Sunday, on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” host David Gregory asked The Guardian’s Glenn Greenwald a question that reached to the heart of the notion of journalistic objectivity. Greenwald is the reporter who broke the National Security Agency surveillance case by reporting that the NSA has accessed end-user databases from Verizon and other telecommunications firms.
During the interview, Gregory asked Greenwald where whistleblower and former Booz Allen Hamilton national security analyst Edward Snowden is headed after leaving Hong Kong. On June 21, Reuters reported that the United States has filed sealed criminal charges against Snowden for espionage, theft and conversion of government property — all charges that he has previously admitted to. The Washington Post reported that the United States has asked Hong Kong authorities to detain Snowden on a provisional arrest warrant. The U.S.-Hong Kong extradition treaty, however, makes an exception for political offenses — a category that includes espionage. As such, there was a possibility that Snowden could have been kept safe from prosecution by remaining in Hong Kong.
Snowden, instead, fled to Russia. From there, he was expected to head to Cuba, but — after failing to show up for his Cuba-bound flight on Monday — his current location is unknown. Ecuador is reported to be actively considering granting asylum to Snowden.
“He’s in a safe place,” said Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder who is currently heading a team that is offering assistance to Snowden. “We cannot go into further detail.”
The Putin government has denied any knowledge of Snowden’s movement and Secretary of State John Kerry has stated that the U.S. does not know where Snowden is headed.
When Greenwald refused to discuss the issue on “Meet the Press,” Gregory asked why Greenwald shouldn’t be charged with aiding and abetting Edward Snowden. Greenwald replied that it was “pretty extraordinary that anybody who would call themselves a journalist would publicly muse about whether or not other journalists should be charged with felonies.”
“If you want to embrace that theory, it means that every investigative journalist in the United States who works with their sources, who receives classified information is a criminal, and it’s precisely those theories and precisely that climate that has become so menacing in the United States,” Greenwald continued.
Greenwald, a former constitutional and civil rights lawyer, is the author of three books on the ways the government has violated personal liberties for the sake of national security.
Whistleblowing under the Obama administration
Since entering office, President Obama has charged seven people under the Espionage Act — a controversial law that was created to prohibit interference with military operations. The law barred the act of revealing information regarding the military and intelligence interworking of the government or falsely reporting foreign intelligence. Since its introduction, the act has been amended so that it is now part of the national criminal code and applies to the whole of the government — not just the military.
Under the Espionage Act, Snowden is charged with disclosure of classified information, which carries a maximum sentence of 10 years, and gathering, transmitting or losing defense information, which also has a maximum sentence of 10 years.
Since the implementation of the Espionage Act, the government has used it in only 10 total indictments. The list of those indicted under the Obama administration for espionage includes Shamai Leibowitz, an FBI linguist who received 20 months in prison in 2010 for leaking transcripts of wiretaps of the Israeli embassy to blogger Richard Silverstein; Army Pfc. Bradley Manning, who is currently facing court martial for his disclosure of hundreds of thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks; and John Kiriakou, who was sentenced to 30 months in prison for disclosing the name of a covert CIA officer to the media. Kiriakou was among the first to speak out against the CIA’s use of waterboarding.
The interpretation of a law
The Obama administration is currently responsible for twice the number of espionage indictments than the combined total from the other 16 administrations since the Espionage Act’s passage. Many feel that the law itself is to blame for this disproportionate rate of indictment, as its clumsy and vague wording permits a litany of interpretations.
“We think about the Espionage Act as forbidding disclosures of classified information. That’s not really what the statute says,” said Benjamin Wittes of the Brookings Institute to NPR. “What the statute talks about is information related to the national defense. And so, you know, I think if you were to go take pictures of ships at Pearl Harbor, that is not classified information, but it arguably is information related to the national defense.”
“On the other hand, if you imagine a highly classified diplomatic cable that’s sensitive for reasons having nothing to do with national defense, it’s classified for other reasons. And so I think you do have this weird mismatch under the Espionage Act. The categories don’t really line up very well with the modern classification system,” Wittes concluded.
Political blogger Charles Pierce used much harsher tones describing the act in a post for Esquire. The Espionage Act was created — alongside the Sedition Act — to constrict the flow of anti-government free speech. Pierce called the Espionage Act a “foul relic of a foul time, born of the repressive mind of Woodrow Wilson, American history’s most overrated man, employed to quash dissent during World War I, and then repurposed for the Red Scare that followed hard on the Armistice, and it rose again during the subsequent Red Scares after the subsequent world war.”
Greenwald attacked the Obama administration for its seemingly heavy-handed use of the Espionage Act.
“It’s a completely one-sided and manipulative abuse of secrecy laws,” Greenwald wrote. “It’s all designed to ensure that the only information we as citizens can learn is what they want us to learn because it makes them look good. The only leaks they’re interested in severely punishing are those that undermine them politically. The ‘enemy’ they’re seeking to keep ignorant with selective and excessive leak prosecutions are not The Terrorists or The Chinese Communists. It’s the American people.”
The subjectiveness of an objective report
But this raises important questions. Snowden admitted to taking this information and distributing it without the government’s consent. Does not the government have the moral and legal obligation to address and challenge this? Is a crime done for a noble reason no less a crime? If Snowden is innocent of the charges he is accused of, should he not have the right and obligation to meet his challengers in court?
Most importantly, when does a reporter’s defense of his sources segue from protecting his sources to excusing his sources? On MSNBC’s “All In with Chris Hayes,” host Chris Hayes challenged Greenwald on his allegation that the Obama administration is simply going after Snowden because he is a whistleblower.
“One of the complaints is theft of government property,” Hayes said. “The specific language in the complaint is ‘unauthorized communication of national defense communication, and willful communication to an unauthorized person… Doesn’t the government have to do something? Someone who worked for the government, and inside the government, skips out with 1,000 classified documents. This is a fairly big breach.”
“I don’t think you will find very many people who argue that he should not be charged with any sort of a criminal offense,” Greenwald replied. “I think when he did what he set out to do, that he understood that it was in violation of the law, he felt like it was a noble act, justified under basic theories of civil disobedience, and that he expected to be charged with a crime. I don’t think anybody is objecting to that. I think … the extreme zealousness, the over-charging that the Obama administration has specialized in, when it comes to whistleblowers, is the issue. The fact that he is 29 years old, and will be threatened with life in prison… The extreme excess that really reflects this sort of vindictive mentality on the part of the administration with regard to anyone who brings transparency to them.
There is an adage in journalism that says that if, in covering a story, the reporter realizes that he is being covered himself, the reporter is in too close. In journalism, it is important to maintain objectivity and not front-load personal opinions or viewpoints onto the facts of the case. While Greenwald’s legal implication in the Snowden case is for a court to decide, it is clear that personal feelings are coloring Greenwald’s reporting and handling of this investigation.
In this particular case, it is nearly impossible to tell where ideology ends and the facts begin.