News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:The Intercept cuts back by kodz4 on Sunday March 17, 2019 @05:56AM (#19413187)
Glenn Greenwald spends too much time on Twitter railing imho when that time could gave been spent doing Journalism.

It was the in depth journalism that he originally did that made Snowden contact him. Not the current 75 tweets a day on everything under the sun.

Ideally journalists need to get off Twitter. It's a waste of their time. Especially the pointless fact checking of bullshit. I'd rather see and PAY for one Spotlight story a year than 24x7x365 days of tweeting.

Re:The Intercept cuts back by DyslexicAtheist on Sunday March 17, 2019 @06:30AM (#19413296)
The Intercept has become a pretty large organization that goes well beyond the vision (and personal views) of Greenwald.

GG has no doubt upset a lot of powerful people who want to see him fall professionally (or even worse). It's not surprising that he has his hands full on twitter fending off attacks. I don't think GG or his staff are only on Twitter in order to find scoops and topics for regurgitation (or that twitter is automatically a problem affecting the magazines output).

The Drone Papers[1] released in 2015 by Jeremy Scahill were an outstanding piece of writing.

In 2016 they revealed[2] that a AT&T site in NYC hosts a secret NSA surveillance site

It is probably hard to create such hits on a regular basis especially when their new content will always be judged on their previous (first) successes

I don't see the quality of their reporting being reduced though, but fwiw they did expand into a more mainstream political sphere which isn't always about tech-conspiracies (NSA, Snowden, Drone-papers) and so they have to compete with other outlets that cover the same stuff. If they have become less edgy (more "blah") than they used to be maybe less funding will be good for them and they'll find their roots again.

[1] https://theintercept.com/drone-papers/

[2] https://theintercept.com/2016/11/16/the-nsas-spy-hub-in-new-...

Re:The Intercept cuts back by Scipio_Afri on Sunday March 17, 2019 @08:13AM (#19413582)
I'm a bit confused, if NSA mission is to be able to spy on other counties' military operations, why wouldn't that include the ability to intercept communications coming from outside the country or information going out from suspected spys? What I'm saying is the facility in NYC is not at all surprising, there are a ton of fiber cables that come in from overseas into NYC. Anyone with half a brain about internet infrastructure and has ever read any of the mission directives or legal authorities of NSA will realize exactly what they're doing there. That is looking at cyber operations/attacks coming into the country and looking for covert communications from people who are trying to influence our government for their foreign government's military or economic benefit.

Also, for what it is worth, NSA is also pretty important in ensuring weapons proliferation and military equipment movements (which helps indicate possibly wars, covert actions or invasions) using measurements of various types to track nuclear, biological and other weapons. That is fairly essential for upholding and enforcing international laws and treaties.

Finally I'm also confused when people say "domestic" tracking. Basically the NSA had databases they could look at if given legal authority to do so (meaning they think someone is a spy and show evidence of that) to see interactions between a person and other people (who they call, how often, where their phone is, etc). Apparently it seems now they just have to request or, like anyone else, buy that data from the telecoms instead of it being in house.

Re:The Intercept cuts back by DyslexicAtheist on Sunday March 17, 2019 @09:54AM (#19414024)
> Anyone with half a brain about internet infrastructure and has ever read any of the mission directives or legal authorities of NSA will realize exactly what they're doing there.

It's a good thing when long running rumors can be corroborated, so labeling this as non-info is somewhat unfair. News in Europe of cell towers listening-in on national parliaments discussion or phones being directly targeted, make scary headlines outside in Europe or anywhere outside US. This story drove home the same message to Americans: that it's not just something the NSA does overseas to "keep us save". The story also made sense since it continued the established narrative from previously published Snowden leaks in The Intercept.

