Leaked Ukraine War Docs: What’s really going on? Plus: Dems Urge Biden to Ignore Court Rulings

Glenn Greenwald

Politics • Culture • Writing

Video Transcript: System Update #67

April 13, 2023

A very strange leak of top-secret documents in the U.S. government has made its way onto the Internet, though these documents have been on obscure corners online for at least a couple of months, U.S. media outlets led by the New York Times and NBC News have noticed them only now and continue to use quite a dramatic language to describe them. NBC, for example, warns, “It could represent the most serious breach of U.S. Intelligence secrets since the contractor for the NSA, Edward Snowden, passed on thousands of classified documents to journalists about U.S. electronic surveillance in 2013.”

Despite that melodramatic language, almost nothing is known about who leaked this archive or why. Many of these documents pertain to the U.S. proxy war in Ukraine, though many pertained to other topics. And while corporate media outlets keep insisting that these materials contain embarrassing revelations for the U.S. government, none has really been identified, at least none that wasn't already widely known, leading some in the region of that war to speculate that they may be intended as a disinformation campaign from American officials themselves. We'll examine all these competing theories and developments and some of the documents themselves to explain what can be done and what can't and how to think about this leak.

Then, last week, a Texas federal judge ruled that the U.S. FDA, the Food and Drug Administration, acted illegally when it approved the use of the so-called abortion drug, used in more than half of abortions performed in that state. While the Biden administration immediately announced it will appeal the ruling, which is what citizens and government entities do when they disagree with a court ruling, some leading elected Democrats, including Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, began urging Joe Biden to simply ignore the ruling – just ignore the order of the court. What are the implications of national Democrats now advocating that the president of the United States simply ignores court rulings with which he disagrees on the ground, as Andrew Jackson put it, the court has no army and therefore let them enforce it.

Then finally, today, Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy expressed his full-throated support for President Biden's policy of pursuing an endless proxy war in Ukraine. McCarthy, who sent signals before the 2022 midterms that agreed with growing portions of the public that more constraints are needed on war spending by the United States, now basically says he didn't really mean anything by that, and instead decided that it was the greatest importance that Ukraine and the world win the war against Russia and that the United States must do everything to make that happen. We'll look at those comments in the House speaker today,

As a reminder, System Update is available in podcast version 12 hours after we air, live, here on Rumble. Simply follow us at System Update on Spotify, Apple, and every other major podcasting platform and you'll be able to listen to the show that way as well.

For now, welcome to a new episode of System Update, starting right now.

Large-scale leaks of documents have become really the only way for Americans to learn what their government in general and what the U.S. Security State in particular, are doing in their name. For decades now, but particularly in the wake of 9/11, the CIA, the FBI, Homeland Security and the NSA have constructed such a large and impenetrable wall of secrecy behind which they operate that characterizes almost everything that they do, that American citizens, even members of Congress, really have very little idea – really no idea – what these agencies are doing in the name of our democracy, except when people inside these agencies decide to leak documents to journalists or others that enable those who get the documents to tell their fellow citizens what their government is doing in their name.

Perhaps the first of these modern-day large-scale leaks occurred in 1971, when Daniel Ellsberg, who had worked inside the Defense Department and then for the RAND Corporation with very high levels of secrecy, leaked the Pentagon Papers to The New York Times and The Washington Post. And the purpose of the Pentagon Papers, which was a gigantic volume of top secret classified documents - was not to reveal – not to reveal –specific, war plans that the United States had in prosecuting its war in Vietnam. Such details were never published, either by the papers or by Ellsberg, because that wasn't the purpose of the leak. The purpose of the leak instead was to prove to the American people that the government, the Pentagon and the CIA had been lying to them for over a decade about their views of the Vietnam War, in public. Leading Pentagon officials and leading officials of the Johnson administration were telling the public that they believed and in fact knew that the U.S. was on its way to winning the war in Vietnam, that all that was needed was another offensive around the corner, another 10,000-troop collapse. They were constantly insisting that they were winning the war and believed that they would win. Internally, though, in private, they were saying exactly the opposite. They were admitting that the most that they could hope for was a stalemate, that they would never really be able to conquer Vietnam, to install the rule of the South Vietnamese allies of theirs in North Vietnam, that essentially the most that they could hope for was simply having the war continue on and on and on with no resolution in sight - that the Vietcong would fight forever - and there was no way American power could be brought to bear to win the war. In other words, they were lying to the American public by telling the American people the exact opposite of what they were saying in private. And Daniel Ellsberg, when he saw that thought: I know I'm going to go to jail probably for life if I do this, but I, in my good conscience, cannot allow my fellow citizens to continue to believe this lie about the Vietnam War. I need to expose what Pentagon officials are really saying in secret so that Americans can decide whether they want to support this war or not, based not on the lives that were being fed through the media, but based on the truth. Ellsberg would have gone to prison for doing that had it not been for the fact that the Nixon administration broke into his psychoanalyst’s office to try and steal his psychoanalyst’s records, to reveal his psychosexual secrets and discredit him and distract attention away from the leaks which caused the court to rule that that misconduct warranted dismissing the espionage charges against him. But had it not been for that – and Daniel Ellsberg himself says that to this very day – he would have gone to prison for life. It was almost impossible to beat an espionage charge when the United States brings it under the Espionage Act of 1917, which was a law that Woodrow Wilson implemented to criminalize dissent into the U.S.'s participation in that first World War in Europe.

Those are the kinds of leaks that illuminate and that allow us to know what the government is doing. Those are the kinds of leaks that WikiLeaks has repeatedly published beginning in 2010 when they revealed the realities of what the United States government was doing in Afghanistan and Iraq and as well as what its allies around the world were doing, particularly our tyrannical and despotic partners in the Middle East. And it's also what Edward Snowden did when he decided to leak documents to journalists, including myself, not that revealed the names of agents overseas, which none of those documents did, nor to reveal specific plans of how the U.S. was spying on its enemies like China or al-Qaida. That was something Snowden was adamant about not to be disclosed. Instead, it was to reveal to the American people that the NSA, unbeknownst to almost every member of Congress and the American people, was spying not on al-Qaida or the Chinese, but instead, primarily, domestically, on our conversations, on our telephone calls and our email activities, on our browsing records and the like, a program that we were able to expose because Edward Snowden allowed us to do so was ultimately ruled a violation of the American Constitution and relevant statutes by a circuit court of appeals. Those are the kinds of leaks that are constructive and that shed a gigantic light on the U.S. Security State, even though they need to be done with care. You don't just dump all the documents onto the Internet. WikiLeaks never did that. They redacted documents carefully. We certainly did the same in the Snowden case. We ended up not publishing a majority of the documents, only publishing the ones necessary to inform the public debate about what the NSA was doing in secret against their privacy and against people's privacy around the world. So, these kinds of leaks are crucial to journalism because if you don't have them, what you have instead are leading media outlets like The New York Times, The Washington Post, NBC News and CNN, doing the bidding of the U.S. Security State. They get secrets past them all the time and they publish those but they’re secrets the CIA wants you to hear. They're the secrets the Pentagon wants you to hear. So, it basically just states media feeds you constantly leaks that seem like they're unauthorized because they come from anonymous sources. So, they have that feeling of something edgy and radical. But that's all that is, feeding you guys the propaganda and deceit that they want to give the veneer of some sort of journalistic achievement to. That's how Russiagate was constantly propagated. The CIA would go to Ken Dilanian, ABC News, or Natasha Bertrand, who worked at MSNBC and then worked her way up to The Atlantic and CNN and Politico. She's now at CNN. And every one of the reports would say, “Intelligence officials tell us…” The Washington Post and The New York Times won Pulitzers for that kind of reporting that in reality was just propaganda on behalf of the U.S. Security State. The only counterweight to that is when we get these giant leaks of the kinds I just reviewed that allow us to shed light on what the U.S. Security State is doing in secret.

