that liberals are unreasonably biased toward them” (in this case, toward Obama “just because he was black”). Which involves certain assumptions about where the fair neutral position is.

  143. 143.

    Kay

    @TBone:

    Maybe someone can explain to me at some point why the US Department of Justice isn’t enforcing the three giant federal voting statutes. I know criticizing Merrick Garland is verboten and means I want Trump to win but what the fuck? Why was this left up to states? We DON’T leave it up to states. That’s why we have three giant federal statutes protecting voting rights and process.

    Bring a complaint. Be a fucking prosecutor, for once. I know Republicans will get mad! Criminals get mad when you go after them! It should have happened after 2020. They’re doing this because they got away with it last time.

  144. 144.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Kay:

    There’s no set of circumstances where 50 million Republicans wake up one day and become liberals.

    The frustrating thing is, it DOES go the other way, 50 million Democrats suddenly deciding they’re conservatives, or at least to vote Republican. I’ve lived through it. Maybe more than once.

  145. 145.

    Itinerantpedant

    @Geminid: I think he was a classic MICE (under I, at minimum) recruit after he was in place. Most spying takes place after the asset is in place, the kind of a prior spy infiltration that sounds cool is way secondary to the kind of thing that leads a Hanson or a Boyce to offer their services.  But I think publishing and embarrassment was one of the guiding agencies goals. Especially after all the success they had with Wikileaks.

    I’m pretty sure (while acknowledging we may never truly know) that by the time the leaks took place SOMEONE was running him, and I believe it was GRU. I think the Hong Kong stop was because it’s a bit easier to get to Hong Kong and THEN Moscow than Moscow in one go.

  147. 147.

    Chris

    @David 🐝KHive🐝 Koch:

    Snowjob had no problem with Dubya collecting penny ante telephone metadata, he just couldn’t stand it when a black guy was doing it.

    Have you ever read Snowden’s Wikipedia page?  It’s interesting reading, especially all the parts related to politics that came before his moment of fame in 2013.  He signed up for the U.S. Army, saying that he felt a duty to serve in Iraq, in 2004, and even tried to join special forces.  He voted third party in 2008.  He said that if Congress passed an assault rifle ban, he and his pro-gun friends would show up on the steps of Congress (boy that aged well).  And when visiting London, he said he was terrified to get out of the car because there were so many Muslims.

    The plain fact is that Snowden was a completely conventional right-winger, who lost his shit when a black Democrat came into the White House, and decided that when you got right down to it, it’s better to be Russian than Democrat.  It speaks incredibly poorly of so many progressives that they ever bought him as some sort of firm opponent of the security state when his politics were available to anybody with access to Wikipedia.

  148. 148.

    Frankensteinbeck

    @Matt McIrvin:

    For Glenn laundering it would be incredibly easy.  Just keep focusing on dishonest slimeball attacks on Democrats.  Do exactly what he was doing and just NOT change.

  149. 149.

    Kay

    I’ll volunteer as a lawyer and do my part – what I can do! I’m not a prosecutor! – to protect voting process in the next election but I must say I resent the hell out of the DOJ lawyers I’m paying for NOT doing it.

    They must be shocked, shocked that the State of Georgia is plotting to steal an election. No one could have predicted they would do the exact same thing they did in 2020 in 2024.

    You should see how fast federal prosecutors can get off their ass when they’re going after small fry – they’re more than happy to bring the hammer down in a matter of weeks. It’s only when powerful people violate laws that they become so reticent and shy. Useless. We’re poorly represented.

  150. 150.

    Barry

    @Jay: “And yet, he flew from the ‘stans’, to France, where there was a open warrant for his arrest.”

     

    Perhaps a deal with France to serve him only non-radioactive food in prison?

  151. 151.

    Geminid

    @Kay: People talk about a “Harris Bump” as if she has to come down from it. But this seems more like a Harris Lift, where she’s gotten some air under her wings and the momentum to fly higher.

  153. 153.

