> He seems to be treading over the same ground over and over again without revealing anything particularly new.
He has to, to have any chance of what he's saying actually sticking. Do you follow his Twitter feed? People routinely accuse him of holding opinions exactly opposite to his actual ones, even though he's been writing about them and publishing in newspapers and books for years. There are a huge number of confused, ignorant noisemakers twisting everything.
Maybe it seems slow to you, but there's been more groundbreaking stuff in the last month or so than in all previous years of my whole life, so I'm willing to give him and his collaborators time to triple-check everything before publishing so that the stories are absolutely unassailable.
I think Greenwald is exactly the right guy to be doing this. I hope my life and chance affords me the opportunity to help him someday, maybe one millionth as much as he's helping us.
And what do you mean "more groundbreaking stuff in the last month or so than in all previous years of my whole life"? What year span are we talking about, here?
People understanding. Unless you follow Greenwald's Twitter feed or watch him interact with others in some other way, it's hard to imagine how many people misunderstand the most basic facts of these stories.
> What year span are we talking about, here?
Does it matter? I'm 34, but I think my statement would still make sense if I was twice that age. We're getting new stories with solid evidence of massive criminality by the US government weekly. I've never seen anything like it.
The WikiLeaks cables, I feel, are of more significance than the Snowden leaks, if only because the American people a) kind of had some idea that the government was spying on them already and b) the WikiLeaks cables contained much more direct data. Snowden has given us some data, such as the slideshow on PRISM and the FISA court documents re: Verizon, but much of the outrage regarding the NSA's pervasiveness is about what they could do with that data rather than what they have done, as was/is with the WikiLeaks cables.
And I don't think this will ever stick with the public, no matter how many times it's repeated. Like I said, people don't tend to care about the final step between the supposition that something's occurring "the government's watching your every communication" and actual evidence of such a thing occurring "we can show that the government has been watching your every communication". Once the assumption has saturated the American consciousness, it's not much of a news story when that assumption is "merely" proven to be true.
Previously, _serious_ belief (rather than a sneaking suspicion) that the feds collected everything was considered to be ... eccentric. Similar to claims that the government staged 9/11, or that we have alien bodies and hardware at Area 51. Court cases that reference this have been thrown out on the basis that "you can't prove that anything like that has happened to you".
Now, we have pretty concrete proof that that is NOT a silly belief to have, and that the government really does record everything it possibly can. Pretty much any nerd with sufficient understanding of the technology, and/or who has read very much in the cyberpunk literary genre, has probably always suspected this, but now we have proof.
I don't mean to belittle the Wikileaks cables: they showed that the US and our allies were often lying to locals. In this case, however, Snowden's leak shows that our government has been lying to US, about something that violates the literal founding principles of our country. I think that why so many people are considering this a Really Big Deal.
ECHELON[1] showed us precisely what you call a "conspiracy" theory to be provably true. If ECHELON is a conspiracy theory, then the Snowden leaks are a singular whisper in a backroom, relatively speaking. We've had that "concrete proof" (which the Snowden leaks are not, by the way) for nearly fifteen years.
As for the US government lying to its people, we've known about that too for at least 40 years [2]. According to one CBS article, lying politicians are one of the "three things most Americans take as an article of faith"[3]. It's simply not a big deal. Take the Iraq war and WMDs as another example of the US government lying to its people.[4]
Hell, if you've watched The Newsroom's first season, you'd have seen a whole multi-episode story arc about an NSA whistleblower revealing extensive spying going on at a level thus far unprecedented. [5] Did Aaron Sorkin and the rest of The Newsroom writers have special information on PRISM, or is it just so ingrained in the American psyche that it was entirely predictable and fully plausible? Keep in mind this was MONTHS before Snowden.
Simply put, the Snowden leaks are a "no shit" for most people. The majority now believe he did the wrong thing, according to a recent poll[6]. Also worth noting in that same poll, "Forty-eight percent of respondents to the poll said that they support prosecuting Snowden for his actions, while 33 percent were opposed."
He has to, to have any chance of what he's saying actually sticking. Do you follow his Twitter feed? People routinely accuse him of holding opinions exactly opposite to his actual ones, even though he's been writing about them and publishing in newspapers and books for years. There are a huge number of confused, ignorant noisemakers twisting everything.
Maybe it seems slow to you, but there's been more groundbreaking stuff in the last month or so than in all previous years of my whole life, so I'm willing to give him and his collaborators time to triple-check everything before publishing so that the stories are absolutely unassailable.
I think Greenwald is exactly the right guy to be doing this. I hope my life and chance affords me the opportunity to help him someday, maybe one millionth as much as he's helping us.