Jimmy Wales interviews Edward Snowden

[Poetlister]

A triumph for Wikitribune.

[Soldado Sin Nombre]

A triumph for Wikitribune.

I'm as pleasantly shocked and surprised by this as if Donald Trump hired a real climate scientist to a cabinet position. The highest quality, most intelligent thing I've seen from Jimmy Wales in many years. Now, if WikiTribune can continue such high quality, insightful interviews and journalism, perhaps it will be something of lasting value.

[Bezdomni]

Adverbially, this came out the same day that Democracy Now! had James Risen on for the hour:

The Biggest Secret: James Risen on Life as a NY Times Reporter in the Shadow of the War on Terror

and the same day that Jimmy Wales extended an olive branch to MONGO, who I suppose is either a character in Blazing Saddles or someone working for MongoDB.

I wonder what Greg would think of all this talk of censorship.

[Kumioko]

This is just Jimbo attempting to grab headlines and personally I wouldn't trust Jimbo on his word regardless of who he talks to or what he said. If he told me it was raining outside and I could here the drops on the roof, I would still go out and check with my own eyes to make sure he hadn't paid someone to stand outside and spray a hose on the roof. I wouldn't put it past him.

Everyone here and even on Wikipedia knows Jimbo is nothing but a predator, a lyer and an opportunist. All these years he has convinced the world he was the sole founder of Wikipedia when everyone knows he was little more than a front man.

No, he cannot be trusted. Not then and not now.

[Graaf Statler]

You don't understand the tactics. What Jimmy is doing, is to create a reliable wiki product. And Jimmy knows, exactly as we do, it will never be a succes.

But that does't matter. Because Jimmy, has a other goal with his Wikitribune. Clever Jimmy is wiki laundering. And that is the reason were you find everywhere Jimmy is the founder of Wikipedia and Wikitribune. To make it looks everything what is wiki is reliable. To make Wikipedia reliable in this way.

Yes, little Jimmy, maybe you can fool the world, but not me. Was the reason you kicked me out, wasn't it Jimmy?

And that was the reason for that Fact Checkers, you are the Fuckt Checkers of the world of Maher, and the reason why the first person to interview was Snowdon. To connect everything together. To launder all the wiki shit of his wiki shitheads friends in this way.

[CrowsNest]

A triumph for Wikitribune.

I'm as pleasantly shocked and surprised by this as if Donald Trump hired a real climate scientist to a cabinet position. The highest quality, most intelligent thing I've seen from Jimmy Wales in many years. Now, if WikiTribune can continue such high quality, insightful interviews and journalism, perhaps it will be something of lasting value.

Wtf? I didn't see anything in this interview that was new information. This appears to simply be Jimmy just using his own private corporation, which he has extensively marketed as the solution to agenda driven news, to advance one of his pet agendas, to keep it in the news. The reality is, Snowden is old news, one suspects he is long forgotten by every person on the planet who actually makes their living out of news writing. He has nothing new to say, and no new ways to say it, and clearly the general public, stupid as they may be, are entirely less concerned with this form of unconstitutional government over-reach, than he or Jimmy is. Even the people highly concerned with it, are at this time more concerned with the actions of Snowden's new best friends, and their possibly interference in US politics. If Jimmy wants the world to understand how truly undermining the things Snowden discovered were, to properly place them in their historical context, he should be remaining engaged with Wikipedia, because in the absence of anyone who has any strategic vision of what the site is for, be that Jimmy or his old friend Larry, they currently do an absolutely shit job of basic public education in this regard. There's copious amounts of inscrutably detailed stuff, all diligently scraped by Wikipedia's news obsessives, and court obsessives, and politics obsessives, but no real encyclopedic overview. In this regard, Jimmy is just adding to the noise.

[Poetlister]

Of course, this has the potential to be highly politically controversial. Many in the USA want to see Snowden convicted of treason, which of course is why he is living in Russia. Suppose a prominent member of the Ku Klux Klan was charged with very serious offences and fled to another country. Would Jimbo interview him, and how would people react if he did?

[Randy from Boise]

Of course, this has the potential to be highly politically controversial. Many in the USA want to see Snowden convicted of treason, which of course is why he is living in Russia. Suppose a prominent member of the Ku Klux Klan was charged with very serious offences and fled to another country. Would Jimbo interview him, and how would people react if he did?

Talk about false equivalencies..... Don't get strawman up your nose, it'll make you sneeze...

RfB

[BrillLyle]

Boy just the idea of this really annoyed me. What qualifies Jimmy Wales to do this kind of reportage. Also, blech on Snowden. I had hoped his 15 minutes were up and he would just fade away. After initially thinking what he was doing was interesting and helpful, I don't think that at all. Not an educated assumption but I think it's just not good at all he's with the Russians.

[dogbiscuit]

Surely the most obvious problem with it is that it is not balanced reporting - it is an interviewer with extreme views on the subject tossing softball questions to a fellow believer to push an agenda. This is an opinion piece pretending to be news.