    TBone

    @Kay: the Supremacists Court effectively nullified a lot of federal power(s)…

    🤬🤬🤬

    The Shelby decision and the 2020 election each sparked years of legislative action making it harder for eligible Americans to vote. Each tells the story of politicians and special interests doing whatever they can to limit democracy, avoid accountability, and maintain political power. Each will unfortunately influence and inspire restrictive election legislation for years to come.

    https://votingrightslab.org/2023/06/27/10-years-since-shelby-v-holder-where-we-are-and-where-were-heading/

    So it is up to each of us in our States.  Bloody fucking hell!

  154. 154.

    TBone

    @Kay: the blame lies at the feet of the Supremacists Court, the Federalist Society, and Leonard Leo.

    Their coup is ongoing.  I’m as angry and frustrated as you are!

  155. 155.

    Kay

    @Geminid:

    I’m optimistic but I don’t yet think it’s lift off. But I agree there’s the potential for growth there. Her Latino numbers are now genuinely good. She’s easily surpassed Biden and she still has room to grow. That won’t help her in the Great Lakes states though – the only Great Lakes state with a meaningful or determinative Latino population is Illinois that’s only because of how huge Chicago is.

    I’ve been donating and volunteering for Elissa Slotkin because I like her and think she’s a solid younger Dem and she’s doing great but Sherrod is actually competitive with her MI share in OH, which is amazing. They’re both going to win.

  157. 157.

    Chris

    @The Audacity of Krope:

    @Frankensteinbeck: What really bugged me about the whole Snowden issue is that nothing was revealed that attentive people wouldn’t have expected after understanding the USA PATRIOT Act.

    Same.  I thought I was going crazy in 2013.  All these people going around pointing me at the story and going “OMG did you know that the U.S. government has been spying on its people?”  Yes!  Yes I did!  I’ve known it since 2005, when the New York Times published the story about the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping!  Because I remember how badly Obama’s first attempt to dismantle an abusive war on terror program (Gitmo) went, and also because I haven’t read anything about it in the papers, I’ve assumed all along that the program had continued!  What Snowden revealed might be interesting for IT nerds who want to know how it’s all done, but as far as the actual substance, we’ve known for almost a decade that the NSA is listening to us with no checks on its power.  Why the fuck are we suddenly all now pretending that this is some astonishing new development?

  160. 160.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Chris: It seems much easier to get people incensed about Democratic administrations doing this because of some combination of “man bites dog” and the Hack Gap. Republican administrations are SUPPOSED to behave like authoritarian creeps; Democratic ones aren’t. A liberal who is OK with this is a hypocrite, but a conservative who is OK with it is just a conservative. So Republicans get a pass.

  161. 161.

    Kay

    @sab:

    Well then we’ve lost. If they aren’t enforcing laws because of the SCOTUS then we have already lost the right to vote and this is just holding off the inevitable for one more cycle.

    I am so, so sick of hiring people based not on the public interest but on what those people are suppsoedly “owed” by the public. Because Garland didn’t get a SCOTUS seat does not mean he is entitled to AG. He isn’t suited to this job. At every juncture he has been too timid.

    It isn’t about these people as individuals and their stupid fucking careers. It’s ABOUT the public. I want a good lawyer. I’m paying thousands of them. I want one of them to do some work that entails risk and the possibility they might lose. That’s what lawyers do – they enter adversarial proceedings on behalf of others. They’re not mediators.

  162. 162.

    TBone

    @Kay: that’s how Donold became King.  We must reform the Court but to do so, we must first win the trifecta.  There’s the rub, and that is on purpose.

    We lose if we give up.

    Fuck you forever Roy Cohn.

  163. 163.

    Kay

    @sab:

    I gave up the DOJ several years ago and I should go back to ignoring them. They’re fucking useless.

    Biden’s Labor Department has aggressive lawyers who aren’t afraid of powerful people. Maybe we could put some of them on voting rights. Please. Hire someone who will bring a complaint.

  164. 164.

