{"id":185802,"date":"2014-08-12T09:30:00","date_gmt":"2014-08-12T14:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2014\/08\/12\/why-i-dont-give-to-npr-on-pledge-week-part-infinity\/"},"modified":"2014-08-12T09:30:00","modified_gmt":"2014-08-12T14:30:00","slug":"why-i-dont-give-to-npr-on-pledge-week-part-infinity","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2014\/08\/12\/why-i-dont-give-to-npr-on-pledge-week-part-infinity\/","title":{"rendered":"Why I Don’t Give to NPR on Pledge Week, Part Infinity"},"content":{"rendered":"

The first reason is their Jihad against community owned low power radio stations<\/a>, and now they quote a consulting firm that is bought and paid for by the CIA to condemn Snowden’s NSA Leaks<\/a>:<\/p>\n

On August 1, NPR\u2019s Morning Edition broadcast a story by NPR national security reporter Dina Temple-Raston touting explosive claims from what she called \u201ca tech firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts.\u201d That firm, Recorded Future, worked together with \u201ca cyber expert, Mario Vuksan, the CEO of ReversingLabs,\u201d to produce a new report that purported to vindicate the repeated accusation from U.S. officials that \u201crevelations from former NSA contract worker Edward Snowden harmed national security and allowed terrorists to develop their own countermeasures.\u201d<\/span>

<\/span>The \u201cbig data firm,\u201d reported NPR, says that it now \u201chas tangible evidence\u201d proving the government\u2019s accusations. Temple-Raston\u2019s four-minute, 12-second story devoted the first 3 minutes and 20 seconds to uncritically repeating the report\u2019s key conclusion that \u201djust months after the Snowden documents were released, al-Qaeda dramatically changed the way its operatives interacted online\u201d and, post-Snowden, \u201cal-Qaeda didn\u2019t just tinker at the edges of its seven-year-old encryption software; it overhauled it.\u201d The only skepticism in the NPR report was relegated to 44 seconds at the end when she quoted security expert Bruce Schneier, who questioned the causal relationship between the Snowden disclosures and the new terrorist encryption programs, as well as the efficacy of the new encryption.<\/span>

<\/span>With this report, Temple-Raston seriously misled NPR\u2019s millions of listeners. To begin with, Recorded Future, the outfit that produced the government-affirming report, is anything but independent. To the contrary, it is funded by the CIA and U.S. intelligence community with millions of dollars. Back in 2010, it also filed forms to become a vendor for the NSA. (In response to questions from The Intercept, the company\u2019s vice president Jason Hines refused to say whether it works for the NSA, telling us that we should go FOIA that information if we want to know. But according to public reports, Recorded Future \u201cearns most of its revenue from selling to Wall Street quants and intelligence agencies.\u201d)<\/span>

<\/span>The connection between Recorded Future and the U.S. intelligence community is long known. Back in July, 2010, Wired\u2018s Noah Shachtman revealed that the company is backed by both \u201cthe investment arms of the CIA and Google.\u201d<\/span>

<\/span>Indeed, In-Q-Tel\u2014the deep-pocket investment arm of both the CIA and other intelligence agencies (including the NSA)\u2014has seats on Recorded Future\u2019s board of directors and, on its website, lists Recorded Future as one of the companies in its \u201cportfolio.\u201d In stark contrast to NPR, The New York Times noted these connections when reporting on the firm in 2011: \u201cRecorded Future is financed with $8 million from the likes of Google\u2019s venture arm and In-Q-Tel, which makes investments to benefit the United States intelligence community, and its clients have included government agencies and banks.\u201d<\/span>

<\/span>Worse, Temple-Raston knows all of this. Back in 2012, NPR\u2019s Morning Edition broadcast her profile of Recorded Future and its claimed ability to predict the future by gathering internet data. At the end of her report, she noted that the firm has \u201cat least two very important financial backers: the CIA\u2019s investment arm, called In-Q-Tel, and Google Ventures. They have reportedly poured millions into the company.\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Also, she ignores the fact that the changes to encryption, as reported by the New York Times<\/i><\/a>, have been an ongoing process for at least 7 years, predating the Snowden whistle-blowing.<\/p>\n

Why would I want to pledge money for the care and feeding mindless hack journalists acting as stenographers for the American state security apparatus?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The first reason is their Jihad against community owned low power radio stations, and now they quote a consulting firm that is bought and paid for by the CIA to condemn Snowden’s NSA Leaks: On August 1, NPR\u2019s Morning Edition broadcast a story by NPR national security reporter Dina Temple-Raston touting explosive claims from what …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[974,1051,1102,982,979],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-185802","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hack-journalism","category-hypocrisy","category-intelligence","category-stupid","category-wanker"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185802"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=185802"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185802\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=185802"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=185802"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=185802"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}