[BrillLyle]

Surely the most obvious problem with it is that it is not balanced reporting - it is an interviewer with extreme views on the subject tossing softball questions to a fellow believer to push an agenda. This is an opinion piece pretending to be news.

Well said. If this is the example of WikiTribune, it's an immediate fail.

Gads I can't stand Jimmy Wales. I wish our community had better quality people representing the work. It makes me feel very self-hatred of everything. Aaaagh.

[dogbiscuit]

Surely the most obvious problem with it is that it is not balanced reporting - it is an interviewer with extreme views on the subject tossing softball questions to a fellow believer to push an agenda. This is an opinion piece pretending to be news.

Well said. If this is the example of WikiTribune, it's an immediate fail.

Gads I can't stand Jimmy Wales. I wish our community had better quality people representing the work. It makes me feel very self-hatred of everything. Aaaagh.

Snowden is not an expert on politics or privacy or anything. He is just some bloke who took a principled stand and is suffering the consequences. However, exactly as with Jimmy Wales, it is just a bunch of opinions, snazzy meaningless sound bites, ("Privacy’s not about having something to hide, privacy’s about something to protect.") but it reads like facts - in a way it is a prime example of the fake news that JW wants to get away from.

[Zoloft]

Snowden demonstrates in this interview he doesn’t know anything about how Congress works, how revolutions begin, the political atmosphere, or how much ordinary people in this country want him prosecuted. He’s self-serving slime. Actually I may be demonizing slime.

[Poetlister]

Of course, this has the potential to be highly politically controversial. Many in the USA want to see Snowden convicted of treason, which of course is why he is living in Russia. Suppose a prominent member of the Ku Klux Klan was charged with very serious offences and fled to another country. Would Jimbo interview him, and how would people react if he did?

Talk about false equivalencies..... Don't get strawman up your nose, it'll make you sneeze...

RfB

We're talking about someone widely accused of committing treason. I suppose it's OK to do so if you're sufficiently anti-American to be given safe harbour in Russia.

[Bezdomni]

[T]he fact that the Times held the NSA story for more than a year convinced Edward Snowden not to come to the paper with his trove of documents when he became a whistleblower.

source

"snazzy soundbites", dogbiscuit? Well, if you say so. His claim that "privacy is the fountainhead of all rights" is certainly very Lockean (and so is pretty capital), even if it does sound like reheated Rand.

To be fair: I'm not sure this article claims to be "news". It's an interview.

Granted, Wales does let him talk in ways the WaPo didn't let Jill Stein talk (instead she was pressed to condemn her running mate and respond to various smears... vaccines, wifi, etc.), or in ways the NY Daily News folks didn't let Bernie talk without having an answer for life, the universe and everything (while HRC was given a pass to embroider facts on Honduras)...

I would be interested in learning what Snowden gets wrong about Congress, Zoloft... nothing he said there struck me as particularly inaccurate?

[dogbiscuit]

"snazzy soundbites", dogbiscuit? Well, if you say so. His claim that "privacy is the fountainhead of all rights" is certainly very Lockean (and so is pretty capital), even if it does sound like reheated Rand.

My issue is that if you are unthinking about rights and freedoms it is very easy to make an argument based on these being absolutes. Trouble is that black and white arguments are easy to construct but ultimately don't resolve to solutions for the real world.

Rights are an artificial construct and often are sloppily applied - for example American society can get very excited over their rights of privacy and be very casual over the right to life for example. In the UK our thinking gets infected by this sloppy thinking, we are losing as a society our famed reputation for pragmatism, Brexit is an example where reasoned argument is almost impossible because it has become a black and white issue, you are not allowed to see it as a balancing act.

I see it as an American cultural imperialism thing - a lot of the Internet freedom movement is based on an extremist view of it being fundamentally wrong to have trust in government and its institutions (a lot of which is driven by Hollywood's casual use of corruption plotlines). It's not a lot different from the basement dwellers constructing arguments about porn being educational so not having to consider the consequences of treating women as sex objects.

Back to the point. Wales is selling WikiTribune as an antidote to fake news. Why then is one of his first forays a sloppy unbalanced opinion piece? How does that establish WikiTribune's credentials? All it says to me is the first thing Wales has done is the typical proprietor thing of using it to push an agenda on a subject important to himself. Where is the example of his new journalism that makes us go "Ah! That's how news should be presented."? [EDIT}...and it shows that Wales is fundamentally incapable of driving a business proposition, he cannot control his personal whims for the benefit of the business objective. (and he probably doesn't have any clue how to make the WikiTribune work aside from spouting his Big Idea over and over again).

[Poetlister]

American society can get very excited over their rights of privacy and be very casual over the right to life for example.

Many people in the US are very hot on the right to life for the unborn, even from the moment of conception. Ironically, they are often among those least worried by the death penalty or dubious police shootings.