    Chris

    @Matt McIrvin:

    @Frankensteinbeck: The old online, uh, quasi-friend I saw go from unclassifiable quasi-lefty to full-MAGA Trump supporter got there through “antiwar” support for Ron Paul, and I think Greenwald’s stuff was a contributor. One of the stages was “liberals voted for the babykiller Obama just because he was black”, and that last bit turned out to be a really persistent hook.

    One of my high school classmates was that special breed of idiot who thought Hillary Clinton was the leader of the neocon-neoliberal corporatist CIA military-industrial complex Deep State, Donald Trump was not good but not the biggest enemy and also a populist enemy of the Deep State, and Russiagate is all a hoax.

    Funny story, though: that guy also married a Ukrainian and was living in Ukraine.  All of a sudden, at some random point early in 2022, the Facebook screeds from him just stopped coming!  No, he’s not dead; he and his family moved to Hungary and he still posts from time to time.  But even if he never came out and said he was wrong, all of the idiot conspiracymongering finally stopped coming.

    They say it’s expensive to get an education, but needing an entire war before you’ll finally wise up is taking it to some ridiculous new heights.

  166. 166.

    Kay

    @TBone:

    Your lawyers are making it impossible for you to win. You should demand they represent the United States in this dispute. It’s their job, after all.

    You deserve better representation. You cannot save this country just as a voter. These federal employees are going to have to make an effort.

    Georgia will handle Georgia voting! Sure they will. Let’s leave it up to the states! 75 years of civil rights legal theory just down the fucking drain.

    It’s WHY we have a federal DOJ. It is their reason to exist.

  167. 167.

    Gloria DryGarde

    @Leto: Just another day of “conservatives can fuck off into the sun, forever”.

    agree. Que se vacant a la mierda, Estos conservativos, y que no nos Jodan más. Into the sun forever. Quemaditos!

  168. 168.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Chris:

    They say it’s expensive to get an education, but needing an entire war before you’ll finally wise up is taking it to some ridiculous new heights.

    It took two wars (albeit not ones that were mostly happening where I lived) to knock some of my reflexive NPR-bipartisan instincts out of me, so I can’t really throw stones here.

  169. 169.

    Gloria DryGarden

    @Leto: Just another day of “conservatives can fuck off into the sun, forever”.

    agree.
    Que se vayan a la mierda, Estos conservativos, y que no nos Jodan más. Into the sun forever. Quemaditos! Y que se les cayan sus bichos, sus picos, sus penecitos, bien tostaditos.

    moderator, can you delete #167, somehow I must have dropped a letter from my nym, a new way to become new/ invisible. Just wrangling with my tablet. Oops.

  170. 170.

    Geminid

    @Itinerantpedant: One aspect of the “Global War on Terror” was that US operations and the intelligence gathering to support them expanded so quickly that a lot of the work was contracted out. That may have been the case with Snowden’s job.

    I know only generally about the kind of work Snowden did, but I noticed a lot of contractors popping up in Virginia back then that did Defense Department work. My former Congressman, the nebbishy Denver Riggleman, is an example. Riggleman retired from the Air Force and then started a company where he basically did what he used to do for the Air Force in-house. He made good enough money to set up a distillery and begin a third career making vodka.

  171. 171.

    Chris

    @lowtechcyclist:

    Are you kidding?  I’ve been bitching about the security state for years.  How bad they are at selecting trustworthy and useful people.  How politicized they are in ways that make them ignore entire categories of threats while obsessing over various things whose only crime is hurting their fee-fees.  How the entire anthill of privatized contractors has made the entire thing vastly more expensive, more unwieldy, less accountable, and easier for hostile actors to penetrate.  How it encourages a business mentality that corrodes the entire ethos that’s supposed to underly public service in this field.  All of this is before you even get to the civil rights violations.  It’s so bad that I’ve gotten to the point of wondering if the entire creation of the modern intelligence state in the last hundred years (America isn’t the only country with all these problems) wasn’t a mistake, and we wouldn’t be better off burning the whole thing to the ground, though I don’t think the topic’s ever come up on Balloon Juice.

