“Don’t rock the boat” is more of a code for “don’t try to ‘fix’ things, you’re going to make someone look bad.” In this case, the choice of who was to design the website was probably based more on political favoritism than technical merit, just like what happened to the new Obamacare site, and showing the management it was broken would make one of them look bad in the eyes of their peers and superiors. Nope, can’t have that, can’t destroy the illusion that one’s superior should be in the position make such decisions.

It’s all about protecting reputations and careers, not the country.

For someone who says she’s been paying attention to what Greenwald said, you must not have heard him respond to these exact “points.”

BUT speaking of interesting: just when Greenwald should be publishing more “leaks”, he’s not. Instead, he’s going to an entirely new company started by a billionaire.

“So I have to stop everything I’m doing in the world and only work on these documents? That’s absurd: there are many reasons why documents aren’t published more quickly than they are – none of them has to do with my inability to churn out articles based on them.

Let me ask you this: do you have any idea how much time elapsed between the time that (a) WikiLeaks received the diplomatic cables and (b) WikiLeaks published the first diplomatic cable?

Do you have any idea how much time elapsed between the time that (a) WikiLeaks received the Iraq & Afghanistan war logs and (b) WikiLeaks published the first such wars logs?

The answer to both question is: much longer than the total amount of time that we’ve had the NSA documents.

I think there are important and interesting topics to discuss beyond just publishing NSA documents, including how journalists view their functions. So I’ll write about that. But the reality is that getting institutions like the Guardian to publish top secret documents is a slow process- it involves editors, lawyers, and lots of other processes. Whatever the cause of the delays are, it has nothing to do with my lack of work ethic in producing articles.

Finally, much of the complaint about excessively slow publication comes from nationalistic blindness. I have been working on and publishing NSA articles in many different countries in the world, as has Laura Poitras. The US and UK are not the only countries that exist.”

–From The Guardian, 10/14/13

So we may never learn more of the alleged trove that Snowden had…It has NOT been damaged or limited, just the public has become accustomed to it and is now getting bored with the story.

“As you said, you’ve been spending months reading through these documents. What percentage of these documents have you been able to actually reveal so far? I mean, how much more information is there out there that will make headlines, that will surprise people?”

“You know, genuinely a small percentage. I’ve been saying from the beginning whenever I’m asked that question the same thing: that there’s still a lot of stories to come in many, many countries around the world including in the United States and it’s always been true and still is true. These documents are very complicated. You have to piece them together. A lot of them take reporting. So the process isn’t fast. When Wikileaks got their diplomatic cables, it took them almost ten months to even begin publishing the first one, because you have to go through them and vet them and understand them. But there are genuinely very significant stories, ones that I think will surprise people. The problem, of course, is that I think people know by now is that the NSA is trying to collect everything, and so it’s sort of hard to generate shock. That’s not our goal. Our goal is to inform people of things they don’t know and there’s definitely a lot of that stuff still coming.”

–CNN interview, 10/17/13: 1:58-3:03