When Edward Snowden stole about 1.7 million documents from the National Security Agency and shared the information with journalists from around the world, reporters were forced to determine whether publishing the information would negatively affect U.S. national security or if the information was something the public had every right to know.
Though a Google search of NSA surveillance practices now leaves a reader with millions of results, the reality is that what journalists have written about the NSA revelations only come from just a few dozen of the millions of documents Snowden had shared with reporters, which means there is a lot more to the story and surveillance practices than we know.
As the public demands more answers about the government’s activities, and some journalists yearn to become the next reporter to break the next juicy scandal, the media is faced with determining when to censor news of illegal government activity in the name of national security.
“The question if we compromised legitimate intelligence methods is one that we have asked ourselves many times,” said Holger Stark, an investigative journalist with the German newspaper Der Spiegel, which has reported on the NSA scandal.
“If you go through the reporting that we did you won’t find anything that is related to counterterrorism, because we see the approach of the security and authorities to try to disrupt possible plots as a legitimate point.”
Censorship by the media may be a hard concept for many to wrap their heads around, especially since the First Amendment of the Constitution protects free speech and freedom of the press, and the true role of the press is to be a watchdog for the government. But for many reporters covering political, legal, economic and cultural issues, national security is often cited as the reason why there are some restrictions on what a newspaper can share with the public.
For example, after the 9/11 attacks, reporters and editors across the country reported that they received “tremendous pressure” from U.S. government officials to not publish any controversial articles containing information about classified U.S. spy operations.
During a recent panel discussion hosted by Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Siobhan Gorman, a national security reporter for the Wall Street Journal, said that in 2008 some of her work on the collection of Internet metadata angered the George W. Bush administration and others in the intelligence community. Luckily for the U.S. government, Gorman’s article never received the attention Snowden’s revelations received.
The Bush administration was again infuriated in 2005 when the New York Times decided to publish a story — it had held for more than a year — about warrantless NSA eavesdropping in the U.S. According to a report from Politico, Bush warned the Times’ publisher “There’ll be blood on your hands,” if the paper went ahead and published the story.
“The presumption I think that the government has had in some cases prior to Snowden, that they could get you to just not at all publish a story, or hold it for some extensive period of time, there are fewer of those conversations and more of the kind of conversation about, ‘Do you really need this detail to tell your story?’” Gorman said. “It’s less of a wholesale pushback, and it tends to be a little more focused.
“What we’ve seen with the Snowden revelations is the impact that putting documents out there really has,” Gorman said.
Bruce Brown, executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, agreed the Snowden-NSA revelations are a tricky issue for those in the media, and that reporters, editors and government officials need to have a discussion and “develop protocols for handling sensitive or national security information prior to publication.
“To have those kinds of conversations at a time not when it’s 5 o’clock, and there’s a deadline the next day,” Brown said, is ideal. “But in a more leisurely and relaxed setting, so going forward there’s some basis for better understanding each other when the deadlines do come along, which they inevitably will.”
To print or not to print?
Although the NSA revelations have largely painted a picture that the government is involved in illegal and unconstitutional practices, many reporters are checking with government officials before any report is published to ensure that the information in the article doesn’t cause any more problems.
Barton Gellman, a national security reporter at the Washington Post who has worked with Snowden, said during a recent panel discussion that he has followed the same procedures when writing about the NSA scandal that he has used while covering other national security issues, such as checking with editors and giving government sources an opportunity to explain why something should not be published.
The mere fact that reporters around the globe are checking with government officials to clear what they are printing may be concerning to some, but Gellman says the public should rest assured that the Washington Post doesn’t agree to remove information or kill a story simply because the public won’t like what the government is up to.
“In my view, and it was shared by the editor, was that if the harm you’re worried about consists of the public disliking what you’re doing and responding either politically or in terms of the marketplace to that, then that’s why we publish it,” Gellman said. “That’s the nature of accountability.”
Gellman says he is still working on some NSA stories, but added he has no plans to publish all of the materials Snowden has given him.
“It’s a very peculiar relationship to be in with the reading public, in which I am doing the blacking out because I think part of the information is vital to understand the story and part of it shouldn’t be disclosed,” he said.
But Glenn Greenwald, formerly of the Guardian, who worked closely with Snowden to break the NSA surveillance story, has taken a different approach than many of his peers in the industry in reporting on the NSA scandal.
Since the revelations came at a time when it was discovered the Obama administration had spied on The Associated Press and was threatening journalists with time behind bars for publishing information leaked to them, Greenwald hasn’t relied much on government officials to discern what information should and should not be published, since he says many U.S. officials are trying to discourage reporters from following and reporting on the story.
“What they’re trying to do is to remove it from the realm of journalism, so that they can then criminalize it,” Greenwald said.
“The fact that I’ve been more defiant about the U.S. government … makes them want to do something to me more. That fact that I’ve gone around the world doing this reporting in different countries and publishing reporting around the world — that is something they want to stop.”
Balancing act
For the record, some of Greenwald’s peers at the Guardian checked with British government sources before any NSA story was published, and as a result, British security officials forced editors at the Guardian to destroy computers on which the Snowden documents were saved. Luckily for Greenwald, the Guardian had partnered with the New York Times for several stories, so the reporter had the ability to access the documents again.
Now Greenwald has tried to encourage reporters at media outlets across the world to not check with government officials before publishing a story revealing NSA secrets. He told Politico that originally Snowden didn’t even want to work with the New York Times because he was concerned the media giant was “too subservient” to the U.S. government.
“This model of journalism, of extreme collaboration between the government and the media, has become pretty discredited in large part over the last seven months because of what we have been able to do,” he said. “Other institutions are motivated now to show they’re not too captive to the U.S. government.”
Geoff Stone is a law professor at the University of Chicago and a member of the White House-chartered task force that examined the surveillance programs. Stone said that while he recognizes the reporters are the ones with access to the once-classified NSA documents, he says he doesn’t think reporters should be the ones determining what information from the documents should be published or not, because they don’t fully understand the harm that the information could cause.
Though Stone believes the Snowden revelations have been “very valuable” and have forced the U.S. government to have a conversation about the extent that the nation is under surveillance, he says “there really is a danger there of members of the press thinking they know more than they do and making important decisions for the nation based on that.
“These are really hard issues that journalism as a profession needs to think about now because it’s come to the fore so much,” Stone said.
In an interview with the PBS NewsHour, Stark and his Der Spiegel colleague Marcel Rosenbach defended journalists coverage of the NSA scandal, and said they believed the NSA surveillance story is an important one to tell because without it, the public wouldn’t be able to have an informed debate on whether this level of surveillance is something the public wanted.
Stark explained that while the Internet was once thought of as a place where free speech and democracy could survive, the NSA documents revealed that the Internet is also the perfect place to surveil the activities of the public.
We asked ourselves many times if we were compromising national security, Stark said, adding that Der Spiegel has not published every NSA story written since there are facets of the NSA’s operations in dangerous parts of the world such as North Korea and Iran where intelligence work is extremely sensitive and legitimately needed.
“We don’t want to give terrorists an opportunity to advance,” he said, “but a lot of this information, if revealed, benefits democracy.”