There's a current claim that we have a similar leak of that kind, namely a kind where someone inside the U.S. government leaked top secret documents in order to expose secrets of the American government that supposedly are very embarrassing to the American government. And yet there's something extremely strange, many things extremely strange about this claim that we have a new Snowden-type leak or a new WikiLeaks-type leak or a new Pentagon Papers-leak. For one thing, we have no idea who leaked this material. We don't even know. The category of person is that we don't know their name. We don't even know where they supposedly work. We don't have confirmation they worked inside the U.S. government. We have no idea who did that. We also have no idea what the motive is because they didn't bring these materials to journalists and asked journalists to curate them and report on them, nor did they bring them to places like WikiLeaks, which might be willing to, in a very high profile and prominent way, leak them all or publish them all or most of them. Nor did they publish these documents in a way that would be noticed. They started instead appearing back in January or February on very obscure places on the Internet, including Discord servers, which are used for people who play video games. They can often be private. The first time they appeared reportedly, is in a Discord server used only by a dozen people or so. And only from there did they make the leap to a more populated forum on the Internet. And then only in the last week did they start to appear in places like Telegram and more popular Discord channels and now the media has noticed them. But there's no guarantee that these would have leaked, nor was there any attempt to direct how they ended up being disclosed or even what kinds of information is being covered in the way the media is talking about this is very odd. I think it raises more questions than it answers. So, let's first look at what the media is telling you about this leak. Let's look at some of the documents themselves. We've picked the ones that we think are worth looking at, and then let's try and examine them.

So, we have the first story, which is from The New York Times. It is entitled “How the Latest Leaked Documents Are Different from Past Breaches.” That's an article from The New York Times today: “The freshness of the documents – some appear to be barely 40 days old – and the hints they hold for operations to make them particularly damaging, officials say.” This is how the New York Times frames so often what they do. They state something and then at the end, they add “officials say”. So, they're not really technically affirming the veracity of this claim, but it sounds to the reader as though they are. They're stating something, namely the freshness of the documents – “some appear to be barely 40 days old” and “the hints they hold for operations to come to make them particularly damaging – comma – “, officials say”. So, The New York Times is not saying that anonymous officials are enabling us. Officials want you to believe this, which is why they told this to The New York Times. This is by David Sanger, today. He's a journalist who has all kinds of ties to the CIA, to the U.S. Security State; he has spent years, decades, publishing authorized leaks from sources inside the intelligence community. That's what he does. This is what the article says,

When WikiLeaks spilled a huge trove of State Department cables 13 years ago, it gave the world a sense of what American diplomats do each day, the sharp elbows, the doubts about wavering allies and the glimpses of how Washington was preparing for North Korea's eventual collapse and Iran's nuclear breakout (The New York Times. April 9, 2023).

Let me just stop there. It is unbelievable to describe WikiLeaks' disclosures that way. He's doing it on purpose to make it seem like it was a completely unjustified and banal leak that didn't really tell you anything about the world other than giving you a “sense of what American diplomats do”. This is just the business of diplomats. They throw sharp elbows. They have some doubts about wavering allies. And you got some glimpses about how Washington was preparing for North Korea's eventual collapse and Iran's nuclear breakout. So, they pick the things that they know you're fine with the State Department doing in order to make this leak sound like it was something that told you nothing important – but at the same time was incredibly dangerous.

This eventual collapse of North Korea, I don't think we have that yet. This is 13 years later. So, there's no collapse in North Korea, maybe “eventually” means 100 years now. And Iran has not broken out in the sense that it has nuclear weapons. Nobody claims that. But these are things that you would want the government to be doing and that's why The New York Times purposely described the WikiLeaks releases in this way to make you think these WikiLeaks releases told you nothing but endanger the public. In reality, the exact opposite was true. They revealed all kinds of secrets about tens of thousands of people, innocent civilians, that the United States government, the military, had killed in Afghanistan and Iraq; they had revealed a video showing the U.S. government, the U.S. military, gunning down innocent people, including journalists who work for Reuters when they were on the ground and scrambling to try and leave. They revealed widespread, rampant corruption among all kinds of U.S. allies in Saudi Arabia in Bahrain, Jordan and Egypt, and all kinds of lies about a whole range of issues that the U.S. government told the public. But it's bizarre, although not really, that David Sanger, who is an ally of the intelligence services, started his article trying to demean WikiLeaks’ releases knowing Julian Assange is in prison. This is the way that a CIA agent who hates Julian Assange would describe those releases, not the way a journalist would. So already you know that he's serving an agenda that is the U.S. Security State's agenda. That's what he always does. But this is the first clue. Now here's the second one.

This paragraph enrages me. It's full of lies, as I will document in a minute once I show you what this article says about these newly leaked documents but here is what it says about the Snowden leaks:

When Edward Snowden swept up the NSA's secrets three years later, Americans suddenly discovered the scope of how the digital age had ushered in a remarkable new era of surveillance by the agency [This is what he says the NSA's Snowden reporting revealed] enabling [the NSA] to pierce China's telecommunication industry and to drill into Google’s servers overseas to pick up foreign communications (The New York Times. April 9, 2023).

So, David Sanger is saying the only thing that Snowden reportedly did was reveal that the NSA was spying on China, something that every American would be okay with them doing and drilling into Google servers to pick up foreign communications, which most people would probably be fine with as well. A complete lie. The crux of the Snowden report showed how the NSA was spying on the conversations of American citizens and the telephone activities of Americans to the point that courts were able to rule them unconstitutional, as I said earlier. But again, if you work for the NSA, this is what you would want people to think the Snowden report was about. He's counting on the fact that it's been ten years and people don't remember. So, he's just rewriting history. And I will show you that the only people who ever revealed any secrets about how the NSA spies on China are The New York Times itself, not any of the other journalists who actually worked with Edward Snowden. So, we'll get to that in a minute. The New York Times goes on:

The cache of 100 or so newly leaked briefing slides of operational data on the war in Ukraine is distinctly different. The data revealed so far is less comprehensive than those vast secret archives, but far more timely (The New York Times. April 9, 2023).

