{"id":57855,"date":"2021-05-14T06:11:12","date_gmt":"2021-05-14T11:11:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=57855"},"modified":"2021-05-14T06:11:12","modified_gmt":"2021-05-14T11:11:12","slug":"reporters-once-challenged-the-spy-state-now-theyre-agents-of-it","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=57855","title":{"rendered":"Reporters Once Challenged the Spy State. Now, They’re Agents of It"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Reporters Once Challenged the Spy State. Now, They’re Agents of It<\/a><\/h3>\n

News companies are pioneering a new brand of vigilante reporting, partnering with spy agencies they once oversaw<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Former CIA director John Brennan was a media villain, now he\u2019s media himself.<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

What a difference a decade makes.<\/p>\n

Just over ten years ago, on July 25, 2010, Wikileaks released\u00a075,000 secret U.S. military reports involving the war in Afghanistan<\/a>.\u00a0The New York Times, The Guardian<\/em>, and\u00a0Der Spiegel<\/em>\u00a0helped release the documents, which were devastating to America\u2019s intelligence community and military, revealing systemic abuses that included civilian massacres and an assassination squad, TF 373, whose existence the United States\u00a0kept \u201cprotected<\/a>\u201d even from its allies.<\/p>\n

The Afghan War logs came out at the beginning of a historic stretch of true oppositional journalism, when outlets like\u00a0Le Monde, El Pais, Der Spiegel, The Guardian, The New York Times,\u00a0<\/em>and others partnered with sites like Wikileaks. Official secrets were exposed on a scale not seen since the Church Committee hearings of the seventies, as reporters pored through 250,000 American diplomatic cables, secret files about every detainee at Guantanamo Bay, and hundreds of thousands of additional documents about everything from the Iraq war to coverups of environmental catastrophes, among other things helping trigger the \u201cArab Spring.\u201d<\/p>\n

There was an attempt at a response \u2014 companies like Amazon, Master Card, Visa, and Paypal shut Wikileaks off, and the Pentagon flooded the site with a \u201cdenial of service\u201d attack \u2014 but leaks continued. One person inspired by the revelations was former NSA contractor Edward Snowden, who came forward to unveil an illegal domestic surveillance program, a story that won an Oscar and a Pulitzer Prize for documentarian Laura Poitras and reporters Glenn Greenwald and Jeremy Scahill. By 2014, members of Congress in both parties were calling for the resignations of CIA chief John Brennan and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, both of whom had been caught lying to congress.<\/p>\n

The culmination of this period came when billionaire eBay founder Pierre Omidyar launched\u00a0The Intercept\u00a0<\/em>in February 2014. The outlet was devoted to sifting through Snowden\u2019s archive of leaked secrets, and its\u00a0first story<\/a>\u00a0described how the NSA and CIA frequently made errors using geolocation to identify and assassinate drone targets. A few months later, former CIA and NSA director Michael Hayden admitted, \u201cWe kill people based on metadata.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reporters Once Challenged the Spy State. Now, They’re Agents of It News companies are pioneering a new brand of vigilante reporting, partnering with spy agencies they once oversaw Former CIA director John Brennan was a media villain, now he\u2019s media himself. What a difference a decade makes. Just over ten years ago, on July 25, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[135,379,462,496,3733,512,655,28835,5906,880],"class_list":["post-57855","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-liberty","tag-cia","tag-government","tag-journalism","tag-mainstream-media","tag-matt-taibbi","tag-media","tag-propaganda","tag-us-central-intelligence-agency","tag-us-intelligence","tag-wikileaks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57855","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=57855"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57855\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":57856,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57855\/revisions\/57856"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=57855"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=57855"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=57855"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}