    One of the drums I’ve beat several times repeatedly (at least once in the Adam Silverman posts) is the number of our securocrats who’ve popped up in recent years working for foreign governments and organizations that were either hostile or at the very least unreliably friendly, and what this says about the national security state increasingly breeding national security threats.

    It’s just that none of this takes the onus off of Snowden for what he did, and Snowden, especially ten years ago, was far more likely to be getting unearned brownie points on blogs like this one than the NSA apparatchiks.  So yes, I’m not surprised that there’d be so much beating of that horse.

  175. 175.

    Kay

    I regret thinking about the DOJ again.

    Its easier to assume they will, again, do nothing.

    We’re all pro se. We rely on volunteers to enforce voting rights. No one knows what our giant federal law firm does all day.

  176. 176.

    TBone

    @Kay: preserving what we can while under assault – not bringing cases while we know they will use any opportunity to go even further.

    https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/08/as-the-voting-rights-act-turns-59-supreme-court-trump/

    …That’s just one example of how Republican-appointees to the federal judiciary, emboldened by Supreme Court rulings curbing voting rights, are going after the VRA.

    In November 2023, a three-judge panel on the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals, which covers seven states in the Midwest and Great Plains, ruled that private plaintiffs could not bring lawsuits to enforce Section 2 of the VRA, the key remaining provision of the law, which prohibits voting practices and procedures that discriminate against voters of color.

  177. 177.

    Geminid

    @Itinerantpedant: However it happened exactly, Snowden did what he did and now he is where he is. I expect Snowden will have a comfortable life, if only because the Russians want to encourage future valuable defectors. Ironically though, Snowden now lives under a state hostile to civil liberties, and he’s  liable to live under surveillance for the rest of his life.

    My guess is that Snowden has justified his actions in his own mind, but I wonder if he ever questions the choice he made. Snowden could have given Booz Allen notice and found other work that suited his conscience better. He was a young man with a marketable skill, living in Hawaii. Snowden could have made a good life there or anywhere else he chose.

  178. 178.

    Chris

    @Matt McIrvin:

    @Frankensteinbeck: I confess, I was still surprised when, after years of bashing Obama for escalating the drone war, Trump got in and escalated it some more, and Greenwald mostly went after Trump’s critics, not Trump. I’d pegged him as anti-whoever was in power and assumed he’d go back to attacking Republicans, but that wasn’t what he did.

    Going back a little further on Greenwald is instructive.  In the nineties (when a Democrat was in the White House and the militia movement was in full bloom), he was a civil libertarian lawyer whose clients just happened to be Nazis.  In the early and mid 2000s (when a Republican was in the White House and bigots were temporarily looking outwards), he was a neocon who supported the Iraq War and had no concerns at all about the security state undergoing its biggest expansion since 1947.  In the late 2000s and early 2010s (when a Democrat, a black Democrat at that, was back in the White House and the Republican opposition was going full Nazi), he was a civil libertarian Very Very Concerned about the security state again.  And then Trump happened.

    The whole idea that he’s a principled civil liberties activist rather than a right-wing hack is based on fifteen minutes in the mid-to-late 2000s when he was against the security state but George Dubya was still in the White House.  This was, of course, the age when everybody was against George Dubya, and the real hardcore ideologues of racism, the kind who came to Trump like iron to a magnet, still saw the Republicans as milquetoast sellouts, who were preferable to Democrats but would never really do what needed to be done when the chips were down.

    IMO, Greenwald’s always been a full-on Nazi.  He just put on various facades over the years because his real politics weren’t something you could express in public and still exert any influence.  Once Trump came around and made his ideas respectable again, he went all-in on him and hasn’t looked back.  That pretty much says it all.

  179. 179.

    tam1MI

    @Dorothy A. Winsor: I used to read Television Without Pity! The mods were merciless.

    The mods killed TWoP. They ran so many people off for so many stupid reasons and blatantly ignored their own rules to let certain posters run riot. On the GENERAL HOSPITAL forums the mods were banning people for not swooning over a particular subpar actor. It was ridiculous.

