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 In Britain, the editor of the Guardian pulverized entire hard
drives of data leaked by Snowden to keep the government from seizing
them.
In the United States, The New York Times pointed out in a major NSA
expose this month that it agreed to self-censorship of "some details
that officials said could compromise intelligence operations."
And in Spain, the El Mundo newspaper said last week it would turn
over Snowden documents to prosecutors inquiring whether the privacy
rights of Spaniards had been violated.
As revelations about the staggering scope of the NSA's surveillance
have leaked out, newsroom leaders around the world have been
weighing ethical decisions over how much they should reveal about
intelligence-gathering capabilities. Their decisions are guided, in
part, by media protection laws that vary widely from country to
country.
"It's a new era. There are new questions coming up and there are no
clear answers here," said Robert Picard, a specialist on media
policy and director of research at the University of Oxford's
Reuters Institute. "The media are trying to navigate it and it is
not comfortable. You will get different opinions on the
decision-making in different newsrooms and within the same
newsroom."
The huge number of Snowden documents has generated a barrage of
exclusive stories in the Guardian and The Washington Post, along
with a stream of revelations about the NSA surveillance in countries
such as France, Germany, Spain and Brazil. In some cases,
publications that normally compete on stories have teamed up to get
the news out.
Britain's Official Secrets Act guards against the dissemination of
confidential material, and the government's response to the Snowden
leaks has become stormier and stormier. When Britain's deputy
national security adviser warned that agents would confiscate the
Guardian's hard drives containing Snowden files, editor Alan
Rusbridger made the deal to have them destroyed.
"I would rather destroy the copy than hand it back to them or allow
the courts to freeze our reporting," he said in August. "I don't
think we had Snowden's consent to hand the material back, and I
didn't want to help the U.K. authorities know what he had given us."
The fact that other copies of the material existed in the United
States and Brazil meant he could delete the data held in Britain
without fear that the story would die with it, he added.
As the pressure on the Guardian increased, the paper turned to The
New York Times and ProPublica, a U.S.-based nonprofit journalism
group. The decision to collaborate was partly technical, reporter
James Ball told an audience in London. But it was also a nod to what
he called "First Amendment issues," noting that being based in the
United States gave those working on the story the protection of
America's press freedom laws.
That has its limits as well. When a recent New York Times piece on
the NSA appeared to disclose the first names of intelligence
analysts, some British lawmakers began wondering whether the paper
was playing fast and loose with the names of agents at GCHQ, the U.K
government's electronic eavesdropping agency. They've since summoned
Rusbridger, the Guardian's editor, to testify before a Parliamentary
committee. Britain's Metropolitan Police have also confirmed that
detectives are investigating the disclosures.
In France and Spain, the Snowden disclosures have so far revealed
that the NSA captured metadata from millions of telephone calls,
while in Germany they exposed U.S. monitoring of Chancellor Angela
Merkel's cellphone.
While European media must be wary about publishing information about
their intelligence agencies because of legal consequences, the
possibility that citizens' privacy rights might have been violated
is another major concern, said Jane Kirtley, director of the
University of Minnesota's Silha Center for the Study of Media Ethics
and Law.
"If you look at how privacy protection has developed in Europe,
countries speak of privacy as a fundamental right, which is not a
concept we see in England or the United States," she said. "The
justification that the European media can give is that 'We are
helping to protect this fundamental right to privacy by revealing
the surveillance going on.'"
El Mundo's chief editor, Vicente Lozano Garcia, said his newspaper
had no problem turning over Snowden documents to Spanish prosecutors
because it had called for an investigation to determine whether the
spying broke Spanish laws. He added the only information given to
them had already been published and did not involve secrecy because
the source — Snowden — was known.
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After El Mundo and France's Le Monde published their stories on NSA
spying, the NSA revealed that the monitoring in those countries was
done in coordination with NATO allies.
Le Monde's chief editor, Natalie Nougayrede, said the paper has not
come under pressure from French authorities to turn over documents
or to withhold information. Still, she said the paper was keeping
the documents "in a safe place" that she would not describe.
"Even if there were demands and pressure, I would be absolutely
adamant that we would just continue our work," Nougayrede said.
The German government said Der Spiegel magazine, which has published
material from Snowden, approached it around Oct. 16 with what it
believed was the evidence showing the NSA had monitored Merkel's
cellphone.
After examining the material, Germany announced Oct. 23 that Merkel
had called President Barrack Obama to demand clarification. Der
Spiegel then posted the material on its website and in its print
version.
Although the story unleashed a firestorm in Germany and around the
world, Der Spiegel's handling of the news has drawn little if any
criticism, neither for tipping off the government nor for publishing
an ally's secrets.
"The autonomy of the press is ensured in Germany," said Klaus-Dieter
Altmeppen, a professor for communication studies at the Catholic
University of Eichstaett. "Therefore, we don't have the kind of
problems between the media and the government here that exist in
other countries when it comes to the publication of the NSA files."
The biggest change for news organizations publishing Snowden
documents is that it marks a huge step forward in their access to
intelligence information. As they have done in the past,
publications often query government officials before making a
decision on what to release.
Barton Gellman, the Washington Post reporter who broke the story
about NSA's PRISM data-gathering program, said at a conference last
month that U.S. government officials had asked him not to publish
the names of Yahoo Inc., Google Inc. and seven other Internet
companies participating in the NSA program.
Gellman said he refused because that would have undermined the
Post's principal mission of holding U.S. institutions accountable.
Including the technology companies' names propelled them to argue
for greater transparency about NSA's operations to show customers
that they were taking privacy concerns seriously, he said.
Gellman said he had "long conversations" with U.S. government
officials about the NSA documents and agreed there was information
in them that raised legitimate U.S. security concerns.
"We quickly agreed that that would not be in the story and it turns
out the Guardian made substantially identical decisions without any
mutual consultation," Gellman said.
The New York Times has not published as many articles based on
Snowden's information as the Guardian.
Jill Abramson, the executive editor of the Times, said that she'd
been approached by a British diplomat in Washington and asked to
relinquish the Snowden documents. She said she refused.
Abramson also told BBC's "Newsnight" television program that she was
distressed to see criticism of the reporters breaking the NSA spying
stories.
"We balance the need to inform the public against possible harm to
national security, and we do that very seriously and soberly," she
said.
[Associated
Press; ALAN CLENDENNING and
RAPHAEL SATTER]
Satter reported from
London. Associated Press writers Kristen Grieshaber in Berlin,
Angela Charlton in Paris, Richard Lardner in Washington and David
Bauder in New York contributed to this report.
Copyright 2013 The Associated
Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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