> NSA is also pretty important in ensuring weapons proliferation and military equipment movements (which helps indicate possibly wars, covert actions or invasions) using measurements of various types to track nuclear, biological and other weapons

as a non US citizen, this deeply terrifies me (even without the current geo-policial climate).

edit: reduce waffle

Re:The Intercept cuts back by forinti on Sunday March 17, 2019 @06:35AM (#19413314)
IMHO, Greenwald is producing the best journalism in Brazil at the moment.

Unfortunately, most of what is produced in Brazil is just the opinion of the journalist or, worse, his boss's. In fact, a local journalist once admitted the only thing he ever read was his own paper and nobody thought anything of it (Paulo Sant'Ana from Zero Hora). If you think about it, the big names in Brazil, like the recently deceased Boechat or Reinaldo Azevedo, spend all day in different medias. Where would they get the time to investigate anything?

Re:The Intercept cuts back by HillRat on Sunday March 17, 2019 @10:50AM (#19414293)
I’m overall no fan of GG, but it seems (speaking as an outsider) he had the goods on Bolsonaro before the election, and his husband is now in the literal firing line as a gay, liberal Congressman in a time of rising right-wing violence. I’m not sure Greenwald has been effective or even all that salutary in regards to US politics and policies, but he might just be the journalist Brazil needs now.
Re:The Intercept cuts back by objektif on Sunday March 17, 2019 @07:54PM (#19417613)
Hold on why would anyone not be a fan of GG. Do you know anything that I should as well?
Re:The Intercept cuts back by danso on Sunday March 17, 2019 @07:24PM (#19417454)
I remember Greenwald being known for being an outspoken, opinionated writer. Maybe his Twitter presence today projects a different image than his blogging presence back in the day. But I was under the impression that Greenwald tendency of "railing" about things, like the Iraq War, was what made Snowden aware and trusting of Greenwald:

https://thetyee.ca/Books/2014/05/30/No-Place-to-Hide/

> In my own exploration of the blogosphere over a decade ago, I soon ran across Glenn Greenwald. In some ways he seemed to break the rules of writing online: he wrote long blog posts composed of long sentences in long paragraphs. His blocks of text did not welcome, but I read them anyway. So did thousands of others.

> In the process of blogging, Greenwald helped form a community of interest, just as opposing communities formed to support Bush and his policies. In forming his community, Greenwald eventually drew the attention of a young man who’d been mostly hanging out in techie communities: Edward Snowden.

Re:The Intercept cuts back by kodz4 on Monday March 18, 2019 @05:03AM (#19419581)
Long blog posts requires more thought and work than his current tweeting. The kind that you usually find in Books in a Library. Twitter content is what you find in the garbage bins of writers. I don't think Twitter has helped Greenwald evolve into something better.
Re:The Intercept cuts back by sz4kerto on Sunday March 17, 2019 @07:54AM (#19413520)
We have something similar in Hungary -- a group of journalists living off donations who produce a few big stories a year. It's not an easy way of making a living.
Re:The Intercept cuts back by Tsubasachan on Sunday March 17, 2019 @09:12AM (#19413823)
Well its difficult making money with writing things people don't want to hear.

How many people in the US or Hungary want to read about everything that is wrong in the country? Isn't it much easier to believe that everything is great?

Re:The Intercept cuts back by jkestner on Sunday March 17, 2019 @12:00PM (#19414656)
Not exactly. The US media is happy to sell us bad news that reinforces our own sense of moral superiority. What we don't like is non-partisan news that challenges it.
Re:The Intercept cuts back by ReptileMan on Sunday March 17, 2019 @07:32AM (#19413464)
He also took a very hard stand in the culture war, where for his business being neutral would have been probably better in the long-ish term.
Re:The Intercept cuts back by AlexCoventry on Sunday March 17, 2019 @12:34PM (#19414830)
What was his stand, there?
Re:The Intercept cuts back by ReptileMan on Sunday March 17, 2019 @12:40PM (#19414880)
The intercept started on laser focus on privacy and state surveillance and turned into full blown sj outlet later on. And that is crowded space lately. So it is hard to get good ROI.
Re:The Intercept cuts back by objektif on Sunday March 17, 2019 @07:55PM (#19417617)
You also might get a better return for your time on TD than HN.
Re:The Intercept cuts back by ReptileMan on Monday March 18, 2019 @07:11AM (#19420129)
Personal attack. Mediocre.