    Previously TV is the successor to TWoP and they are light years better. Their mods are very good about enforcing the rules in an evenhanded manner.

    TWoP h

  180. 180.

    Ceci n est pas mon nym

    @Geminid: People talk about a “Harris Bump” as if she has to come down from it.

    Or as if there’s a pre-defined narrative that lazy writers force the facts into. The cliche is that there’s a “convention bump”, so go ahead and write your two convention bump stories before each convention.

    The facts that there was no Republican bump, and the Democratic “bump” is going to last for weeks, perhaps right up to the election, will not prevent anyone from filing their already-written “convention bump” stories.

  181. 181.

    Geminid

    @Kay: I bet Sherrod Brown and Elissa Slotkin will like working with each other.

    I see that Bernie Moreno’s ads call Senator Brown “Shifty Sherrod.” Have Republicans come up with name for Rep. Slotkin yet?

  182. 182.

    tam1MI

     

    @Betty Cracker: It’s a shame that, of all the old school bloggers, Greenwald is one of the few who made the jump to a form of mainstream respectability and billionaire sponsorship. Apart from his sketchy claims, serial exaggerations, hysterical reactions to even mild criticism, he’s a lousy writer.

    It’s cleaned up it’s act in recent years, but between Glenn Greenwald, Christopher Hitchens, and Camille Paglia, Salon has a lot to answer for.

  183. 183.

    Another Scott

    @Chris:

    … but as far as the actual substance, we’ve known for almost a decade since the 1950s that the NSA is listening to us everything that [eta] crosses (or more accurately, everything outside the US border) – it’s what they’re paid to do with no checks on its power except needing to get a warrant to use that information on a US person inside the US.

    FWIW.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  184. 184.

    Matt McIrvin

    @Ceci n est pas mon nym: There *was* a Republican bump, though it’s hard to say if it was from the convention or the assassination attempt or picking Vance or what. You can see it in 538’s favorable/unfavorable for Trump.

    It’s just that it was about 1 point big and it’s already half gone.

    I personally don’t think we’re going to see a discrete Democratic bump from the convention. I think a big change started the moment Harris swapped in and it’s continuing but more gradually. Everything’s still going to be a game of inches.

  185. 185.

    BellyCat

    @TBone: The Strict Scrutiny conversation with Ruth Benghiat was truly profound. Highly recommended!

    Notably, she never really answered the question about how far along we are on the path to authoritarianism. And they ran out of time to discuss ways to avoid it.

    (Love the Strict Scrutiny podcasts!)

  186. 186.

    Ceci n est pas mon nym

    @Another Scott: I hoped throughout the TFG years that the NSA was bugging his traitorous conversations with our enemies, even though it would be patently illegal and therefore any such program would be locked so tightly in a classified box that nobody would let you use the information directly.

  187. 187.

    Chris

    @Another Scott:

    Uh, no?  The entire reason the New York Times’ revelations in 2005 were a scandal was that the wiretapping was being done on domestic suspects without court warrants.

  188. 188.

    JML

    @tam1MI: TWoP (which I read all the way back to Mighty Big TV) got too big and couldn’t handle it. A private project between a couple of friends turned into a company that struggled to manage their hires and and the originals themselves didn’t really know how to transition from personal project to business with standards. I nearly took a banhammer on that site for complaining that a character sucked on the forums and how it was ridiculous to keep excusing the characters behavior on the show just because people thought the actor was hot (and immediately got jumped on). And I wrote some content for that site!

    I liked the writing from several people there and made some friends by way of it. But it got out of control.

  190. 190.

    tam1MI

    @Kay: That won’t help her in the Great Lakes states though – the only Great Lakes state with a meaningful or determinative Latino population is Illinois that’s only because of how huge Chicago is.

    What may help her in Michigan is that Indian Americans are an exploding demographic here. The Democrats were making a concerted effort to reach out to them even before Harris ascended to the top of the ballot.

  191. 191.