I'm not sure that's even true. There were Snowden documents that we began reporting on, engaged in, in June – that was only three months old. Snowden gave us the archive only a couple of months before we began reporting. There were some that were only two or three months old. So that's not even true anyway.

And it is the immediate salience of the intelligence that worries White House and Pentagon officials.

Some of the most sensitive material – maps of Ukrainian air defenses and a deep dive into South Korea’s secret plans to deliver 330,000 rounds of much-needed ammunition in time for Ukraine's spring counteroffensive – is revealed in documents that appear to be barely 40 days old. It is the freshness of the “secret” and “top secret” documents and the hints they hold for operations to come that make these disclosures particularly damaging, administration officials say. On Sunday, Sabrina Singh, Pentagon spokeswoman, said U.S. officials had notified congressional committees of the leak and referred the matter to the Justice Department, which had opened an investigation.
The 100-plus pages of slides and briefing documents leave no doubt about how deeply enmeshed the United States is in the day-to-day conduct of the war, providing the precise intelligence and logistics that help explain Ukraine's success thus far. While President Biden has barred American troops from firing directly on Russian targets and blocked sending weapons that could reach deep into Russian territory, the documents make clear that a year into the invasion, the United States is heavily entangled in almost everything else (The New York Times. April 9, 2023).

Didn't we know that already - that the United States is heavily involved in the war in Ukraine with everything except combat troops on the ground? I mean, the Biden administration boasts of how much it's done for Ukraine. Republican members of Congress, including Kevin McCarthy today, demanded that the Biden administration do everything possible to ensure Ukraine wins this war. So, what exactly is it that these documents have revealed that is so bothersome to the United States? Nothing, really. I mean, you could look at them in a certain way and say, well, the United States doesn't want it known how they have special services stationed and deployed in Ukraine. And there are some documents that reveal how the U.S. government even spies on its own allies, something that was widely known during the Snowden report. You may recall that a major controversy erupted between the United States and Germany when it was reported – not as part of the Snowden files, but from a different source – that the United States is spying under Angela Merkel and Obama had to call her and apologize. And she compared the United States to the Stasi of East Germany, where she grew up. And there was a similar diplomatic scandal between the United States and Brazil – we did a report based on the Snowden materials – that the Obama administration was spying on the personal cell phone calls of Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, the Brazilian oil company, Petrobras, all kinds of economic conferences. So, all of this has been known for a long time. I don't even feel like, let alone can point to anything specific, that makes this seem like the kind of leak, like the Pentagon Papers or the Snowden reporting or WikiLeaks that it is really bothersome to the United States in the sense that it would cause scandal and disrepute for American leaders. The Pentagon Papers show that the American government lied to the American people about the war in Vietnam for a decade, the Snowden reporting showed that the U.S. government was spying on its own citizenry in violation of the Constitution and the law, WikiLeaks showed all kinds of hidden war crimes. What do these documents show that is similar to what would really be upsetting and destabilizing to the United States? We keep hearing that they're like those other cases. We keep hearing from the U.S. government about how disturbing this leak is. I haven't really seen anything in these documents yet that would be comparable.

Let's look at NBC News's version of events and of course, it's very similar because they're talking to the same people and serving the same agenda: “Leaked secret Pentagon documents lift the lid on U.S. spying and Russia's war in Ukraine.” NBC News obtained more than 50 of the leaked documents, many of them labeled ‘top secret’.” They say they obtained them. So, this is their story, this is their work – when they're all over the Internet, everyone can just get them. That's all they did was they obtained them not by having sources that gave them to them, but just by going on the Internet like everybody else and looking at them. They have four journalists on this story, including Kendall Jenner, notorious for serving the agenda of the CIA. And there you see the framing, which is very similar to The New York Times. This is what they say,

Dozens of leaked Defense Department classified documents posted online reveal details of U.S. spying on Russia's war machine in Ukraine and secret assessments of Ukraine's combat power, as well as intelligence gathering on America's allies, including South Korea and Israel. NBC News obtained more than 50 of the leaked documents, many of them labeled top secret the highest level of classification.
The documents first appeared online in March, and a senior U.S. official said Saturday that the government's “working theory” is that they are real, although some of them could have been altered (The New York Times. April 9, 2023).

These are government documents taken right from the files of the Pentagon or the intelligence community, they can't know whether they're real. They only have a working theory that they are real. Of course, they can look in their own files and know.

The full impact of the leak remains unclear [I would say so] but it could represent the most serious breach of U.S. intelligence secrets since a contractor for the NSA, Edward Snowden, passed on thousands of classified documents to journalists about U.S. electronic surveillance in 2013. In this case, the scale of the disclosure is much smaller [much, much smaller] involving dozens instead of thousands of documents.
The documents include repeated references to information based on secret signals intelligence – electronic eavesdropping – a crucial pillar of U.S. intelligence gathering. A former U.S. intelligence official said the disclosure of some signals intelligence reporting about Russia and its spy agencies could cause significant damage if Moscow is able to cut off those sources of information (The New York Times. April 9, 2023).

So, again, I see a lot of speculation about how this leak could be very damaging, but I don't see any specific revelations that are causing any problems for Joe Biden or the Biden White House or any leaders of America's foreign policy or its defense and intelligence community. Do you? I don't.

That fact has led some in the region, in Ukraine, including some Ukrainian officials, some Russian officials, some prominent journalists in the region, to speculate that this might actually be a disinformation campaign by the United States to demoralize Russia, because a lot of it claims that Russia is suffering in the war, that Russia might even be losing the war. And by letting people in Russia, including potential troops, think this is a real leak from the United States government that shows intelligence that Russia is suffering grave losses in the war. It could be an attempt to demoralize the Russians. That is possibly not at all affirming that that's true. But I do, again, think it's odd that U.S. intelligence officials are so hellbent on claiming to the public these documents are real and that they're very damaging. They go right to their favorite reporters to do that – David Sanger of The New York Times. The media outlets always serve their agenda and write down whatever they tell them to say. As I just showed you, they did duly and loyally, but I don't actually see anything that is so disturbing.

The Economist today has an article, “A leak of files could be America's worst intelligence breach in a decade.” You see, they're all using similar languages, but they have a paragraph that caught my attention because it supports that hypothesis that I just expressed that others in the region are claiming, namely, that it's actually intended to suggest that the Russians are losing the war, to embolden European governments to continue to provide aid and encouraged the American public to be willing to do so as well. This is what this paragraph says from The Economist:

However, the leaked documents hardly paint a rosy view of Russia's armed forces, though it has devastated the eastern city of Bakhmut – the situation there was, “catastrophic” by February 28, according to Ukraine's military-intelligence chief, who was quoted in one report – its combat power is crippled. America's Defense Intelligence Agency reckons that 35,000 to 43,000 Russian troops have died, twice the number of Ukrainian casualties, with over 154,000 wounded, around 40 times the Ukrainian figure (the agency acknowledges that these numbers are ropey). Russia has lost more than 2,000 tanks and now fields only 419 “in theater”. Another slide says that Russia’s “grinding campaign of attrition” in the East is “heading toward a stalemate” and that the result is likely to be a “protracted war beyond 2023” (The New York Times. April 9, 2023).

