Get ready to read a whole lot more about New York gay porn entrepreneur Jake Jaxson.

Just before the July 4 holiday, Jaxson – under his real name, Jason Buchtel – posted a remarkable Tumblr item about his previous business partnership with Glenn Greenwald, The Guardian reporter who broke the Edward Snowden story. He was belatedly responding to reports on BuzzFeed and in the New York Daily News about his past dealings with Greenwald.

Buchtel details his struggles with the media attention and how it led him to reveal to his parents, for the first time, that he is now operating gay porn websites. He also explains how the burgeoning X-rated sideline started:

Like many, I came to the adult space by accident. With Master Notions, the company I co-owned with Glenn, we were on the forefront of developing online “street” and viral marketing, and we had taken on a few adult clients… I really enjoyed being able to work in a strategic space that had no boundaries, where we could see immediately what worked and what did not work — not the long tail approach to more traditional marketing.

It was only a matter of time before my partners and I saw that running our own customer friendly adult sites – built on customer satisfaction and loyalty – was a lucrative business. So we began acquiring properties in the adult space and cockyboys.com is now the crown jewel.

Read more

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Snowden Hits Back Against Critics of NSA Leaks (Reuters)
The former National Security Agency contractor who revealed the U.S. government’s top-secret monitoring of Americans’ phone and Internet data fought back against his critics on Monday, saying the government’s “litany of lies” about the programs compelled him to act. Edward Snowden told an online forum run by Britain’s Guardian newspaper that he considered it an honor to be called a traitor by people like former Vice President Dick Cheney, and he urged President Barack Obama to “return to sanity” and roll back the surveillance effort. HuffPost A reader asked Snowden for his thoughts on the media debate around him. “Initially I was very encouraged,” he wrote. “Unfortunately, the mainstream media now seems far more interested in what I said when I was 17 or what my girlfriend looks like rather than, say, the largest program of suspicionless surveillance in human history.” Medium / Joshua Foust The reporting on Snowden has been dreadful. Is there a way to make it better? Two weeks ago, when The Guardian first leaked a Verizon court order to hand over its call metadata, a national debate began about privacy and security. THR Director Oliver Stone brought thunderous applause to a crowd of more than 500 festivalgoers at the 16th Shanghai International Film Festival in China on Monday when he praised Snowden as a “hero.” The Guardian Defense officials issued a confidential D notice to the BBC and other media groups in an attempt to censor coverage of surveillance tactics employed by intelligence agencies in the UK and US. Editors were asked not to publish information that may “jeopardize both national security and possibly UK personnel” in the warning issued on June 7. Read more

Well, here we go. The media has located Edward Snowden’s (the NSA whistleblower) alleged girlfriend. What does she have to do with any of this? Nothing! But this is America, and we love making something out of nothing and somebodies out of nobodies.

Here are just a few of the places already talking about someone that doesn’t matter at all:

• Inside Edition (credit them with breaking this amazing, must-read story)
• Gawker
• BuzzFeed
• Cosmo ( ! )
• The Huffington Post
• Business Insider
• ABC News
• New York Daily News

Much to the media’s delight, the woman is a dancer and writes a blog. Those items alone will give them fodder for months.

Will all of this unnecessary attention ruin this woman’s life? Yes! But please, don’t bother the media with ethics when it’s busy creating a celebrity.

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A New Kind of Leaker for an Internet Age (NYT)
What does a leaker look like? Sometimes, people who reveal secrets remain in the shadows, and the public is left to guess at their motivations, agendas and states of mind. Edward Snowden, the 29-year-old man behind the recent revelations about the National Security Agency’s pursuit of phone and computer data, upended that history. He is a new kind of leaker of the wired age: an immediately visible one with a voice and the means to go direct with the public. In a era of friction-free Web communication, he disdained the shadows and stepped into view with a lengthy video interview he gave to The Guardian, which broke the story based on information he provided. He stated his motivation plainly, saying, “The public needs to decide whether these programs and policies are right or wrong.” HuffPost / The Backstory The Guardian has labeled Snowden a whistleblower after the NSA contractor revealed himself Sunday as the source for several recent surveillance scoops. But some news organizations have been less quick to describe Snowden as a “whistleblower,” opting instead for terms like “source” or “leaker.” The Washington Post / Erik Wemple News organizations’ hesitancy to use “whistleblower” may well derive from the term’s meaning. According to this definition, a whistleblower is an “informant who exposes wrongdoing within an organization in the hope of stopping it.” Clearly Snowden was looking to stop something here, but whether it was wrongdoing depends on whether you’re director of national intelligence James Clapper or, say, a civil liberties advocate. The Guardian Snowden is a “hero” who has exposed “one of the most serious events of the decade — the creeping formulation of a mass surveillance state,” Julian Assange said on Monday. The WikiLeaks founder said the question of surveillance abuses by states and tech companies was “something that I and many other journalists and civil libertarians have been campaigning about for a long time. It is very pleasing to see such clear and concrete proof presented to the public.” The New Yorker / Daily Comment He is a grandiose narcissist who deserves to be in prison. The American government, and its democracy, are flawed institutions. But our system offers legal options to disgruntled government employees and contractors. They can take advantage of federal whistleblower laws; they can bring their complaints to Congress; they can try to protest within the institutions where they work. But Snowden did none of this. Instead, in an act that speaks more to his ego than his conscience, he threw the secrets he knew up in the air — and trusted, somehow, that good would come of it. We all now have to hope that he’s right. Read more

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Layoff Day at The New York Post (Capital New York)
Brooklyn court reporter Mitch Maddux and staff writer Pedro Oliveira Jr. are among those that sources tell Capital lost their jobs at the New York Post Friday in a round of layoffs that was foreshadowed last month when editor Col Allan announced he was seeking a reduction of 10 percent of the paper’s staff. JimRomenesko.com Allan’s memo about Friday’s layoffs: “The decision to lay off employees is not one that we make lightly, but it is a necessary step as we continue to reduce costs, refocus our priorities, and re-imagine overall how we run as a company. The future of the Post is as vibrant as its brand, both in print and digitally, and we will continue to focus on the core areas we see key to a strong future.” NY Observer The news comes in advance of the expected June 28 News Corp split, when the book and newspaper assets will separate from the more lucrative TV and film properties. The shakeout is expected to be rough. Read more