[Bezdomni]

American society can get very excited over their rights of privacy and be very casual over the right to life for example.

Poetlister's comment just above reminded me that privacy was an important aspect of the Griswold v. Connecticut decision, which was later used as one basis for the Roe v. Wade decision. The Stanford Encylopedia of Philosophy has an interesting article on privacy. The sections on feminist criticism of the notion of separable private & public spheres is interesting in light of the #MeToo movement (The article doesn't directly mention Pateman's book The Sexual Contract, though it does reference one of her articles.)

I see it as an American cultural imperialism thing - a lot of the Internet freedom movement is based on an extremist view of it being fundamentally wrong to have trust in government and its institutions (a lot of which is driven by Hollywood's casual use of corruption plotlines).

Personally I think the history of COINTELPRO might be a more relevant reference than Pixar-Disney-Al Jazeera cultural imperialism, though at least one Tunisian emigré (a business owner) I've met here in France does agree with your point of view. (We'd been talking about the overthrow of Ben Ali in 2011.)

Back to the point. Wales is selling WikiTribune as an antidote to fake news.

Again, I'm really not sure what to say here... the interview we're discussing just cannot be viewed as a news piece, it seems more to be giving Snowden a tribune from which to express his POV. The fact that in the section on "fake news" Snowden criticizes censorship struck me as interesting given the frequency of censorship on en.wiki (justified by the fact that the WMF is a private corporation). What I found most interesting though was the timing of the release of the interview to coincide with James Risen's piece in Omidyar's The Intercept (which certainly *could* be just coincidence, I just seemed to remember photos of the interview having been done quite some time ago).

[dogbiscuit]

American society can get very excited over their rights of privacy and be very casual over the right to life for example.

Many people in the US are very hot on the right to life for the unborn, even from the moment of conception. Ironically, they are often among those least worried by the death penalty or dubious police shootings.

Exactly. It's not really a right if it is so inconsistently considered. If they can jump that intellectual hoop with such ease, they should be able to doublethink privacy.

[dogbiscuit]

Back to the point. Wales is selling WikiTribune as an antidote to fake news.

Again, I'm really not sure what to say here... the interview we're discussing just cannot be viewed as a news piece, it seems more to be giving Snowden a tribune from which to express his POV. The fact that in the section on "fake news" Snowden criticizes censorship struck me as interesting given the frequency of censorship on en.wiki (justified by the fact that the WMF is a private corporation). What I found most interesting though was the timing of the release of the interview to coincide with James Risen's piece in Omidyar's The Intercept (which certainly *could* be just coincidence, I just seemed to remember photos of the interview having been done quite some time ago).

The point is that Wales explicitly set out to create something better, and he doesn't have any idea how to go about it. He has put his name to one of the first sample articles from his Brave New World and he fails to recognise it is just the same old crap, worse, it is simply not very good journalism, it's just a fluffy magazine piece on a subject that entertains him that took very little effort to produce.

I'm actually surprised that he risked putting his name on the article given that he appears to be aiding and abetting a wanted man, but he likes the image of being a brave, outspoken man when really he is just a very naughty boy.

[Randy from Boise]

Back to the point. Wales is selling WikiTribune as an antidote to fake news.

Again, I'm really not sure what to say here... the interview we're discussing just cannot be viewed as a news piece, it seems more to be giving Snowden a tribune from which to express his POV. The fact that in the section on "fake news" Snowden criticizes censorship struck me as interesting given the frequency of censorship on en.wiki (justified by the fact that the WMF is a private corporation). What I found most interesting though was the timing of the release of the interview to coincide with James Risen's piece in Omidyar's The Intercept (which certainly *could* be just coincidence, I just seemed to remember photos of the interview having been done quite some time ago).

The point is that Wales explicitly set out to create something better, and he doesn't have any idea how to go about it. He has put his name to one of the first sample articles from his Brave New World and he fails to recognise it is just the same old crap, worse, it is simply not very good journalism, it's just a fluffy magazine piece on a subject that entertains him that took very little effort to produce.

I'm actually surprised that he risked putting his name on the article given that he appears to be aiding and abetting a wanted man, but he likes the image of being a brave, outspoken man when really he is just a very naughty boy.

linkhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plZRe1kPWZw[/link]

RfB

[Textnyymi]

Snowden demonstrates in this interview he doesn’t know anything about how Congress works, how revolutions begin, the political atmosphere, or how much ordinary people in this country want him prosecuted. He’s self-serving slime. Actually I may be demonizing slime.

Snowden has been a thorn in some sides... for you! But what about people living in other countries? What do they think about this?

[Poetlister]

Snowden demonstrates in this interview he doesn’t know anything about how Congress works, how revolutions begin, the political atmosphere, or how much ordinary people in this country want him prosecuted. He’s self-serving slime. Actually I may be demonizing slime.

Snowden has been a thorn in some sides... for you! But what about people living in other countries? What do they think about this?

I doubt that most people living in other countries give two hoots about him.