So, get ready. We're being told through these scary, unauthorized documents that Russia cannot win this war, that they're heading toward a stalemate and we should expect a “protracted war beyond 2023”. And that's what the Russians are to understand as well.

I'm not at all suggesting this was a disinformation campaign planted by U.S. operatives. I'm generally not suggesting that. But I'm also not ready to buy into this narrative that the media is feeding us at the behest of the intelligence community, that these documents are confirmed to be authentic and are somehow so destabilizing to the U.S. government. Let's look at the ones that would most plausibly be described as damaging to the U.S. government. These are the ones the media is touting.

Here is a document that purports to show that native countries have special forces deployed to specific parts of Ukraine, and it actually details the specific countries that have special forces in Ukraine, including the United States and purports to show their location. Again, we're not showing anything that hasn't been all over the Internet and that isn't being talked about in every journalistic outlet. The slide shows the number of NATO's special forces in Ukraine. And it says the U.S. has 14 14 Special forces; Germany, 50; France 15; Latvia 17; The Netherlands, one; for a total of 97 purportedly here to show their locations in terms of what their bases are in those native countries. And I guess that's something that is supposed to be incriminating to the United States, as though people didn't know that the U.S. likely has covert operations in Ukraine. Of course, they do. We've given them all kinds of weapons. They can't operate on their own. It's been repeatedly reported that we give them real-time intelligence on the ground that they use to target Russian forces and where to activate their air defenses. It would be almost impossible for us not to have U.S. special forces on the ground, in fact, early in the war, one of the reasons the Biden administration gave for why it wouldn't provide some of these weapons systems to Ukraine is because they couldn't be operated without having special forces on the ground to show them how to do it and help them do that. We've given those systems to them. They're in use in theater. So of course, everybody already knew that special forces were on the ground in Ukraine.

So, this is the big revelation that's supposed to be so incriminating to the Biden administration. I would suggest, again, this leak is nothing of the kind. Virtually everyone in Washington – with the exception of seven dozen Republicans or so – supports this policy, as we're about to show you. Kevin McCarthy, the Republican House speaker, came out today and basically said exactly that we need to do everything we can to ensure Ukraine wins the war. No one in Washington is going to care that we have special forces in Ukraine. That's an open secret. This is not some shocking revelation of the kind of Daniel Ellsberg or WikiLeaks or Snowden.

Here is a second document that suggests different ways that Israel might provide lethal aid to Ukraine. Israel has been very reluctant to involve itself in the war in Ukraine because their relations with Russia are an important part of its national security plan. They bomb Syria at will and need Russia not to do that. They have all kinds of relations with Russia and there are a lot of influential Russian Jews in Israel. They have ties to that country and they've really tried hard to stay out of this war because they don't want to alienate the Russians. They obviously can't side with Russia because they would alienate their biggest benefactor, the United States. So, neutrality has essentially been their only option. That's the one they more or less have chosen. And yet this suggests different ways Israel might be able to provide lethal arms to Ukraine, although it doesn't suggest that Israel has yet done so. These are just ways that the U.S. government might propose to Israel that they would do so. I don't really consider these documents particularly interesting, let alone incriminating at all. But those are the second set of ones that are being cited as proof that this is some sort of devastating leak. And then there is the document that purports to reflect the “status of the conflict as of March 1,” which is one of the things that they're so alarmed about, supposedly, that these documents are so new. March 1 is only 40 days ago, as The New York Times said over and over and tried to convince you that this was something so damaging. And here's what they're pointing to as the thing that is so damaging.

This is one of the documents, I believe the only one, where the claim is being made that it was altered. The original document, according to the U.S. government, purported to show that the Ukrainians have lost double the number of soldiers as Russia, and that twice as many Ukrainian soldiers have been killed in this war as Russians. This document here, the version that ended up online, purports to show that, in fact, Ukraine has suffered five times more, killed in action. There you see it's something like 61 to 71,000 troops, whereas the Russians are estimated to have lost 16 to 17000. This is the document they claim has been altered, that the original one shows double the number of Ukrainian troops killed. Again, the fact that Ukraine is losing a huge number of people in this war is well known. In fact, Zelenskyy recently, again, had to increase the penalties for desertion because Ukrainian men actually don't want to fight in this war. They know they're being used as cannon fodder. So, while Kevin McCarthy and Joe Biden and Bill Kristol and David Frum feel proud and strong because we're fighting this glorious war, the people who are actually dying in the war and fighting in the war, as usual, don't actually want to be fighting and dying in this war. They're being forced to Zelenskyy. He's using a conscript army, not a volunteer one. So, if this, again, is the most incriminating document or the most destabilizing document, I just don't find this leak particularly threatening to the United States government. I find it very odd that they're insisting through their media outlets that they manipulate and control what it is. I can see how these documents might concern Russia and Russians and Russian troops by claiming that this whole thing is a stalemate. They're never going to win. They have to fight at least another year throughout 2023. I can see how that would be beneficial to convincing the American public to get ready for another $100 billion in authorizations to support this war beyond 2023. As this document says, I just don't see what is supposedly so scandalous about this from the perspective of the CIA, the Pentagon, or the Biden White House. And, in fact, there is no scandal being generated by these documents, even though we keep being told it's the most damaging leak in at least a decade.

I mentioned earlier – I do want to show you this because it's just such a perfect example of how The New York Times lies all the time. I showed you that paragraph: this is how they described the Snowden reporting. This is what they wanted you to think about what Edward Snowden, the reporting from Edward Snowden revealed. This is David Sanger’s article:

When Edward Snowden swept up the NSA's secrets three years later, Americans suddenly discovered the scope of how the digital age had ushered in a remarkable new era of surveillance […] (The New York Times. April 9, 2023).

So, we learned about a remarkable new era of surveillance. What did they spy on? Here is what The New York Times says:

[…] enabling it to pierce China's telecommunication industry and to drill into Google’s servers overseas to pick up foreign communications (The New York Times. April 9, 2023).

According to The New York Times, the only thing you learned from Snowden was that the NSA spied on China and its telecommunications infrastructure and that they were using Google to spy on foreign nationals and their communications.

That is just an outright lie. Here's the very first article that I published in The Guardian that kicked off the Snowden report. And there you see the headline, NSA collecting phone records of millions of Verizon customers daily. That was on June 6, 2013. And the subheadline was – and this is one of the articles cited by the Pulitzer Committee – “Top secret court order requiring Verizon to hand over all call data shows the scale of domestic surveillance under Obama.” Isn't it odd that the New York Times, 10 years later, wants to rewrite the history of what the Snowden story showed by claiming it was only about how they spied on China and how they spied on foreign nationals and not what it was actually about, which is NSA spying on Americans? And it wasn't just that they were spying on Americans. The high court, the highest court to rule on it, ruled that spying was unconstitutional, that it violated your constitutional rights. “NSA surveillance exposed by Snowden was illegal, court rules seven years on.”– that from The Guardian, in 2020, reporting on a ruling from the Court of Appeals that that surveillance program I just showed you – that we exposed that domestic spying – was in violation of the Constitution.

