DEMOCRACY » FEATURED

New Internet media outlet signals more secrets from Snowden coming soon – experts met in Denver, Colorado

October 22, 2013   ·   0 Comments

Journalist Glenn Greenwald has left The Guardian for a new Internet media outlet and website in a sign that more secrets leaked by former CIA employee Edward Snowden may be published soon.

More info on Glenn Greenwood

These new publications may trigger a huge outcry and cause serious harm to the US and British intelligence services, a British defense expert from the London-based Royal United Services Institute for Defense and Security Studies told the ITAR-TASS news agency.

The new outlet is a project of Pierre Omidyar, a co-founder of Ebay, who wants to challenge WikiLeaks without repeating Julian Assange’s mistakes and who reportedly allotted $250 million to Greenwald for these purposes.

Greenwald still has a huge amount of information from Snowden – hundreds of thousands of classified documents, the expert said. He did not rule out that Greenwald may start publishing those documents on the Internet soon.

Some reports suggest that The Guardian and The New York Times have decided not to publish some of the data provided by Snowden for fear of being charged with divulgence of state secrets. The case in point may be lists of British and US secret agents operating in various parts of the world.

Greenwald’s disagreement with The Guardian’s decision could have provoked his dismissal from the newspaper.

Snowden Journalist Greenwald

Associated Press Denver News Editor James Anderson, right, facilitates a question and answer session with investigative journalist Glenn Greenwald via teleconference from Rio de Janeiro Brazil, during an event at the annual conference of the 69th Annual General Assembly of the Inter American Press Association, at the Brown Palace Hotel, in Denver, Monday Oct. 21, 2013. Greenwald, who’s source is NSA leaker Edward Snowden, cowrote a story in Monday’s Le Monde newspaper outlining details of the NSA’s eavesdropping program in France, in which reportedly some 70 million calls were monitored in one month by the spy agency.

BRENNAN LINSLEY — AP Photo

Read more here: http://www.macon.com/2013/10/21/2730936/nsa-spy-program-reporter-to-speak.html#storylink=cpy

UK tried to get NSA documents from New York Times

Jill Abramson, executive editor of The New York Times, has mounted a defence of the ability of journalists at her own paper and at The Guardian to publish public interest stories based on the thousands of secret intelligence files leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Abramson, has confirmed that senior British officials attempted to persuade her to hand over secret documents leaked by the former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.

Giving the newspaper’s first official comments on the incident, Abramson said that she was approached by the UK embassy in Washington after it was announced that the New York Times was collaborating with the Guardian to explore some of the files disclosed by Snowden. Among the files are several relating to the activities of GCHQ, the agency responsible for signals interception in the UK.

“I think the issue is that what the Guardian has published, and they have published far more material than we have, that those articles are very much in the public interest and inform the public,” she said during an appearance on the BBC’s Newsnight programme.

Abramson also addressed the criticism which has been directed at the Guardian in recent weeks over its role in illuminating the activities of US and British spy agencies, saying: “It distresses me to see other people in the media being critical of journalists doing their job, which is to inform the public, and I think these articles have been in the service of that”.

Britain has been on Abramson’s mind a lot over the past few months. In August, she accepted an invitation from the Guardian to join in the exploration of the files leaked by Edward Snowden, a repeat of the 2010 collaboration between the two news organisations over WikiLeaks in which she was also heavily involved.

The latest joining of forces with the Guardian earned Abramson an approach from the UK embassy in Washington. In the NYT’s first official comment on the incident, she says that an embassy figure whom she does not name asked to speak to her several weeks ago. “They were hopeful that we would relinquish any material that we might be reporting on, relating to Edward Snowden”.

If that was an attempt to dissuade the NYT from publishing stories about GCHQ and the NSA, it didn’t work. The British government had met its match in Abramson: “Needless to say I considered what they told me, and said no.”

There’s a calm confidence to the way she relates the story that is striking, and very American. She repeats one of her favourite expressions: “The First Amendment is first for a reason. It makes me feel a little like I’m pontificating to cite the founders of this country, but it’s true they were so afraid of centralised power that they saw a free press as the critical bulwark against unbridled government and that is our role”.

“In dealing with these stories and making very difficult decisions where we weigh, we balance, the need to inform the public against possible harm to national security and we do that very seriously and soberly.”

Asked about claims by MI5 director general, Andrew Parker, that newspaper reports on how the intelligence agencies intercept voice and internet communications were causing “enormous damage” to the fight against terrorism, Abramson said that there had been no proof of actual harm to security.

