Journalist Glenn Greenwald condemned the mainstream media during an address at a German computer conference on Friday and accused his colleagues of failing to challenge erroneous remarks routinely made by government officials around the globe.

Journalist Glenn Greenwald condemned the mainstream media during an address at a German computer conference on Friday and accused his colleagues of failing to challenge erroneous remarks routinely made by government officials around the globe. ● Thousands of attendees at the thirtieth annual Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg packed into a room to watch the 46-year-old lawyer-turned-columnist present a keynote address delivered less than seven months after he started working with former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden. Revelations contained in leaked documents supplied by Snowden to Greenwald and other journalists have sparked international outrage and efforts to reform the far-reaching surveillance operations waged by the NSA and intelligence officials in allied nations. But speaking remotely from Brazil this week, Greenwald argued that the media establishment at large is guilty of failing significantly with respect to accomplishing its most crucial role: keeping governments in check.

Grant Smith: Dual-citizen nominee's lifetime benefit to Israel comes at a heavy cost to America. ■ The rushed campaign to insert Stanley Fischer straight from his position leading Israel’s central bank into the number two spot at the Federal Reserve has allowed little time for research into the appointee’s career or for informed public debate about his record. Like the failed recent Obama administration-Israel lobby pincer move to ram approval for U.S. military strikes on Syria through Congress, avoiding such due diligence through velocity may actually be the only means for successful Senate confirmation.

From Aaron Swartz to Assange, Monsanto to Manning, fracking fears, Iraq carnage and more, here are RT’s "Top 13 of 2013." These vastly underreported stories are some of the biggest ones to fly under the mainstream media’s radar this year.

Revelation 2:9 - I know thy works, and tribulation, and poverty, (but thou art rich) and I know the blasphemy of them which say they are Jews, and are not, but are the synagogue of Satan.

Les Visible ■ On the Doorstep of a New World Israelis [...] have got a personal agenda that is indifferent to the welfare of anyone but themselves. For them, Christmas means killing 3 year old children in occupied lands, illegally occupied by them and they do it to celebrate the bloodlust of the demon god they serve, who demands blood sacrifice in order to assist them in their ongoing war against the whole of the human race. You disagree with my analysis? Then explain to me how it is that nearly every Christmas they crank up their war machine and most of the time it involves an assault on a captive populace that they have corralled into an ever diminishing territory, which is for them no more than a playground for applied genocide.

Sheldon Richman ■ The American people should know that pending right now in Congress is a bipartisan bill that would virtually commit the United States to go to war against Iran if Israel attacks the Islamic Republic. “The bill outsources any decision about resort to military action to the government of Israel,” Columbia University Iran expert Gary Sick wrote to Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) in protest, one of the bill’s principal sponsors. The mind boggles at the thought that Congress would let a foreign government decide when America goes to war.

The Washington Post is running a terrific article in which former NSA contractor Edward Snowden explains why he revealed how far the NSA and other federal agencies had gone toward constructing a national security surveillance state. Short answer: Because it's unconstitutional. The Post interviewed Snowden for 14 hours in Moscow and he comes off much better than the pack of liars who run the NSA or the enablers who "oversee" its activities in Congress or in the Administration.

Even Before 9/11, NSA Knew In Real-Time Which Countries Both Parties to Phone Calls Were In. In finding the NSA’s metadata collection program legal today, Judge William Pauley III ruled: The September 11th terrorist attacks revealed, in the starkest terms, just how dangerous and interconnected the world is. While Americans depended on technology for the conveniences of modernity, al-Qaeda plotted in a seventh-century milieu to use that technology against us. It was a bold jujitsu. And it succeeded because conventional intelligence gathering could not detect diffuse filaments connecting al-Qaeda. [...] The Government learned from its mistake and adapted to confront a new enemy: a terror network capable of orchestrating attacks across the world. It launched a number of counter-measures, including a bulk telephony metadata collection program—a wide net that could find and isolate gossamer contacts among suspected terrorists in an ocean of seemingly disconnected data. [...] Judge Pauley is uninformed … and he fell for the “big lie” behind NSA spying. [W]hile Binney headed NSA’s global digital communications gathering efforts prior to 9/11, his team knew in real-time which countries calls were made from and received in. The NSA is lying if it claims otherwise.

Reason.com: Judge Says the NSA Can Look at Your Phone Records Because They're Not Yours

The newest version of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) includes an amendment that would legalize the use of propaganda on the American public, reports Michael Hastings of BuzzFeed.● The amendment — proposed by Mac Thornberry (R-Texas) and Adam Smith (D-Wash.) and passed in the House last Friday afternoon — would effectively nullify the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948, which explicitly forbids information and psychological operations aimed at influencing U.S. public opinion. Thornberry said that the current law “ties the hands of America’s diplomatic officials, military, and others by inhibiting our ability to effectively communicate in a credible way,” according to Buzzfeed. The vote came two days after a federal judged ruled that an indefinite detention provision in the annual defense bill was unconstitutional. Lt. Col. Daniel Davis, who released a highly critical report regarding the distortion of truth by senior military officials in Iraq and Afghanistan, dedicated a section of his report to Information Operations (IO) and states that after Desert Storm the military wanted to transform IO "into a core military competency on a par with air, ground, maritime and special operations."