Here's what The Guardian reported about that ruling, “Seven years after the former NSA contractor Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the mass surveillance of American's telephone records, an Appeals court has found that that program was unlawful and that the U.S. intelligence leaders who publicly defended it were not telling the truth.” Why would the New York Times just lie about what this reporting showed?

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Glenn Greenwald@ggreenwald

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Listen to this Article: Reflecting New U.S. Control of TikTok's Censorship, Our Report Criticizing Zelensky Was Deleted

For years, U.S. officials and their media allies accused Russia, China and Iran of tyranny for demanding censorship as a condition for Big Tech access. Now, the U.S. is doing the same to TikTok. Listen below.

Glenn Greenwald@ggreenwald

February 19, 2026

Good news about your Locals membership and our move to Substack

Dear Locals members:

We have good and exciting news about your Locals membership. It concerns your ability to easily convert your Locals membership to SYSTEM UPDATE into a Substack subscription for our new page, with no additional cost or work required.

As most of you know, on February 6, we announced the end of our SYSTEM UPDATE program on Rumble, or at least an end to the format we’ve used for the last 3 years: as a live, nightly news program aired exclusively on Rumble.

With the end of our show, we also announced that we were very excited to be moving back to Substack as the base for our journalism. Such a move, we explained, would enable us not only to continue to produce the kind of in-depth video segments, interviews, and reports you’ve grown accustomed to on SYSTEM UPDATE, but would also far better enable me to devote substantial time to long-form investigations and written articles. Our ability at Subtack to combine all those forms of journalism will enable (indeed, already is enabling) us to ...

Alice Everyday@AliceEverywhere

February 25, 2026

So last Tuesday was the first day of the Lunar/Chinese New Year (a really special one - the year of the fire horse! :) and I realized that I forgot to wish everyone happy new year last month, too, so Happy New Year to everyone! 🥳whichever one you like to celebrate🎆🥂🎊

The Chinese New year that just ended was the Year of the Snake - definitely was that for me! 😓 it's all about shedding old patterns of thinking and stuff like that - but I'm feeling better now & ready to get back to my art works and everything 🥰

To celebrate, I wanted to share 2 videos - one is a clip from my favorite movie growing up! The Black Stallion :)

There is actually a scene just before this one where a cobra sneaks up on Alec while he is sleeping, and the horse jumps in and thrashes the snake & saves his life! 😱🐍💥🐎

I was going to make a clip of that one instead, bc it seemed the most fitting to me (I mostly associated the horse with water since some of my favorite scenes are of them playing and ...

StuartFoxx@StuartFoxx

February 25, 2026

There was a question in a survey I took today about Glenn.

Glenn Greenwald@ggreenwald

February 08, 2026

NEW: Message from Glenn to Locals Members About Substack, System Update, and Subscriptions

Hello Locals members:

I wanted to make sure you are updated on what I regard as the exciting changes we announced on Friday night’s program, as well as the status of your current membership.

As most of you likely know, we announced on our Friday night show that that SYSTEM UPDATE episode would be the last one under the show’s current format (if you would like to watch it, you can do so here). As I explained when announcing these changes, producing and hosting a nightly video-based show has been exhilarating and fulfilling, but it also at times has been a bit draining and, most importantly, an impediment to doing other types of work that have always formed the core of my journalism: namely, longer-form written articles and deep investigations.

We have produced three full years of SYSTEM UPDATE episodes on Rumble (our premiere show was December 10, 2022). And while we will continue to produce video content similar to the kinds of segments that composed the show, they won’t be airing live every night at 7:00 p.m. Eastern, but instead will be posted periodically throughout the week (as we have been doing over the last couple of months both on Rumble and on our YouTube channel here).

To enlarge the scope of my work, I am returning to Substack as the central hub for my journalism, which is where I was prior to launching SYSTEM UPDATE on Rumble. In addition to long-form articles, Substack enables a wide array of community-based features, including shorter-form written items that can be posted throughout the day to stimulate conversation among members, a page for guest writers, and new podcast and video features. You can find our redesigned Substack here; it is launching with new content on Monday.

For our current Locals subscribers, you can continue to stay at Locals or move to Substack, whichever you prefer. For any video content and long-form articles that we publish for paying Substack members, we will cross-post them here on Locals (for members only), meaning that your Locals subscription will continue to give you full access to our journalism.

When I was last at Substack, we published some articles without a paywall in order to ensure the widest possible reach. My expectation is that we will do something similar, though there will be a substantial amount of exclusive content solely for our subscribers.

We are working on other options to convert your Locals membership into a Substack membership, depending on your preference. But either way, your Locals membership will continue to provide full access to the articles and videos we will publish on both platforms.

Although I will miss producing SYSTEM UPDATE on a (more or less) nightly basis, I really believe that these changes will enable the expansion of my journalism, both in terms of quality and reach. We are very grateful to our Locals members who have played such a vital role over the last three years in supporting our work, and we hope to continue to provide you with true independent journalism into the future.

— Glenn Greenwald

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Glenn Greenwald@ggreenwald

February 16, 2026

The Epstein Files: The Blackmail of Billionaire Leon Black and Epstein's Role in It

Black's downfall — despite paying tens of millions in extortion demands — illustrates how potent and valuable intimate secrets are in Epstein's world of oligarchs and billionaires.

One of the towering questions hovering over the Epstein saga was whether the illicit sexual activities of the world’s most powerful people were used as blackmail by Epstein or by intelligence agencies with whom (or for whom) he worked. The Trump administration now insists that no such blackmail occurred.

Top law enforcement officials in the Trump administration — such as Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel, and former FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino — spent years vehemently denouncing the Biden administration for hiding Epstein’s “client list,” as well as concealing details about Epstein’s global blackmail operations. Yet last June, these exact same officials suddenly announced, in the words of their joint DOJ-FBI statement, that their “exhaustive review” found no “client list” nor any “credible evidence … that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions.” They also assured the public that they were certain, beyond any doubt, that Epstein killed himself.

There are still many files that remain heavily and inexplicably redacted. But, from the files that have been made public, we know one thing for certain. One of Epstein’s two key benefactors — the hedge fund billionaire Leon Black, who paid Epstein at least $158 million from 2012 through 2017 — was aggressively blackmailed over his sexual conduct. (Epstein’s second most-important benefactor was the billionaire Les Wexner, a major pro-Israel donor who cut off ties in 2008 after Epstein repaid Wexner $100 million for money Wexner alleged Epstein had stolen from him.)

Despite that $100 million repayment in 2008 to Wexner, Epstein had accumulated so much wealth through his involvement with Wexner that it barely made a dent. He was able to successfully “pilfer” such a mind-boggling amount of money because he had been given virtually unconstrained access to, and power over, every aspect of Wexner’s life. Wexner even gave Epstein power of attorney and had him oversee his children’s trusts. And Epstein, several years later, created a similar role with Leon Black, one of the richest hedge fund billionaires of his generation.