    BellyCat

    @TBone: Agreed. We are further down the path than anyone wants to contemplate. If Trump does not win, a less objectionable fascist will soon be put forward by the good folks at the Heritage Foundation.

  192. 192.

    kindness

    Yikes.  Fidelity has one of my IRAs.  I had no idea they helped underwrite Musk’s purchase of Twitter.  They’re boneheads and I need to seriously transfer that account.

  193. 193.

    tam1MI

    @JML:

    TWoP (which I read all the way back to Mighty Big TV) got too big and couldn’t handle it. A private project between a couple of friends turned into a company that struggled to manage their hires and and the originals themselves didn’t really know how to transition from personal project to business with standards. I nearly took a banhammer on that site for complaining that a character sucked on the forums and how it was ridiculous to keep excusing the characters behavior on the show just because people thought the actor was hot (and immediately got jumped on). And I wrote some content for that site!

    I liked the writing from several people there and made some friends by way of it. But it got out of control.

    No lie told. I enjoyed the TWoP forums, but I don’t miss the asshole mods.

  194. 194.

    Geminid

    @Ceci n est pas mon nym: I remember how, in the first year of Trump’s  administration, former CIA Director William Brennan and NSA Director Michael Hayden would get on TV and talk about Trump. They seemed like they knew stuff, information they couldn’t share. Brennan had this faint smile, like the cat that swallowed the canary.

    Trump would bluster about how he was gonna get those guys but he never did a thing. I think that was because they knew stuff.

  195. 195.

    Another Scott

    @Chris:

    I’m remembering things like this:

    NYCLU.org:

    2002

    Bush Issues Executive Order Allowing Warrantless Wiretapping
    President Bush, through a secret executive order, authorizes the NSA, which already has confidential surveillance program in place, to wiretap communications between foreign citizens suspected of having links to terrorist groups and individuals on American soil. This wiretapping is allowed without any warrant. Communications between people located in the US still requires a warrant. (15)(16)(17)

    It’s probably not a useful exercise to go through all this stuff again. The inside/outside the US distinction was much easier in the 1950s than now, and the US/non-US distinction is obviously problematic when both types are in the same communication loop, but lots of things have been done to try to address them (some as a result of the publicity during the Snowden days).

    FWIW.

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  196. 196.

    TBone

    @kindness: if it’s the same Fidelity, I would!  There are many outfits named Fidelity, not sure it’s the same org, or a subsidiary, or what.  Pierce the corporate veil to find out.

    nd tech at Slate.

    The Death of The Electric Vehicle Has Been Greatly Exaggerated

    But his choice of co-owners may be telling. In addition to a fairly typical assortment of Silicon Valley venture-capital firms and heavyweight foreign investors, there are a number of prominent Donald Trump supporters as well as advocates for looser moderation policies on social media and a major crypto exchange, which is surely thrilled to be in businesses with the planet’s most prominent booster of Dogecoin. Maybe they’re all there to make a buck: Musk pitched these investors on ambitious plans to grow Twitter by cutting down on costs and monetizing tweets. Just as likely, they want to make Twitter the social network they’d like to see in the world. Here’s a guide to the investors who may soon own a piece of Twitter.
    Lawrence J. Ellison Revocable Trust
    Larry Ellison—the multibillionaire founder of Oracle and Donald Trump supporter—pledged to invest $1 billion in Musk’s purchase. Ellison claims to be a close friend of Musk’s and joined Tesla’s board in 2018. Ellison’s Oracle almost got to take over part of TikTok’s U.S. operations in what appeared to be a sweetheart deal during the Trump administration. It withered after Trump lost reelection, but now Ellison may get another bite at the social-media apple.
    Sequoia Capital Fund
    This Silicon Valley fund contributed $800 million to the cause. “We see, as he [Musk] does, the opportunity to drive meaningful product innovation that will help unlock Twitter’s full potential as a global platform that connects the world,” a spokesperson told the New York Times. The firm was an early investor in the likes of Google and Apple. Sequoia also co-led the Series C funding round for the Boring Company, Musk’s underground-tunnel venture. Musk previously recruited Roelof Botha, a partner at Sequoia, to be the chief financial officer of PayPal.
    VyCapital
    This investment firm based in Dubai pledged $700 million. VyCapital has also invested in Musk’s Boring Company and Neuralink, the neurotechnology startup that recently faced allegations of abusing macaque monkeys in its experiments.
    Binance
    This cryptocurrency exchange platform invested $500 million, and reportedly contacted Musk directly for the privilege to do so. Musk has been a major booster of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin and Dogecoin, and he has shown he has a tremendous influence over their prices. Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao tweeted his support for Musk’s takeover.

