I've been spending the past six or so hours trying to catch up with a story that I missed in December and, somehow, failed to see covered in any of the leftish sites and sources that will usually cover any aspect of the Greenwald-Snowden PR machine wall to wall. How did I fail to notice anyone giving serious coverage to the fact that Greenwald's Pay Pal tycoon sugar daddy Pierre Omidya, has cooperated with NSA requests for information from Pay Pal. That cooperation made not surprising due to the fact that his co-founder Max Levchin is a big NSA supporter. Once I read the stories it was a little surprising to remember that the man who gave Greenwald $250 Million to be his best friend also cut off Wikileaks.
Now, one of the first things that disturbed me about this whole thing was discovering that Edward Snowden, the man who stole 10,000, or 20,000, or.... 1.7 million documents (the figure is ever rising) worked, not for the NSA but for the contractor Booz Allen Hamilton, a company with extensive Bush-Cheney ties. It seemed to me to be a bad idea to have a company like that be in the business of spying on us to start with. And then they hire Edward Snowden who stole enormous amounts of secret information and brings it to first China and the Russia. Well, it would seem that in this remarkably cosy circle, Greenwald's backers also have ties to Booz Allen Hamilton.
As principal shareholder and chairman of eBay, Omidyar controls eBay’s child company, PayPal. PayPal has recently made headlines for prosecuting the so-called “PayPal 14,” the hacktivists who staged a virtual ‘sit in’ in protest of PayPal’s decision to cut off Wikileaks’ funding by organizing a Denial of Service attack on PayPal’s website. PayPal was co-founded by Max Levchin, a dedicated NSA supporter.
More worrying still, Sal Gambianco, one of the principal investment partners with the Omidyar Network, actually sits on theboard of advisors of Globant, a software company in which both the Omidyar Network and Booz Allen Hamilton, Snowden’s former employer, are major shareholders. Philip Odeen, one of the Booz Allen Hamilton board members, also sits on the Board of Directors of Globant. The Omidyar Network and Booz Allen Hamilton are also both major investors in Innocentive.
Yet somehow none of these concerns are enough for Greenwald’s most ardent supporters to even raise the question of how he is using his personal collection of leaked NSA files and who he is getting into bed with financially to do so.
While I would normally have waited until I'd read a lot more and understood a lot more of what I'm reading, I have to say that the more I read this the more it stinks of, sorry to have to use the word, a total ratfucking operation. I don't trust anyone involved, I strongly suspect that this entire thing was orchestrated to further the goals of those behind Booz Allen Hamilton and they have played everyone, including the Obama hating Greenwald pretty effectively. This stinks, it really stinks and one of the things that stinks the most of it is watching the alleged left get played by a bunch of libertarian-right wing thugs masquerading as heroes of the left.
Why isn't this getting the attention that something this disturbing should be getting? That it isn't reveals just how superficial the "new media" online really is. The deification of Snowden and Greenwald prevents it from looking hard at what is, apparently, already known about the sleazy interconnections that have the so-called whistle blower and his main media outlet in bed with the business partners of Booz Allen and, through them, the very NSA and the Republican establishment that may well benefit from the damage Greenwald et al have done to Barack Obama. That this all leads back to those with connections to the Bush family should certainly give anyone who remembers the worst administration in our history six short years ago nightmares. Yet the carnival of the lefty blogs, their distractions and regular minutes of hate, goes on, resting secure in the knowledge that the great and glorious Glenn is on the case.
For more The Snowden Effect: From Governmentalized to Privatized & Commoditized
JP Sottile Greenwald’s Twitter War Over PayPal-NSA Allegations
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