Epstein’s 2008 conviction and imprisonment due to his guilty plea on a charge of “soliciting a minor for prostitution” began mildly hindering his access to the world’s billionaires. It was at this time that he lost Wexner as his font of wealth due to Wexner’s belief that Epstein stole from him.

But Epstein’s world was salvaged, and ultimately thrived more than ever, as a result of the seemingly full-scale dependence that Leon Black developed on Epstein. As he did with Wexner, Epstein insinuated himself into every aspect of the billionaire’s life — financial, political, and personal — and, in doing so, obtained innate, immense power over Black.

The recently released Epstein files depict the blackmail and extortion schemes to which Black was subjected. One of the most vicious and protracted arose out of a six-year affair he carried on with a young Russian model, who then threatened in 2015 to expose everything to Black’s wife and family, and “ruin his life,” unless he paid her $100 million. But Epstein himself also implicitly, if not overtly, threatened Black in order to extract millions more in payments after Black, in 2016, sought to terminate their relationship.

While the sordid matter of Black’s affair has been previously reported — essentially because the woman, Guzel Ganieva, went public and sued Black, accusing him of “rape and assault,” even after he paid her more than $9 million out of a $21 million deal he made with her to stay silent — the newly released emails provide very vivid and invasive details about how desperately Black worked to avoid public disclosure of his sex life. The broad outlines of these events were laid out in a Bloomberg report on Sunday, but the text of emails provide a crucial look into how these blackmail schemes in Epstein World operated.

Epstein was central to all of this. That is why the emails describing all of this in detail are now publicly available: because they were all sent by Black or his lawyers to Epstein, and are thus now part of the Epstein Files.

Once Ganieva began blackmailing and extorting Black with her demands for $100 million — which she repeatedly said was her final, non-negotiable offer — Black turned to Epstein to tell him how to navigate this. (Black’s other key advisor was Brad Karp, who was forced to resign last week as head of the powerful Paul, Weiss law firm due to his extensive involvement with Epstein).

From the start of Ganieva’s increasingly unhinged threats against Black, Epstein became a vital advisor. In 2015, Epstein drafted a script for what he thought Black should tell his mistress, and emailed that script to himself.

Epstein included an explicit threat that Black would have Russian intelligence — the Federal Security Service (FSB) — murder Ganieva, because, Epstein argued, failure to resolve this matter with an American businessman important to the Russian economy would make her an “enemy of the state” in the eyes of the Russian government. Part of Epstein’s suggested script for Black is as follows (spelling and grammatical errors maintained from the original correspondents):

you should also know that I felt it necessary to contact some friends in FSB, and I though did not give them your name. They explained to me in no uncertain terms that especially now , when Russia is trying to bring in outside investors , as you know the economy sucks, and desperately investment that a person that would attempt to blackmail a us businessman would immeditaly become in the 21 century, what they terms . vrag naroda meant in the 20th they translated it for me as the enemy of the people, and would e dealt with extremely harshly , as it threatened the economies of teh country. So i expect never ever to hear a threat from you again.

In a separate email to Karp, Black’s lawyer, Epstein instructs him to order surveillance on the woman’s whereabouts by using the services of Nardello & Co., a private spy and intelligence agency used by the world’s richest people.

Black’s utter desperation for Ganieva not to reveal their affair is viscerally apparent from the transcripts of multiple lunches he had with her throughout 2015, which he secretly tape-recorded. His law firm, Paul, Weiss, had those recordings transcribed, and those were sent to Epstein.

To describe these negotiations as torturous would be an understatement. But it is worth taking a glimpse to see how easily and casually blackmail and extortion were used in this world.

Leon Black is a man worth $13 billion, yet his life appears utterly consumed by having to deal constantly with all sorts of people (including Epstein) demanding huge sums of money from him, accompanied by threats of various kinds. Epstein was central to helping him navigate through all of this blackmail and extortion, and thus, he was obviously fully privy to all of Black’s darkest secrets.

At their first taped meeting on August 14, 2015, Black repeatedly offered his mistress a payment package of $1 million per year for the next 12 years, plus an up-front investment fund of £2 million for her to obtain a visa to live with her minor son in the UK. But Ganieva repeatedly rejected those offers, instead demanding a lump sum of no less than $100 million, threatening him over and over that she would destroy his life if he did not pay all of it.

Black was both astounded and irritated that she thought a payment package of $15 million was somehow abusive and insulting. He emphasized that he was willing to negotiate it upward, but she was adamant that it had to be $100 million or nothing, an amount Black insisted he could not and would not pay.

When pressed to explain where she derived that number, Ganieva argued that she considered the two to be married (even though Black was long married to another woman), thereby entitling her to half of what he earned during those years. Whenever Black pointed out that they only had sex once a month or so for five or six years in an apartment he rented for her, and that they never even lived together, she became offended and enraged and repeatedly hardened her stance.

Over and over, they went in circles for hours across multiple meetings. Many times, Black tried flattery: telling her how much he cared for her and assuring her that he considered her brilliant and beautiful. Everything he tried seemed to backfire and to solidify her $100 million blackmail price tag. (In the transcripts, “JD” refers to “John Doe,” the name the law firm used for Black; the redacted initials are for Ganieva):

On other occasions during their meetings, Ganieva insisted that she was entitled to $100 million because Black had “ruined” her life. He invariably pointed out how much money he had given her over the years, to say nothing of the $15 million he was now offering her, and expressed bafflement at how she could see it that way.

In response, Ganieva would insist that a “cabal” of Black’s billionaire friends — led by Michael Bloomberg, Mort Zuckerman, and Len Blavatnik — had conspired with Black to ruin her reputation. Other times, she blamed Black for speaking disparagingly of her to destroy her life. Other times, she claimed that people in multiple cities — New York, London, Moscow — were monitoring and following her and trying to kill her. This is but a fraction of the exchanges they had, as he alternated between threatening her with prison and flattering her with praise, while she kept saying she did not care about the consequences and would ruin his life unless she was paid the full amount:

By their last taped meeting in October, Ganieva appeared more willing to negotiate the amount of the payment. The duo agreed to a payment package in return for her silence; it included Black’s payments to her of $100,000 per month for the next 12 years (or $1.2 million per year for 12 years), as well as other benefits that exceeded a value of $5 million. They signed a contract formalizing what they called a “non-disclosure agreement,” and he made the payments to her for several years on time. The ultimate total value to be paid was $21 million.

Unfortunately for Black, these hours of misery, and the many millions paid to her, were all for naught. In March, 2021, Ganieva — despite Black’s paying the required amounts — took to Twitter to publicly accuse Black of “raping and assaulting” her, and further claimed that he “trafficked” her to Epstein in Miami without her consent, to force her to have sex with Epstein.

