WikiBay

Buzzfeed today reported that Glenn Greenwald—together with the filmmaker Laura Poitras one of the journalists who were contacted by Edward Snowden and who broke the story on the NSA’s surveillance—is leaving The Guardian to join a new media venture, ostensibly funded by eBay’s founder Pierre Omidyar (as reported by the Huffington Post).

Omidyar, apart from being a billionaire since eBay’s stock market launch in 1998, is a philanthropist who funds and supports independent media. Together with his wife he founded the “philanthropic investment firm” Omidyar Network and in 2010 launched “the online investigative reporting news service Honolulu Civil Beat covering civic affairs in Hawaii,” which, in September, started a partnership with the Huffington Post: HuffPost Hawaii. Omidyar has also been extremely outspoken in regard to the NSA affair in the past, as you can see here.

The latest news, also reported by HuffPo, is that Laura Poitras and Jeremy Scahill (National Security correspondent for The Nation), too, will be joining Omidyar’s mystery venture, of which nothing really is known except that Greenwald described it as a “momentous” and “once-in-a-career-dream journalistic opportunity that no journalist could possibly decline.”

While wildly googling this stuff today and with the help of Nina, I came across the Freedom of the Press Foundation. It was founded in 2012 – Glenn Greenwald is one of the board members – and appears to be an incredible, post-internet era creation of William Gibson-esque dimensions, which yesterday launched, or began managing “SecureDrop, an Open-Source Submission Platform for Whistleblowers,“ coded by the late Aaron Swartz—somebody who deserves not to be forgotten and whom you should immediately read up on if you don’t already know who he was. One of the projects of the Freedom of the Press Foundation (who now also accept Bitcoin as currency for donations), in reaction to the US military’s denial to release transcripts of the Bradley / Chelsea Manning trial, was to crowd-fund a professional stenographer to cover the trial in the court’s media room and upload the entire transcripts on their site.

Other board members of the foundation include Daniel Ellsberg (the famous whistleblower of the Pentagon Papers), Laura Poitras again, John Perry Barlow (“cyberlibertarian” and former lyricist of the Grateful Dead), and, well, John Cusack. I think I want to work there too.