Anyway the intercept went from having interesting articles you can only read there to having run off the mill articles that you can read literally anywhere else. So you have no reason to read there. A hard hitting report about eric prince could be read only in the intercept. If you want to write hot takes about how terrible Trump or Bolsonaro is you compete with literally every other big outlet there is. And they lost.

Re:The Intercept cuts back by MockObject on Monday March 18, 2019 @11:12AM (#19421708)
What's TD?
Re:The Intercept cuts back by harry8 on Sunday March 17, 2019 @10:19PM (#19418247)
It's been a while since I read Glenn. I'm not remotely left but usually find him a good read, well reasoned and well argued from evidence. From there you can disagree or not as you choose. So given this comment I thought I'd read his twitter feed.

Holy s&t!

Wow. So a bunch of senior US politicians have been telling lies to try and start a war in Venezuela and most of the US media has been parroting those lies without any checking or indeed re-enforcing the lies with their own lies, in CNN's case. The New York Times finally got off their backsides and called it. Wow. Yeah write that Glenn, tweet it too. And while you're at it shame the hell out of those people impersonating journalists who did that and have not retracted it as being entirely* false.

Wow.

Yeah so this is why people hate on Glenn. He's good and that's super inconvenient for the corrupt. He's actually really good. I wish there was someone less leftist as good as he is. I really do. But yeah, read Glenn, disagree with him by all means, I do, often. But read, he has something to say about things you should probably know and be thinking about.

Re:The Intercept cuts back by balladeer on Sunday March 17, 2019 @09:02AM (#19413789)
Is there a tool that gives the average daily/weekly tweeting frequency of an account for last few months or just overall? I often have to unfollow already followed twitter accounts that, even though they are interesting, tweet too much effectively drowning other accounts' tweets which are not that aggressive and I end up unfollowing them. I wish there was a tool that I can decide right in the beginning whether they tweet a lot - find such accounts easily among the ones I follow. (I check Twitter occasionally - once or twice in a day or 2-3 days)
Re:The Intercept cuts back by badideaprojects on Sunday March 17, 2019 @11:18AM (#19414446)
You might like this tool https://github.com/x0rz/tweets_analyzer

Primarily designed with OSINT in mind but covers tweet frequency, among other functions:

- Average tweet activity, by hour and by day of the week

- Timezone and language set for the Twitter interface

- Sources used (mobile application, web browser, ...)

- Geolocations

- Most used hashtags, most retweeted users and most mentioned users

- Friends analysis based on most frequent timezones/languages

Re:The Intercept cuts back by watwut on Sunday March 17, 2019 @08:16AM (#19413592)
Greenwald is just one journalist among multiple intercept journalists. He is not leading or managing the group.
Re:The Intercept cuts back by objektif on Sunday March 17, 2019 @07:53PM (#19417608)
I 100% disagree with you. There are not many influential people doing what ge is doing in twitter. I would rather see him post on twitter and reach out to more people than release articles that only few read.
Re:The Intercept cuts back by _Codemonkeyism on Sunday March 17, 2019 @06:03AM (#19413213)
Last time I've said this, I got a huge karma hit, but I'd say it again: Greenwald is a political activist not a journalist. I had huge expectations in investigative journalism with The Intercept, but for me it failed.

But it looks like it wants to stay that course, with

"said it could no longer afford its research team, and was eliminating those jobs as part of a 4 percent cut in its workforce."

+100 for

"I'd rather see and PAY for one Spotlight story a year than 24x7x365 days of tweeting"