As part of these public accusations, Ganieva spilled all the beans on the years-long affair the two had: exactly what Black had paid her millions of dollars to keep quiet. When Black denied her accusations, she sued him for both defamation and assault. Her case was ultimately dismissed, and she sacrificed all the remaining millions she was to receive in an attempt to destroy his life.

Meanwhile, in 2021, Black was forced out of the hedge fund that made him a billionaire and which he had co-founded, Apollo Global Management, as a result of extensive public disclosures about his close ties to Epstein, who, two years earlier, had been arrested, became a notorious household name, and then died in prison. As a result of all that, and the disclosures from his mistress, Black — just like his ex-mistress — came to believe he was the victim of a “cabal.” He sued his co-founder at Apollo, the billionaire Josh Harris, as well as Ganieva and a leading P.R. firm on RICO charges, alleging that they all conspired to destroy his reputation and drive him out of Apollo. Black’s RICO case was dismissed.

Black’s fear that these disclosures would permanently destroy his reputation and standing in society proved to be prescient. An independent law firm was retained by Apollo to investigate his relationship with Epstein. Despite the report’s conclusion that Black had done nothing illegal, he has been forced off multiple boards that he spent tens of millions of dollars to obtain, including the highly prestigious post of Chair of the Museum of Modern Art, which he received after compiling one of the world’s largest and most expensive collections, only to lose that position due to Epstein associations.

So destroyed is Leon Black’s reputation from these disclosures that a business relationship between Apollo and the company Lifetouch — an 80-year-old company that captures photos of young school children — resulted in many school districts this week cancelling photo shoots involving this company, even though the company never appeared once in the Epstein files. But any remote association with Black — once a pillar of global high society — is now deemed so toxic that it can contaminate anything, no matter how removed from Epstein.

None of this definitively proves anything like a global blackmail ring overseen by Epstein and/or intelligence agencies. But it does leave little doubt that Epstein was not only very aware of the valuable leverage such sexual secrets gave him, but also that he used it when he needed to, including with Leon Black. Epstein witnessed up close how many millions Black was willing to pay to prevent public disclosure in a desperate attempt to preserve his reputation and marriage.

In October, The New York Times published a long examination of what was known at the time about the years-long relationship between Black and Epstein. In 2016, Black seemingly wanted to stop paying Epstein the tens of millions each year he had been paying him. But Epstein was having none of it.

Far from speaking to Black as if Epstein were an employee or paid advisor, he spoke to the billionaire in threatening, menacing, highly demanding, and insulting terms:

Jeffrey Epstein was furious. For years, he had relied on the billionaire Leon Black as his primary source of income, advising him on everything from taxes to his world-class art collection. But by 2016, Mr. Black seemed to be reluctant to keep paying him tens of millions of dollars a year.
So Mr. Epstein threw a tantrum.
One of Mr. Black’s other financial advisers had created “a really dangerous mess,” Mr. Epstein wrote in an email to Mr. Black. Another was “a waste of money and space.” He even attacked Mr. Black’s children as “retarded” for supposedly making a mess of his estate.
The typo-strewn tirade was one of dozens of previously unreported emails reviewed by The New York Times in which Mr. Epstein hectored Mr. Black, at times demanding tens of millions of dollars beyond the $150 million he had already been paid.
The pressure campaign appeared to work. Mr. Black, who for decades was one of the richest and highest-profile figures on Wall Street, continued to fork over tens of millions of dollars in fees and loans, albeit less than Mr. Epstein had been seeking.

The mind-bogglingly massive size of Black’s payments to Epstein over the years for “tax advice” made no rational sense. Billionaires like Black are not exactly known for easily or willingly parting with money that they do not have to pay. They cling to money, which is how many become billionaires in the first place.

As the Times article put it, Black’s explanation for these payments to Epstein “puzzled many on Wall Street, who have asked why one of the country’s richest men would pay Mr. Epstein, a college dropout, so much more than what prestigious law firms would charge for similar services.”

Beyond Black’s payments to Epstein himself, he also “wired hundreds of thousands of dollars to at least three women who were associated with Mr. Epstein.” And all of this led to Epstein speaking to Black not the way one would speak to one’s most valuable client or to one’s boss, but rather spoke to him in terms of non-negotiable ultimatums, notably similar to the tone used by Black’s mistress-turned-blackmailer:

Email from Jeffrey Epstein to Leon Black, dated November 2, 2015.

When Black did not relent, Epstein’s demands only grew more aggressive. In one email, he told Black: “I think you should pay the 25 [million] that you did not for this year. For next year it's the same 40 [million] as always, paid 20 [million] in jan and 20 [million] in july, and then we are done.” At one point, Epstein responded to Black’s complaints about a cash crunch (a grievance Black also tried using with his mistress) with offers to take payment from Black in the form of real estate, art, or financing for Epstein’s plane:

Email from Jeffrey Epstein to Leon Black, dated March 16, 2016.

With whatever motives, Black succumbed to Epstein’s pressure and kept paying him massive sums, including $20 million at the start of 2017, and then another $8 million just a few months later, in April.

Epstein had access to virtually every part of Black’s life, as he had with Wexner before that. He was in possession of all sorts of private information about their intimate lives, which would and could have destroyed them if he disclosed it, as evidenced by the reputational destruction each has suffered just from the limited disclosures about their relationship with Epstein, to say nothing of whatever else Epstein knew.

Leon Black was most definitely the target of extreme and aggressive blackmail and extortion over his sex life in at least one instance we know of, and Epstein was at the center of that, directing him. While Wall Street may have been baffled that Wexner and Black paid such sums to Epstein over the years, including after Black wanted to cut him off, it is quite easy to understand why they did so. That is particularly so as Epstein became angrier and more threatening, and as he began reminding Black of all the threats from which Epstein had long protected him. Epstein watched those exact tactics work for Black’s mistress.

The DOJ continues to insist it has no evidence of Epstein using his access to the most embarrassing parts of the private and sexual lives of the world’s richest and most powerful people for blackmail purposes. But we know for certain that blackmail was used in this world, and that Epstein was not only well aware of highly valuable secrets but was also paid enormous, seemingly irrational sums by billionaires whose lives he knew intimately.

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Glenn Greenwald@ggreenwald

February 13, 2026

Amazon's Ring and Google's Nest Unwittingly Reveal the Severity of the U.S. Surveillance State

Just a decade after a global backlash was triggered by Snowden reporting on mass domestic surveillance, the state-corporate dragnet is stronger and more invasive than ever.

That the U.S. Surveillance State is rapidly growing to the point of ubiquity has been demonstrated over the past week by seemingly benign events. While the picture that emerges is grim, to put it mildly, at least Americans are again confronted with crystal clarity over how severe this has become.

The latest round of valid panic over privacy began during the Super Bowl held on Sunday. During the game, Amazon ran a commercial for its Ring camera security system. The ad manipulatively exploited people’s love of dogs to induce them to ignore the consequences of what Amazon was touting. It seems that trick did not work.

