The fragmentation of NSA leaker Edward Snowden's story is now picking up substantial speed. As he has been since the story started,
The Daily Banter's Bob Cesca has continued to document the downfall of Snowden and Glenn Greenwald's account of "facts" coming apart.
It’s now been more than a week since Glenn Greenwald reported that
the National Security Agency attained “direct access” to servers owned
by the various tech giants, Google, Facebook, Apple and so forth. And
it’s been almost a week since other sites, now including Mother Jones, The Nation and Andrew Sullivan’s The Dish, began to notice significant issues with his reporting about PRISM.
I should underscore once again how consequential the “direct access”
line happens to be. The implication of “direct access” is clearly that,
unbeknownst to the public, the NSA and, apparently, low level IT
subcontractors, enjoyed back door access to proprietary server data,
horked it at will and, according to Greenwald, did so potentially
without a warrant. Rick Perlstein, in a post for The Nation, quoted Mark Jaquith of WordPress
who observed that the “direct access” line is “the difference between a
bombshell and a yawn of a story.” (I’m sure Perlstein and Jaquith have
been inundated with “Obamabot apologist!” accusations for daring to aim
an incredulous post in Greenwald’s direction.)
And as I've said before, the "direct access" issue is where the largest discrepancy is...but it's far from the only one. There may be a much bigger problem with Snowden handing over top secret information to the Chinese and the scramble by Greenwald and company to justify that.
He handed over documents about American cyber warfare against China — to China. Specifically, Snowden gave the documents to a Hong Kong publication.
Perhaps he was emboldened by all of the attention, hero worship and
deification he received here. Who knows. Whatever drove him to do it, it
was phenomenally irresponsible on a couple of fronts. Not only could he
have exacerbated an already dubious international relationship,
considering how there appears to be an escalating hacking war between
the United States and China, but he also managed to turn numerous
Americans against him — Americans who believe he crossed the line from
whistleblower to traitor.
But this cuts more deeply than any healthy skepticism some of us
might possess. Greenwald’s stubbornness and Snowden’s foolishness are
actually self-destructive to what they’re attempting to achieve. As I’ve
written from day one, credibility will make or break not only this
story, but anyone who chooses to blindly latch their own credibility to
it. If Greenwald was truly interested in the endurance of this story, he
would’ve stowed his ego and done whatever was necessary to preserve its
integrity as well as his own reputation; because as long as “direct
access” continues to disintegrate, so goes the believability of
everything else he’s reported. Instead, the widening holes in this story
could indicate Peak Greenwald.
That credibility is rapidly disappearing. Now we find out from Reuters (via Bob Cesca) that
Snowden may have misrepresented his education to his employers:
According to the sources, Snowden told employers he took
computer classes at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, earned a
certificate from the University of Maryland’s campus in Tokyo, and
expected in 2013 to earn a master’s degree in computer security from the
University of Liverpool in England.
A Johns Hopkins spokeswoman said she could not find a record of
Snowden’s attendance but he may have taken correspondence courses for
which records are not kept. A Maryland official confirmed Snowden
attended at least one summer class. A Liverpool spokeswoman said Snowden
registered for an online master’s degree in computer security in 2011,
but did not complete it.
Oops.
It's all starting to come apart now, a crackup at breakneck speeds and of epic proportions. Greenwald's ego and Snowden's delusions of being a master spy are blowing up in their respective faces, and if this keeps up, they're going to take down a lot of people who should have known better with them.