{"id":20891,"date":"2013-06-30T10:56:11","date_gmt":"2013-06-30T15:56:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=20891"},"modified":"2013-06-30T10:56:11","modified_gmt":"2013-06-30T15:56:11","slug":"the-observer-has-an-embarrassing-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2013\/06\/30\/the-observer-has-an-embarrassing-day\/","title":{"rendered":"The Observer<\/em> has an embarrassing day"},"content":{"rendered":"

In his Forbes<\/em> column, Tim Worstall<\/a> gleefully recounts the steps in a publishing cock-up by The Observer<\/em>:<\/p>\n

It looks like The Guardian\/Observer<\/em>* has managed to get itself mightily stung over a revelation about PRISM and the NSA. Which is all very amusing given the paper\u2019s part in the Glenn Greenwald\/Edward Snowden revelations. But what turns it into an absolute joy is that, while the news originally came from someone with, hmm, rather \u201cout there\u201d views, the actual information itself seems to be roughly true. And yet they\u2019ve still taken the piece down.<\/p>\n

The story starts here, at a site called The Privacy Surgeon<\/em>. The site does an interview with an ex-NSA guy called Wayne Madsen. In which he claims that there are various European and other countries that cooperate with the NSA in the collection and then dissemination of information picked up from the monitoring of communications.<\/p>\n

[. . .]<\/p>\n

So, The Guardian\/Observer<\/em> has published a piece using allegations made by someone we\u2019d already be predisposed to think of as being less than entirely correct in his descriptions of the real world. And, as a result, they\u2019ve taken the piece down:<\/p>\n