    A small contribution to the cause. https://t.co/xD9XZxOWfL

    — CZ 🔶 Binance (@cz_binance) May 5, 2022

    If Binance’s inclusion is eye-raising, it’s for this reason: Musk has said he wants to purge spam bots from Twitter, where they remain a stubborn presence. Notably, many of those bots appear to pump crypto schemes.
    Andreessen Horowitz
    This venture capital fund, which invested $400 million, was founded by mega tech entrepreneurs Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. Andreesen has been a major critic of Twitter’s moderation policies, something he has been very, very, vocal about on Twitter since Musk’s stake in the company was announced. However, he also sits on the board of the rival social media company Meta, which may present some conflicts of interest. Horowitz also tweeted about the investment and praised Musk’s crusade against moderation on the platform.

    3/While Twitter has great promise as a public square, it suffers from a myriad of difficult issues ranging from bots to abuse to censorship. Being a public company solely reliant on an advertising business model exacerbates all of these.

    — benahorowitz.eth (@bhorowitz) May 5, 2022

    Qatar Holding
    Qatar’s sovereign wealth fund invested $375 million.
    Aliya Capital Partners
    This Miami-based firm is investing $360 million. Aliya has also been an investor in SpaceX, Musk’s rocket company.

    Fidelity Management & Research Company
    This Boston-based company invested $316 million, and also owns about 1 percent of Tesla, making it one of the biggest investors.

  197. 197.

    TBone

    @kindness: crap, couldn’t fix my reply (copy pasta error!).

    Fidelity

    Fidelity Management & Research Company
    This Boston-based company invested $316 million, and also owns about 1 percent of Tesla, making it one of the biggest investors.

  198. 198.

    Manyakitty

    @Geminid: oddly enough, the only Moreno ads I see are positive ones, talking about his background and plans for the future. And nothing at all from Sherrod Brown. 😬

  199. 199.

    Ghost of Joe Liebling’s Dog

    @Chris: Well, maybe not the entire reason. There was also a little bitty fuss about the New York Times having sat on the story for over a year, until Bush II had made it to a second term. Because, you know, they wouldn’t want to influence an election or anything.

  200. 200.

    Roberto el oso

    @Geminid: the problem is that whatever Brennan or Hayden knew or might have known, it appears to have made no difference at all.

  201. 201.

    Matt McIrvin

    @tam1MI: Wasn’t “A Liberal Case for Donald Trump” Walker Bragman there?

    He seems to have wised up a bit lately, isn’t supporting Trump but he still spends much of his time bashing Democrats for deep state evil whatever.

  202. 202.

    Roberto el oso

    @Matt McIrvin: I suspect Bragman will remain in the twilight of self-proclaimed leftists who are in fact working for the other side. He’s almost certainly one of the ‘Kamala is a cop’ types, and, being an entitled, comfortable, and self-important white boy it’s very unlikely he is pleased with the upfront diversity of the Dems and the enthusiasm for it from those he considers less edgy than himself.

  206. 206.

    Manyakitty

    @Geminid: of course. Because out of state voters will decide if he wins? I can’t imagine there’s not a way to target them better.

  208. 208.

    ...now I try to be amused

    @tam1MI: Speaking of Salon, I was once active on Salon’s Table Talk forum, primarily snarking on Survivor in its early seasons. I moved to Television Without Pity after activity on TT declined.

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