The ad highlighted what the company calls its “Search Party” feature, whereby one can upload a picture, for example, of a lost dog. Doing so will activate multiple other Amazon Ring cameras in the neighborhood, which will, in turn, use AI programs to scan all dogs, it seems, and identify the one that is lost. The 30-second commercial was full of heart-tugging scenes of young children and elderly people being reunited with their lost dogs.

But the graphic Amazon used seems to have unwittingly depicted how invasive this technology can be. That this capability now exists in a product that has long been pitched as nothing more than a simple tool for homeowners to monitor their own homes created, it seems, an unavoidable contract between public understanding of Ring and what Amazon was now boasting it could do.

Amazon’s Super Bowl ad for Ring and its “Search Party” feature.

Many people were not just surprised but quite shocked and alarmed to learn that what they thought was merely their own personal security system now has the ability to link with countless other Ring cameras to form a neighborhood-wide (or city-wide, or state-wide) surveillance dragnet. That Amazon emphasized that this feature is available (for now) only to those who “opt-in” did not assuage concerns.

Numerous media outlets sounded the alarm. The online privacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) condemned Ring’s program as previewing “a world where biometric identification could be unleashed from consumer devices to identify, track, and locate anything — human, pet, and otherwise.”

Many private citizens who previously used Ring also reacted negatively. “Viral videos online show people removing or destroying their cameras over privacy concerns,” reported USA Today. The backlash became so severe that, just days later, Amazon — seeking to assuage public anger — announced the termination of a partnership between Ring and Flock Safety, a police surveillance tech company (while Flock is unrelated to Search Party, public backlash made it impossible, at least for now, for Amazon to send Ring’s user data to a police surveillance firm).

The Amazon ad seems to have triggered a long-overdue spotlight on how the combination of ubiquitous cameras, AI, and rapidly advancing facial recognition software will render the term “privacy” little more than a quaint concept from the past. As EFF put it, Ring’s program “could already run afoul of biometric privacy laws in some states, which require explicit, informed consent from individuals before a company can just run face recognition on someone.”

Those concerns escalated just a few days later in the context of the Tucson disappearance of Nancy Guthrie, mother of long-time TODAY Show host Savannah Guthrie. At the home where she lives, Nancy Guthrie used Google’s Nest camera for security, a product similar to Amazon’s Ring.

Guthrie, however, did not pay Google for a subscription for those cameras, instead solely using the cameras for real-time monitoring. As CBS News explained, “with a free Google Nest plan, the video should have been deleted within 3 to 6 hours — long after Guthrie was reported missing.” Even professional privacy advocates have understood that customers who use Nest without a subscription will not have their cameras connected to Google’s data servers, meaning that no recordings will be stored or available for any period beyond a few hours.

For that reason, Pima County Sheriff Chris Nanos announced early on “that there was no video available in part because Guthrie didn’t have an active subscription to the company.” Many people, for obvious reasons, prefer to avoid permanently storing comprehensive daily video reports with Google of when they leave and return to their own home, or who visits them at their home, when, and for how long.

Despite all this, FBI investigators on the case were somehow magically able to “recover” this video from Guthrie’s camera many days later. FBI Director Kash Patel was essentially forced to admit this when he released still images of what appears to be the masked perpetrator who broke into Guthrie’s home. (The Google user agreement, which few users read, does protect the company by stating that images may be stored even in the absence of a subscription.)

While the “discovery” of footage from this home camera by Google engineers is obviously of great value to the Guthrie family and law enforcement agents searching for Guthrie, it raises obvious yet serious questions about why Google, contrary to common understanding, was storing the video footage of unsubscribed users. A former NSA data researcher and CEO of a cybersecurity firm, Patrick Johnson, told CBS: “There's kind of this old saying that data is never deleted, it's just renamed.”

Image obtained through Nancy Guthrie’s unsubscribed Google Nest camera and released by the FBI.

It is rather remarkable that Americans are being led, more or less willingly, into a state-corporate, Panopticon-like domestic surveillance state with relatively little resistance, though the widespread reaction to Amazon’s Ring ad is encouraging. Much of that muted reaction may be due to a lack of realization about the severity of the evolving privacy threat. Beyond that, privacy and other core rights can seem abstract and less of a priority than more material concerns, at least until they are gone.

It is always the case that there are benefits available from relinquishing core civil liberties: allowing infringements on free speech may reduce false claims and hateful ideas; allowing searches and seizures without warrants will likely help the police catch more criminals, and do so more quickly; giving up privacy may, in fact, enhance security.

But the core premise of the West generally, and the U.S. in particular, is that those trade-offs are never worthwhile. Americans still all learn and are taught to admire the iconic (if not apocryphal) 1775 words of Patrick Henry, which came to define the core ethos of the Revolutionary War and American Founding: “Give me liberty or give me death.” It is hard to express in more definitive terms on which side of that liberty-versus-security trade-off the U.S. was intended to fall.

These recent events emerge in a broader context of this new Silicon Valley-driven destruction of individual privacy. Palantir’s federal contracts for domestic surveillance and domestic data management continue to expand rapidly, with more and more intrusive data about Americans consolidated under the control of this one sinister corporation.

Facial recognition technology — now fully in use for an array of purposes from Customs and Border Protection at airports to ICE’s patrolling of American streets — means that fully tracking one’s movements in public spaces is easier than ever, and is becoming easier by the day. It was only three years ago that we interviewed New York Timesreporter Kashmir Hill about her new book, “Your Face Belongs to Us.” The warnings she issued about the dangers of this proliferating technology have not only come true with startling speed but also appear already beyond what even she envisioned.

On top of all this are advances in AI. Its effects on privacy cannot yet be quantified, but they will not be good. I have tried most AI programs simply to remain abreast of how they function.

After just a few weeks, I had to stop my use of Google’s Gemini because it was compiling not just segregated data about me, but also a wide array of information to form what could reasonably be described as a dossier on my life, including information I had not wittingly provided it. It would answer questions I asked it with creepy, unrelated references to the far-too-complete picture it had managed to create of many aspects of my life (at one point, it commented, somewhat judgmentally or out of feigned “concern,” about the late hours I was keeping while working, a topic I never raised).

Many of these unnerving developments have happened without much public notice because we are often distracted by what appear to be more immediate and proximate events in the news cycle. The lack of sufficient attention to these privacy dangers over the last couple of years, including at times from me, should not obscure how consequential they are.

All of this is particularly remarkable, and particularly disconcerting, since we are barely more than a decade removed from the disclosures about mass domestic surveillance enabled by the courageous whistleblower Edward Snowden. Although most of our reporting focused on state surveillance, one of the first stories featured the joint state-corporate spying framework built in conjunction with the U.S. security state and Silicon Valley giants.

The Snowden stories sparked years of anger, attempts at reform, changes in diplomatic relations, and even genuine (albeit forced) improvements in Big Tech’s user privacy. But the calculation of the U.S. security state and Big Tech was that at some point, attention to privacy concerns would disperse and then virtually evaporate, enabling the state-corporate surveillance state to march on without much notice or resistance. At least as of now, the calculation seems to have been vindicated.

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