She compared the warnings by Parker and others to those voiced when the New York Times published reports based on thousands of documents about US policy towards Vietnam after they were leaked in 1971.

MI5 head calls Snowden’s revelations ‘guide books’ for terrorists

The head of the UK’s MI5, Andrew Parker stated that Snowden’s leaks became ‘guide books’ for terrorists, who could use the information to evade law enforcement.

“What we know about the terrorists and the detail of the capabilities we use against them, together represent our margin of advantage. That margin gives us the prospect of being able to detect their plots and stop them. But that margin is under attack,” Parker said referring to the Snowden leaks.

As he noted, these revelations did the greatest damage to the security framework in history and that the agency doesn’t spy on the private lives of citizens.

“It causes enormous damage to make public the reach and limits of GCHQ techniques. Such information hands the advantage to the terrorists. It is the gift they need to evade us and strike at will. Unfashionable as it might seem, that is why we must keep secrets secret, and why not doing so causes such harm,” Parker said.


Greenwald’s new media venture: substantial, exciting, groundbreaking – interview

by Evgeny Sukhoi

Journalist Glenn Greenwald has been presented with what he described as a ‘once-in-a-career dream journalistic opportunity’. Greenwald, who earned international fame for his reporting on NSA surveillance programs, is joining a new media venture ran by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. Andrew Stroehlein, European Media Director at the Human rights watch, talked with the Voice of Russia about Greenwald’s decision and his future career.

How do you assess Greenwald’s decision to leave The Guardian, which helped him gain international spotlight by uncovering secret US surveillance practices?

It is hard to know exactly how to assess the whole thing because it is not completely clear what the new venture will be. But he described it as once in a life time opportunity, the money behind the project seems to be quite substantial from the report I read. So, it is very exticing to have a blind piece of paper in front of you and be able to create a new product or in this case a new media venture from scratch and not really have any legacy in your way. It is quite exciting, I think.

Greenwald will join a new media venture ran by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. There are no details about this venture yet, but what can it possibly be? Will it focus on further revelations about NSA spying?

I think it won’t just focus on that. That is just one story and I think it will spread out to a lot of stories. The amount of money they are talking about, it couldn’t just be a website dedicated to a single story, as big as that story has been. In terms of where journalism is headed today, and the way he may see it as well, this kind of investigative reporting is really what is needed to have that in-depth focus because there is a lot of short pieces of news, a lot of superficial news, very short ones that are on Twitter for example, but even short pieces from news agencies and so on. And what is really interesting or groundbreaking are the kind of investigative reporting that he has done in the NSA case but also the others have done in other cases around the world. So, I would hope that whatever the venture is, it has a very strong investigative reporting element to it.

Edward Snowden stood behind the first revelations about the NSA, and continues to leak documents uncovering US classified methods of collecting private data. Is the public interest toward these leaks waning or, on the contrary, heating up?

I think there is a constant public interest around the world about this. It is not simply just US story or even Russian story because this spread around the world. It may have been waning a little bit because some of the revelations now have been discussed for quite a long time and there is now the director and deputy director of the NSA are leaving the agency and perhaps there is going to be some change there that will bring in some new ideas in this aftermath that we are seeing. In the US the public interest has been so much on the shutdown that I think this has been sideline in recent weeks.

How did Snowden’s revelations, along with websites like WikiLeaks, shape the current media? Has the way of news reporting changes significantly since the first classified document was published online?

I think so. We are talking about massive amounts of data. It is not just Wikileaks, it is not just NSA revelations, there are other revelations of mass surveillance for example, just to take Russia for example. There is mass surveillance happening in and around Sochi for the Olympics that is coming up and that has been reported as well. These kinds of stories unfold over time and they are very big. But the part of the broader set of big data is so big and complicated as well, involving the way we handle information on the net, in the case of NSA, or the way government handles information in terms of big mass of information that come out through Wikileaks revelations, just talking about massive amount of data. Journalism is trying to get around how to get hold of this information and also how to report it. It is quite a new challenge.

Edward Snowden, Bradley Manning, Julian Assange are all called whistle-blowers. Is this a new profession? Is there a significant difference between whistle-blowing and journalism?

I think whistleblowers tend to be on the inside, by definition, so journalists will work with whistleblowers, someone who is on the inside to get information about what is happening inside companies, institutions, governments. So, that is the difference there I think.

Voice of Russia, TASS


By


Readers Comments (0)


Sorry, comments are closed on this post.