NSA Leaks: Government and Press in a Warm Embrace

In the U.K.'s The Guardian, Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras revealed as no one had before the extent to which the government spies on the communications of everyone in the U.S. But rather than pursue whether the intelligence agency was trampling the civil rights of the people, or questioning whether Americans at least have every right to know what is done with the
data collected about them, the attention immediately shifted to the motives of Snowden and the reporters, and away from whether NSA had violated the Constitution.

It is impossible to reconcile NSA’s nationwide grab of everyone’s data with the laws that it claims support its actions. Yet our most senior legislators sided reflexively with NSA. House Speaker John Boehner called Snowden "a traitor”. Senate Majority leader Harry Reid equivocated. Dianne Feinstein, chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said, “I think it’s an act of treason”. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said Snowden should “be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law”, claiming that “each of these programs is authorized by law, overseen by Congress and the courts, and subject to ongoing and rigorous oversight”, all of which would be disputed or debunked in the days that followed.

President Obama assured us that “every member of Congress has been briefed on this program” and that "Congress is continually briefed on how these [data collection programs] are conducted”. That was patently false. Very few Congress members knew of NSA’s activities, and the committees charged with overseeing the intelligence agencies seemed to have lost control of that assignment. Government figures such as Feinstein seemed to be surprised that the public thinks it should have any say in such matters, that Washington should be left to do as it thinks best.

Immediately after The Guardian’s first release, Greenwald, with years of experience challenging government secrecy, foresaw that government would attack the messenger:

Ever since the Nixon administration broke into the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychoanalyst's office, the tactic of the US government has been to attack and demonize whistleblowers as a means of distracting attention from their own exposed wrongdoing and destroying the credibility of the messenger so that everyone tunes out the message. That attempt will undoubtedly be made here.

Which is exactly what happened. And the press, for the most part, fell right in step with the government position.

Journalism is competitive, so instead of celebrating one of their own, the media set about backbiting. Greenwald had just reported the biggest leak of government secrets in history, yet he said that the major concern of The New York Times, New York Daily News and Buzzfeed was some personal matter from ten years prior about which they all e-mailed Greenwald on the same day, the only conceivable purpose being to find a way to discredit him or impugn his character.

With facts in short supply, the press speculated. In a June 24 article, The New York Times wrote

“Two Western intelligence experts, who worked for major government spy agencies, said they believed that the Chinese government had managed to drain the contents of the four laptops that Mr. Snowden said he brought to Hong Kong.”

The New Yorker quickly followed, citing the Times, saying that Snowden's usefulness was drained along with his laptops which was "Why China Let Snowden Go". Other publications, blogs, etc., picked up the story, with little concern that it was based on two unidentified sources who "believed" rather than knew.

On "Meet the Press", NBC's Chuck Todd showed no interest in whether NSA's surveillance is illegal, but demanded to know "how much was [Greenwald] involved in the plot" to expose the NSA? On CNBC, the Times business reporter and commentator, Andrew Ross Sorkin, said “I would arrest him [Snowden], and now I would almost arrest Glenn Greenwald”.

So here were these ostensible journalists choosing to ignore the “big story” they had missed and instead attacking, and even advocating the arrest of, a fellow journalist, or as Greenwald tweeted Sorkin, “Maybe worth discussing the dark irony that someone who works for the NYT (you) is suggesting that journalists be arrested”. Sorkin apologized the next day.

In an attempt to make Greenwald and Poitras partners in a conspiracy, an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal tried to turn the question of who paid Hong Kong expenses into aiding and abetting "this well-planned theft" of secrets — secrets that were already stolen before Hong Kong. The dishonest title of the article was "Who Helped Snowden Steal State Secrets?" The answer is no one. Only Snowden was inside NSA. An op-ed writer is not a reporter for the paper, you might point out, but what does it say about the editors who allowed this into the Journal.

Walter Pincus, co-winner of a Pulitzer, no less, at The Washington Post wrote a piece that that had so many faults — pointed out by Greenwald in a scathing reply — that the Post had to run three paragraphs of corrections — and place them unusually above the article to warn readers. Pincus's objective was to create a broader conspiracy, asking “Did Assange and WikiLeaks personnel help or direct Snowden to those journalists?" Even though Pincus’s beat is national security, he seems to think Greenwald so obscure that Snowden couldn’t possibly have known of him. Greenwald, a former constitutional lawyer who quit that practice a few years ago in order to do investigative reporting on surveillance and national security, first for Salon and now The Guardian, is closely followed by those concerned for what the government is secretly doing, certainly known to Snowden and his obvious first choice to approach. But Pincus wanted to wrap his rival journalist in an Assange/Wikileaks conspiracy.

