Absolutions | a.nolen

I found this pair hiding under my bed.

If you read this blog regularly, you’ll know I have an unorthodox take on the Snowden affair. In a nutshell, I believe the following:

Snowden drew attention to himself from US intelligence during the month (at least) he tried to find a media outlet for the NSA documents he leaked. Laura Poitras is part of the response by US intelligence: Glenn Greenwald and Jacob Appelbaum are, essentially, her creatures. Greenwald is a misguided, narcissistic, idealist who is drunk on attention and is now making bad choices. Appelbaum is managed opposition, and is employed by US intelligence to promote its TOR network, which allows the Pentagon to spy on people who self-select to use TOR. (TOR may also allow US operatives to send information more securely in hostile countries, by hiding behind a bunch ‘security-minded’ neophytes to soft-power ops.)

Appelbaum’s involvement with the US Navy through TOR is well known; Poitras has tried to use Snowden to gain credibility for Appelbaum. The goal is to preserve TOR as a US intelligence asset; US relationships with Microsoft, Facebook, Google, Apple… are all assets that have been fatally compromised.

Or have they?

Twitter provides some really interesting insights into this containment operation. Jacob Appelbaum Tweeted this yesterday:

Which even his supporters found a little strange.

I find Appelbaum’s tweet strange too, strange enough to post about it. Has Appelbaum made the first step in an attempt to salvage credibility for these very valuable intelligence assets, starting with Google? I believe that the ‘outing’ of these assets is far more damaging to the Five Eyes cabal than anything to do with spying on other countries and I’ve believed that from the start, for reasons I’ve described here and here.  I also believe that the brouhaha over spying in Germany, Brazil, etc. is designed to distract from the truly damaging information about these private companies– especially when so many intelligence outfits were also benefiting from the NSA’s private partnerships.

Appelbaum is a copious tweeter, he must have a lot of free time. To paraphrase my mother-in-law: it’s unhealthy for a young man not to work. But Appelbaum is not alone– there are a shocking number of young men and women on both sides of the Snowden debate who appear to be paid to tweet.

Which begs the question, who is this tweeting valuable to? That question can be answered by looking at the arguments given (and those not given) by both sides.

Snowden’s tweet-heavy detractors want to focus on the ‘traitor’ angle and that the NSAs abuses are just big ‘misunderstandings’. Curiously, they do not call out Poitras on Appelbaum’s Navy connections– Appelbaum is famous because of the Navy’s ‘charitable’ endeavor with the TOR network, and because Appelbaum helped the FBI become more tech-savvy (before that was uncool). These points ought to be low-hanging fruit for the NSA shills. But they don’t wanna call attention to TOR, or Appelbaum’s military/law-enforcement past.

Neither do Snowden’s detractors call Greenwald out on Omidyar’s PAYPAL connection, and the ugly consequences that connection has for his media venture, given the star journalists’ cooperation with Wikileaks. They don’t wanna call attention to Omidyar’s previous politics.

Why don’t the detractors make these connections? ‘Cause that would be an own-goal.

Snowden’s tweet-heavy supporters have jumped on the “outraged Merkel” bandwagon as fiercely as his detractors, which only serves to distract from the important stuff. On top of that, supporters have a tendency to tie all sorts of other ‘social justice’ causes onto Snowden’s revelations, which is an even bigger distraction. Whoever is running @EJosephSnowden, an unverified twitter account, is particularly guilty of this. (My guess is that the owner isn’t a Snowden supporter at all.)

The result of all this is a tsunami of Snowden-related tweets that have very little to do with what Snowden says he intended to do by releasing the NSA documents; he intended to ‘out’ governments spying on their own, innocent, citizens. White noise drowns meaningful information, just as Snowden cautioned Applebaum against doing prior to the IALANA conference in August.

So, isn’t it funny that everybody who’s paid to tweet is pulling on the same rope? Now, who could possibly 1) have the money to pay a bunch of young people to do nothing AND 2) benefit from drawing attention away from the NSA’s private-company intelligence assets? Those damn Russians again!

Like this:

LikeLoading...