Words matter. These are the best Glenn Greenwald Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Obama supporters pretended that his 2008 campaign was some sort of populist uprising even as Wall Street overwhelmingly supported his candidacy.
The American Right has an amazing ability to lionize leaders whose lives are the precise antithesis of the political values that define their image.
Very few people use landline phones for much of anything. So when you talk about things like online chat and social media messages and emails, what you’re really talking about is the full extent of human communication.
When I was talking to strangers over the Internet in the 1990s, there would be a much more intense connection because they’re disembodied, so it’s just your brain and your soul interacting with this other person, and it just frees you up in this incredibly empowering way.
The definition of an extreme authoritarian is one who is willing blindly to assume that government accusations are true without any evidence presented or opportunity to contest those accusations.
If establishment journalists were to replicate actual stenography, it would be an improvement on most of the work they produce.
The single most remarkable (and revealing) fact of the Obama presidency may very well be the lack of a single prosecution of Wall Street executives for the massive fraud that precipitated the 2008 financial crisis.
It isn’t those of us who oppose American aggression in the Muslim world who need manipulative, exploitative reminders about 9/11; it’s those who cheer for these policies who are making a follow-up attack ever more likely.
The primary theory embraced by the Bush administration to justify its War on Terror policies was that the ‘battlefield’ is no longer confined to identifiable geographical areas, but instead, the entire globe is now one big, unlimited ‘battlefield.’
I think Dianne Feinstein may be the most Orwellian political official in Washington. It is hard to imagine having a government more secretive than the United States.
Government and businesses cannot function without enormous amounts of data, and many people have to have access to that data.
Ultimately, the reason privacy is so vital is it’s the realm in which we can do all the things that are valuable as human beings. It’s the place that uniquely enables us to explore limits, to test boundaries, to engage in novel and creative ways of thinking and being.
You can’t have a pristine house with ten dogs, and I’d rather have the ten dogs.
A common criticism of establishment journalists entails comparing them to stenographers, on the ground that most of them do little more than mindlessly write down and uncritically repeat what government officials say.
I absolutely believe that another 9/11 is possible.
Whatever one thinks of the justifiability of drone attacks, it’s one of the least ‘brave’ or courageous modes of warfare ever invented. It’s one thing to call it just, but to pretend it’s ‘brave’ is Orwellian in the extreme.
It shouldn’t take extreme courage and a willingness to go to prison for decades or even life to blow the whistle on bad government acts done in secret. But it does. And that is an immense problem for democracy, one that all journalists should be united in fighting.
A key purpose of journalism is to provide an adversarial check on those who wield the greatest power by shining a light on what they do in the dark, and informing the public about those acts.
There is a massive apparatus within the United States government that with complete secrecy has been building this enormous structure that has only one goal, and that is to destroy privacy and anonymity, not just in the United States, but around the world.
An elite class that is free to operate without limits – whether limits imposed by the rule of law or fear of the responses from those harmed by their behavior – is an elite class that will plunder, degrade, and cheat at will, and act endlessly to fortify its own power.
Free speech rights means that government officials are barred from creating lists of approved and disapproved political ideas and then using the power of the state to enforce those preferences.
It is true that the Internet can be used to disseminate falsehoods quickly, but it just as quickly roots them out and exposes them in a way that the traditional model of journalism and its closed, insular, one-way form of communication could never do.
Whistleblowers are typically rendered incommunicado, either because they’re in hiding, or advised by their lawyers to stay silent, or imprisoned. As a result, the public hears only about them, but never from them, which makes their demonization virtually inevitable.
Surveillance breeds conformity.
The Obama administration does not hate unauthorized leaks of classified information. They are more responsible for such leaks than anyone. What they hate are leaks that embarrass them or expose their wrongdoing. Those are the only kinds of leaks that are prosecuted.
There’s a perennial debate about whether the propagandistic tripe produced by establishment media outlets is shaped more by evil or by stupidity. Personally, I think it’s both: a healthy dose of each is needed. The system design is malicious, while those who serve as its public face are generally vacant.
There are few things more dangerous in a democracy than allowing a President to wage secret wars without the knowledge of the country.
I’ve always thought stability was suffocating and deadly. Like, when I read that the kids I went to law school with have stayed at the same firm, I feel like I’m reading an obituary. How much money do you need? Six million, seven million? Put that in the bank and do something else. Get out!
The Obama administration says we only destroy the privacy of non-Americans. That is not true. The government is spying on Americans.
As for the claim that drone ‘pilots’ are not engaged in the extinguishing of human life via video games, the military’s own term for its drone kills – ‘bug splat,’ which happens to be the name of a children’s video game – and other evidence negates that.
Who cares if virtually the entire world views Obama’s drone attacks as unjustified and wrong? Who cares if the Muslim world continues to seethe with anti-American animus as a result of this aggression? Empires do what they want.
‘Terrorism’ itself is not an objective term or legitimate object of study, but was conceived of as a highly politicized instrument and has been used that way ever since.
What made Guantanamo such a travesty – and what still makes it such – is that it is a system of indefinite detention whereby human beings are put in cages for years and years without ever being charged with a crime.
