Inside the World of Pierre Omidyar--How Snowden Leaks Gave Pierre Omidyar a Cause & Enemy
Last edited Mon Nov 3, 2014, 09:24 PM - Edit history (1)
November 2, 2014 - NY Magazine
By Andrew Rice
The eBay founder was a mild-mannered Obama supporter looking for a way to spend his time and fortune. The Snowden leaks gave him a cause — and an enemy.
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Every September, for a siren-snarled week, much of midtown Manhattan surrenders to a pair of occupying powers: the United Nations and the Clinton Global Initiative. The U.N.’s annual General Assembly brings in the foreign excellencies and tin-pot dictators, but it’s Bill Clinton’s event that attracts the billionaires. This year’s edition, co-sponsored by, among others, a Greek shipping magnate’s wife and a Ukrainian oligarch, took place inside the barricaded Times Square Sheraton, where the Clintons made evangelical “calls to action” on issues like water scarcity and women’s empowerment.
One evening, in conjunction with CGI, Pierre Omidyar threw a reception across the street. Omidyar, the programmer who created eBay, is one of America’s richest men, a 47-year-old philanthropist intent on giving away the fortune he made when he was 31. He is on collegial terms with the Clintons and has been a partner in their charity work. His guests, sipping wine inside a vaulted glass atrium, represented foundations and banks, governments and NGOs, tech start-ups and McKinsey. Omidyar’s foundation had just unveiled a $200 million Global Innovation Fund, established in partnership with the U.S. Agency for International Development. The announcement was timed to coincide with President Obama’s speech to the conference that afternoon on nurturing civil society.
Omidyar was late to the party, however — he’d spent much of his day hatching plans with some of Obama’s most uncivil opponents. Down in the Flatiron District, he has been building a digital-media organization dedicated to a scorching brand of “fearless, adversarial journalism.” Its prime target is the U.S. intelligence apparatus, and its marquee voice is Glenn Greenwald, the columnist who shared a Pulitzer Prize this year with documentarian Laura Poitras and others for obtaining and publishing Edward Snowden’s leaks about NSA surveillance. Since that story broke, Snowden, Greenwald, and Poitras have become heroes of a crypto-insurgency. More quietly, Omidyar has become the movement’s prime benefactor, financing an operation to disseminate government secrets.
Earlier this year, Greenwald, Poitras, and a third comrade in arms — former Nation writer Jeremy Scahill — launched a website called the Intercept. It is meant to be the prototype for a fleet of publications funded by Omidyar’s flagship company, First Look Media, to which Omidyar has initially committed $250 million. “We have the luxury of doing something different because we have this kind of infinite-resource backer,” Greenwald told me on the phone from Brazil, where he is based. “We’re thinking about how to do journalism structurally differently.” At the time of Omidyar’s visit, a second site, Racket, was also revving up for its launch. Headed by the polemical magazine writer Matt Taibbi, it was going to offer scabrous satire of the financial industry and politics.
Omidyar’s organization operates a little like WikiLeaks, except it is staffed by well-salaried journalists and backed by Silicon Valley money. It aims to unite strident ideology with publishing technology, cryptography, and aggressive legal defense. The Intercept has become the custodian of Snowden’s immense archive of classified documents, which it continues to mine for stories. Greenwald says the site also plans to share them with outside reporters and is building a secure “reading room” in its Fifth Avenue headquarters building, where it is currently renovating three floors. The Intercept is encouraging others in the intelligence world to leak via an encrypted system called SecureDrop. Between its periodic scoops, it serves up regular doses of acidic commentary by critics of Obama’s national-security policies.
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This is a fascinating read about wealthy Philanthropic Silicon Valley Billionaires, Media Foundations and Government Insiders. Also reveals the somewhat mysterious Pierre Obmidyar's background from E-Bay to his current interest in Independent Media leading to his eventual conflicts in managing"First Look Media"...But it's a long read.
Good Bookmark for those who care about Independent Media Resources, though.
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/10/pierre-omidyar-first-look-media.html