Showing posts with label barton gellman. Show all posts
Showing posts with label barton gellman. Show all posts

Monday, April 14, 2014

All Hail The Snowden Pulitzer



Previous Related Posts:
Smashing Hard Drives ~ The Miranda / Snowden / Guardian Saga Continues
Was Miranda a Mule or a Journalist?
Greenwald Threatens to Spill UK Secrets
UK Detains Greenwald's Partner - Twitter Erupts
Guardian Editor Alan Rusbridger Spins Away
Edward Snowden Releases NSA Secrets

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Both the Washington Post and Guardian UK won Pulitzer Prizes for releasing many of the secrets Edward Snowden stole from the United States Government. The award also went to Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, Ewen McAskill and Barton Gellman for their Obama-slamming coverage as Snowden escaped his own country, first to Hong Kong and later Russia. Yeah, that's great. The Pulitzer Committee obviously overlooked the major flaws in the reporting, including contradictions, unfounded fear-mongering, and just pure lies (see previous posts listed above for examples). But that's okay - bad reporters win awards all the time. Have your happy day, but realize that while you may have "started a conversation" about U.S. Spy techniques it remains to be seen if the reporting was actually the "public service" you think it is. Hisory and future actions of spies like Snowden will judge this reporting much more harshly than critics on twitter. Good luck with that.


From Yahoo News
The Guardian and The Washington Post won a prestigious Pulitzer Prize on Monday for reporting on secret US surveillance programs revealed by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.
The shared award went to the two newspapers credited with breaking the news about NSA surveillance programs, without specifically citing the journalists involved.
The reporters who played key roles in the story included Glenn Greenwald, who has since left the Guardian, and colleague Ewen MacAskill. Barton Gellman, who already has two Pulitzers, was the writer of most of the Washington Post reports.
Laura Poitras, a documentary filmmaker who was the point of contact for Snowden, had the unusual distinction of sharing bylines in both the Guardian and the Post on the topic.

Disclosing the massive expansion of the NSA’s surveillance network absolutely was a public service. In constructing a surveillance system of breathtaking scope and intrusiveness, our government also sharply eroded individual privacy. All of this was done in secret, without public debate, and with clear weaknesses in oversight.”
. . . (Without Snowden) we never would have known how far this country had shifted away from the rights of the individual in favor of state power. There would have been no public debate about the proper balance between privacy and national security. As even the president has acknowledged, this is a conversation we need to have.
~ Martin Baron, Editor of Washington Post













We are truly honoured that our journalism has been recognised with the Pulitzer prize. This was a complex story, written, edited and produced by a team of wonderful journalists. We are particularly grateful for our colleagues across the world who supported the Guardian in circumstances which threatened to stifle our reporting. And we share this honour, not only with our colleagues at the Washington Post, but also with Edward Snowden, who risked so much in the cause of the public service which has today been acknowledged by the award of this prestigious prize.
~ Alan Rusbridger, the editor-in-chief of the Guardian

Today's decision is a vindication for everyone who believes that the public has a role in government. We owe it to the efforts of the brave reporters and their colleagues who kept working in the face of extraordinary intimidation, including the forced destruction of journalistic materials, the inappropriate use of terrorism laws, and so many other means of pressure to get them to stop what the world now recognises was work of vital public importance.
~ Edward Snowden, via Guardian UK









~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Edward Snowden didn’t win a Pulitzer on Monday, but he might as well have.
~ Dylan Byers on Politico

The Guardian and Washington Post Don't Deserve Pulitzers Just for Sparking a Debate
. . . if sparking a debate is enough to earn the Pulitzer’s coveted public service medal, then sure. Congrats. I would note, however, that merely sparking a debate is an exceedingly low standard.
There was a time, and it wasn’t very long ago, when this medal meant something more, when “aggressive reporting” meant more than being a vehicle to shovel leaked documents to the public, with stops along the way for obligatory government comment, for fawning characterizations of one’s own sources, and for tendentious claims about what those documents say.
~ Benjamin Wittes on New Republic

Pulitzers don’t make Snowden a hero
. . . It is not the media or the Pulitzer committee that should judge what Snowden did. The main judgment should come from the courts, which are now considering what the government was up to in its collection programs and should also consider what Snowden did. You may think Snowden a whistle-blower, but the only way of knowing whether he is or not is for him to return to the US and face a jury of his peers. He may continue to refuse to do that, and prefer to be sheltered by a government whose behavior he surely knows is at least as bad as that of the one he fled, but that doesn’t make him a hero. It makes him a fugitive.
~ Daniel Serwer on Peacefare.net










Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Tuesday, June 11, 2013

Edward Snowden Releases #NSA Secrets

photo Snowden2.jpg


Related Post:
Edward Snowden: Hero or Villain?

~~~~~~~~~~~~

From Edward Snowden: The Whistleblower Behind the NSA Surveillance Revelations by Glenn Greenwald in The Guardian
He has had "a very comfortable life" that included a salary of roughly $200,000, a girlfriend with whom he shared a home in Hawaii, a stable career, and a family he loves. "I'm willing to sacrifice all of that because I can't in good conscience allow the US government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they're secretly building."

. . . On May 20, he boarded a flight to Hong Kong, where he has remained ever since. He chose the city because "they have a spirited commitment to free speech and the right of political dissent", and because he believed that it was one of the few places in the world that both could and would resist the dictates of the US government.

. . . He left the CIA in 2009 in order to take his first job working for a private contractor that assigned him to a functioning NSA facility, stationed on a military base in Japan. It was then, he said, that he "watched as Obama advanced the very policies that I thought would be reined in", and as a result, "I got hardened."
. . . Over the next three years, he learned just how all-consuming the NSA's surveillance activities were, claiming "they are intent on making every conversation and every form of behaviour in the world known to them".

. . . He views his best hope as the possibility of asylum, with Iceland – with its reputation of a champion of internet freedom – at the top of his list. He knows that may prove a wish unfulfilled.
But after the intense political controversy he has already created with just the first week's haul of stories, "I feel satisfied that this was all worth it. I have no regrets."



From Guardian Interview with Snowden
Q: Is it possible to put security in place to protect against state surveillance?

A: "You are not even aware of what is possible. The extent of their capabilities is horrifying. We can plant bugs in machines. Once you go on the network, I can identify your machine. You will never be safe whatever protections you put in place."

. . . Q: When did you decide to leak the documents?

A: "You see things that may be disturbing. When you see everything you realise that some of these things are abusive. The awareness of wrong-doing builds up. There was not one morning when I woke up [and decided this is it]. It was a natural process.
"A lot of people in 2008 voted for Obama. I did not vote for him. I voted for a third party. But I believed in Obama's promises. I was going to disclose it [but waited because of his election]. He continued with the policies of his predecessor."

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

From The New York Times

Mr. Snowden, who grew up in North Carolina, did not finish high school and sporadically attended classes at Anne Arundel Community College in Arnold, Md. Military records show he enlisted in the Army Reserve as a Special Forces recruit in May 2004 and was discharged less than four months later, reportedly after breaking his legs in a training accident.
Somewhere along the way, he acquired a top-secret clearance, which, with his computer expertise, was a ticket for admission to the national security establishment....
. . . Mr. Snowden bounced between jobs both inside the government and as a contractor for the Central Intelligence Agency in Switzerland and for the National Security Agency in Japan, Maryland and Hawaii, according to his account. Eventually working for nearly $200,000 a year in classified facilities as a computer systems administrator, he had access to enormous amounts of secret information.

From Washington Post by Barton Gellman
. . . Verax was the name he chose for himself, “truth teller” in Latin. I asked him early on, without reply, whether he intended to hint at the alternative fates that lay before him.

Two British dissenters had used the pseudonym. Clement Walker, a 17th-century detractor of Parliament, died in the brutal confines of the Tower of London. Two centuries later, social critic Henry Dunckley adopted “Verax” as his byline over weekly columns in the Manchester Examiner. He was showered with testimonials and an honorary degree.

. . . I asked him, at the risk of estrangement, how he could justify exposing intelligence methods that might benefit U.S. adversaries.

“Perhaps I am naive,” he replied, “but I believe that at this point in history, the greatest danger to our freedom and way of life comes from the reasonable fear of omniscient State powers kept in check by nothing more than policy documents.” The steady expansion of surveillance powers, he wrote, is “such a direct threat to democratic governance that I have risked my life and family for it.”

In an e-mail on May 24, he dropped a bombshell. Whistleblowers before him, he said, had been destroyed by the experience. Snowden wanted “to embolden others to step forward,” he wrote, by showing that “they can win.” He therefore planned to apply for asylum in Iceland or some other country “with strong internet and press freedoms,” although “the strength of the reaction will determine how choosy I can be.”

. . . On Sunday afternoon, as his name was released to the world, Snowden chatted with me live from a Hong Kong hotel room, not far from a CIA base in the U.S. Consulate.

“There’s no precedent in my life for this kind of thing,” he wrote. “I’ve been a spy for almost all of my adult life — I don’t like being in the spotlight.”

I asked him once more which of the two Veraxes he expected to become: the happy ending or life behind bars?
“That’s up to the global public,” he typed back. “If asylum is offered, we’ll have the first example. If not, we’ll have the second. I am prepared for both.”

From Mother Jones
a spokesman for Anne Arundel Community College (AACC), located in southeastern Maryland, tells Mother Jones a student with Snowden's name and birthdate attended the college from 1999 to 2001 and then again from 2004 to 2005. He did not receive a certificate or degree, the spokesman, Daniel Baum, says.

But here's an interesting wrinkle: Baum says Snowden took no "cyber-related courses" at this college. Nor did he take any classes in the college's NSA-certified "Information Systems Security" program, which focuses on safeguarding computer data and networks, though he went on to work in a related field for the government and in the private sector. It's unclear whether Snowden studied computing elsewhere.
.
Posted by at No comments:
Labels: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)