- Who “owns” the NSA secrets leaked by Edward Snowden to reporters Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras?
Given that eBay founder Pierre Omidyar just invested a quarter of a billion dollars to personally hire Greenwald and Poitras for his new for-profit media venture, it’s a question worth asking.
mk, kleinbl00 -Given the recent discussion around NSFW post, thought you two might be interested in this take on the proposed venture having the Snowden leaked files as an asset.
There's a lot of speculation in this piece. However, Greenwald turning state secrets in to proprietary, for profit information is worth criticism.By Greenwald’s reasoning, even though Omidyar is the founder, largest shareholder, and chairman of the body responsible for eBay/PayPal management oversight, he had “nothing to do with” its policy towards Wikileaks. Zero. None. He was as helpless as you, me, Batkid, or Grumpy Cat.
-I work for a fortune 50 company and I can say that a decision like this isn't something that automatically gets put in front of the board. It's an operational decision (albeit a large one) that likely falls to the CEO. Given the amount of volume/revenue involved in the decision, it really was a small one from a profitability standpoint. My guess is that they've cut off paypal access to a number of controversial businesses/institutions and that they saw this in the same light. "The most controversial decision they've made" -Hindsight is 20/20. I don't doubt that Omidyar had no idea about this decision prior to it being made.