Daily Archives: October 22, 2013

Richard Cohen: Edward Snowden is no traitor

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At last, the penny is beginning to drop. Edward Snowden is in the same mould as Daniel Ellsberg. What makes this WashPo column by Richard Cohen so welcome is that he was one of the early and fiercest journalistic denouncers of Snowden.

What are we to make of Edward Snowden? I know what I once made of him. He was no real whistleblower, I wrote, but “ridiculously cinematic” and “narcissistic” as well. As time has proved, my judgments were just plain wrong. Whatever Snowden is, he is curiously modest and has bent over backward to ensure that the information he has divulged has done as little damage as possible. As a “traitor,” he lacks the requisite intent and menace.

But traitor is what Snowden has been roundly called. Harry Reid: “I think Snowden is a traitor.” John Boehner: “He’s a traitor.” Rep. Peter King: “This guy is a traitor; he’s a defector.” And Dick Cheney not only denounced Snowden as a “traitor” but also suggested that he might have shared information with the Chinese. This innuendo, as with Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction, is more proof of Cheney’s unerring determination to be cosmically wrong.

And this:

My initial column on Snowden was predicated on the belief that, really, nothing he revealed was new. Didn’t members of Congress know all this stuff and hadn’t much of it leaked? Yes, that’s largely true. But my mouth is agape at the sheer size of these data-gathering programs — a cascade of news stories that leads me to conclude that this very column was known to the National Security Agency before it was known to my editors. I also wrote that “No one lied about the various programs” Snowden disclosed. But then we found out that James Clapper did. The director of national intelligence was asked at a Senate hearing in March if “the story that we have millions or hundreds of millions of dossiers on people is completely false” and he replied that it was. Actually, it was his answer that was “completely false.”

And while we’re on the topic, how come that a very senior US official can lie under oath to Congress and not be fired?

So Facebook thinks that videos of beheadings are ok, but exposed nipples are not

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Facebook has just made an idiotic decision — that videos of beheadings can be shown on the site. Jonathan Freedland explains why Zuck & Co have got it spectacularly wrong.

Which brings us to the nub of the matter. Facebook and the other social media giants are reluctant to be thought of as akin to news organisations or even publishers. They want to be seen as something looser and vaguer, a mere arena for others. There are good reasons for that: social media are indeed different.

But there is a less noble motive behind that reluctance too. Publishers are responsible for the content they publish and Facebook and the others don’t want that level of responsibility: for one thing, maintaining standards requires people, which costs money.

But it’s getting harder and harder to maintain the pretence that Facebook doesn’t make editorial judgments, including ones that have serious consequences. It does – and it’s just made a very bad one.

Personally, I’m baffled by the decision. Facebook isn’t a public space: it’s like a shopping mall — i.e. a space controlled by its proprietor. Would any sane such proprietor allow public executions — or representations of same — in its space?