Tom Friedman is fearful that another 9/11 would lead “to the end of the open society as we know it”, which is why he “reluctantly, very reluctantly” (two days after The Guardian” story broke) accepted NSA’a spying as worthwhile. His is a puzzling formulation that says we should sacrifice our civil liberties so as to preserve our civil liberties. Ben Franklin has different advice for Friedman: “They who can give up essential Liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety”.

But it was David Gregory of NBC who topped them all, asking Greenwald in an interview, “To the extent that you have aided and abetted Snowden, even in his current movements, why shouldn't you, Mr. Greenwald, be charged with a crime"? Greenwald skewered Gregory in reply (see video). Here was a television personality, who calls himself a journalist perhaps because he once asked a daring question or two back when he sat in the White House stenographer pool, accusing a true journalist of committing the crime of journalism. As Frank Rich, a columnist with New York Magazine, wrote, “Name one piece of news he has broken, one beat he’s covered with distinction, and any memorable interviews he’s conducted that were not with John McCain, Lindsey Graham, Dick Durbin, or Chuck Schumer".

So we have seen a vivid demonstration of how the press, in order not to lose access to government figures, access that they need to write their stories, learn that they cannot bite those who feed them and gradually become co-opted and even chummy (Bush threw a party for Gregory's 30th birthday on the campaign plane, e.g.) with those they write about. It is an occupational hazard that can lead to abandonment of the impartiality demanded of good journalism and a diminished enthusiasm to go against those hard-won contacts looking for wrongdoing. Greenwald has over his years of reporting shown no sign of cozying up to the Washington establishment.

There was a whole other layer of media timidity in choosing nouns for the principals.

The snooty Times, in possibly a jealous pique at never having been considered by Greenwald for publication of the leaks, at first called him a “blogger”. Greenwald recounts his reasons for bypassing the Times with the story that Bill Keller, then Times executive editor, said in an interview that, unlike Wikileaks, which published whatever it chose, he had gone to the Obama administration ahead of time with the Wikileaks outpourings to ask, in Greenwald’s words, “these are the things we think we ought to publish, do you think we should…and if the U.S. government said ‘you shouldn’t publish this’ or ‘you shouldn’t publish that’, Keller proudly said the Times withheld the material”. Moreover, the Times had held off for a year, at the Bush administration’s request, the 2005 publication of James Risen’s and Eric Lichtblau’s explosive discovery that Bush had authorized wiretapping of all international phone traffic without a warrant.

As for Snowden, there was great hand-wringing over whether to call him a leaker or a whistle-blower. Some said he wasn’t a whistle-blower because he didn’t go through the “proper channels” prescribed by the Whistleblower Protection Act, which would have sent him to the NSA’s inspector general, from which he might never emerge, or to that same Congress that called him a “traitor” and thinks he “should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law”.

Tom Friedman, says he doesn’t “believe that Edward Snowden, the leaker of all this secret material, is some heroic whistle-blower”.

Martin Baron, executive editor of The Washington Post, notes, “No one internally, as far as I know, has suggested we use the term ‘whistleblower.’ I prefer ‘source’ or ‘leaker.’”

The Associated Press issued a memo telling reporters to call Snowden a "leaker" rather than a "whistleblower." In a policy guideline the AP explained, “A whistle-blower is a person who exposes wrongdoing. It’s not a person who simply asserts that what he has uncovered is illegal or immoral”. This is automatic acceptance that NSA’s extravagant “interpretation” of the laws that goes beyond what its congressional authors intended is not illegal.

A whistle-blower, of course, is someone who reports what he or she believes to be wrongdoing, but what we see in the diffident media is a willingness to let the government redefine the word.

The Obama administration finds it essential that all call Snowden a leaker and not a whistle-blower. Otherwise they will have to explain away a contradiction. During his 2008 campaign, Obama set forth an ethics agenda found here, which says under “Protect Whistleblowers”:

"Often the best source of information about waste, fraud, and abuse in government, is an existing government employee committed to public integrity and willing to speak out. Such acts of courage and patriotism... should be encouraged rather than stifled…. Barack Obama will strengthen whistleblower laws to protect federal workers who expose waste, fraud, and abuse of authority in government".

Obama promised change and he certainly changed that pledge: His administration has revoked Snowden’s passport without any due process, bullied three countries to block the airspace of the Bolivian head of state’s flight home, charged whistle-blower Snowden under the Espionage Act, and decided that the international right of asylum no longer applies.