UK's Suppression Of Freedom Of The Press Drives Guardian To Partner With NYT On Snowden Reporting
from the will-they-threaten-the-nyt-too? dept
With the Guardian forced on orders directly from the Prime Minister’s office to physically destroy some hard drives with the Ed Snowden documents on them, the Guardian made it clear that the reporting on the leaks would continue, but out of its NY offices, rather than the London ones (and, of course, via Glenn Greenwald in Brazil and Laura Poitras in Germany). However, another bit of fallout from all of this is that the Guardian has teamed up with its nominal “competitor,” the NY Times to share some (not all) of the documents and to work together on the reporting of what’s in them.
Amusingly, this comes just after a NYT editor argued (somewhat ridiculously) that the NYT has done more to advance the story than any other publication after the very first stories from The Guardian and the Washington Post. That statement is laughable. While the NYT has done some very good reporting on all of this, the Washington Post and the Guardian have continued to “break” a variety of big stories from the documents. The NYT has certainly added to the coverage, and added very important details to some of those stories, but it’s been way, way, way behind. It will be interesting to see what happens now. Of course, one of the reasons why Snowden says he didn’t go to the NYT originally, was due to stories of how they held onto some other stories, such as the original story about warrantless wiretapping, which it held for many months at the request of the feds.
Filed Under: ed snowden, freedom of the press, glenn greenwald, nsa, nsa surveillance, reporting, uk
Companies: ny times, the guardian
Comments on “UK's Suppression Of Freedom Of The Press Drives Guardian To Partner With NYT On Snowden Reporting”
Well good for the NY Times then because they have a lot of old stuff to live down still.
New York Times Judith Miller New York Times Judith Miller New York Times Judith Miller New York Times Judith Miller New York Times Judith Miller New York Times Judith Miller New York Times Judith Miller New York Times Judith Miller New York Times Judith Miller New York Times Judith Miller New York Times Judith Miller New York Times Judith Miller New York Times Judith Miller New York Times Judith Miller New York Times Judith Miller New York Times Judith Miller New York Times Judith Miller New York Times Judith Miller New York Times Judith Miller New York Times Judith Miller New York Times Judith Miller New York Times Judith Miller New York Times Judith Miller New York Times Judith Miller New York Times Judith Miller New York Times Judith Miller New York Times Judith Miller New York Times Judith Miller New York Times Judith Miller New York Times Judith Miller New York Times Judith Miller New York Times Judith Miller New York Times Judith Miller New York Times Judith Miller New York Times Judith Miller New York Times Judith Miller New York Times Judith Miller New York Times Judith Miller New York Times Judith Miller New York Times Judith Miller New York Times Judith Miller New York Times Judith Miller New York Times Judith Miller New York Times Judith Miller New York Times Judith Miller New York Times Judith Miller New York Times Judith Miller New York Times Judith Miller New York Times Judith Miller New York Times Judith Miller New York Times Judith Miller New York Times Judith Miller New York Times Judith Miller New York Times Judith Miller New York Times Judith Miller New York Times Judith Miller New York Times Judith Miller New York Times Judith Miller New York Times Judith Miller New York Times Judith Miller
Say what? Oh yeah: New York Times Judith Miller
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Oh, geez… leftists and their Judith Miller idiocy.
The fact is, Judith Miller is a symptom of a problem with NYT, which is it’s always been a tool for someone… But then again, that’s not something specific to NYT. The WaPo, LAT and others have been tools for one political group or another.
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Fair enough, I’m getting tired of flogging that one anyway.
But it’s not idiocy. NY Times Judith Miller actively helped sell to the American public the worst thing they were ever sold, in my lifetime.
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It’s widely accepted that Syria is using chemical weapons on Syrian rebels.
Where did those weapons come from?
Some suggest they came by way of Egypt in the 1970’s, but what was used in 2013 couldn’t have originated in the 1970’s, because chemical weapons don’t have that long of a shelf life.
So, just where did those weapons come from?
I'm interested in the phrase: 'its nominal "competitor," '
“Nominal” of course means “in name only”, and I suppose that your quote marks point up irony because they don’t actually compete. So I’d like you to expand on those two qualifiers for what should be straightforward.
And fanboys: I’m not off-topic, this is at best about how newspapers are covering the Snowden story; it’s a mere story about stories.
Re: I'm interested in the phrase: 'its nominal "competitor," '
I expected more from you.
HM Government has no authority over NTY. The New York Times is a US newspaper, and is, therefore, only subject to US laws. The US governement can certainly do that, but the British do not have any jurisdiction over it.
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You should be aware that UK and US cooperate extensively on these issues. Since US has also been claiming the documents as “stolen property” and “state secrets” with potential to damage the country, they can do similar things in USA to squeeze the documents out of the country. It is purely symbolic since they can never cover all countries, but UK being able to claim that they have cleaned out their closet and US, Brazil, Germany und so weiter carries some geopolitical bargaining power.
In politics stupidity is not a sin. It is an opportunity!
Paywall
Why would they choose a paywalled site? I am fairly certain that other, nonpaywalled sites would love to assist. They might even stand up to government bullying, even if they are ‘questionable’ on the governments soon to be codified ‘who’s a reporter’ scale.
Maybe the NYT will have a liberal policy with regard to these articles.
Tip of the iceberg
So when is the big reveal coming? Several people have referred to prior revelations as being “just the tip of the iceberg”, so where are the documents to back it up? Let’s hear it before the NY Times gets a visit from the “cleaners”!
Why the NYT?
Because they can fight it out with the government on prior restraint, should the government ever dare to do it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Times_Co._v._United_States
Yes, it’s been done before, and believe me, the government learned a very hard lesson: don’t ever push the First Amendment button on the Supreme Court.
They nailed it down tight with this landmark decision.
Possible Snowden Move
It occurs to me that while Snowdens position is let the world know, it is the Guardians position to do a bit of (let’s say) due diligence and make some money in the process.
Should this avenue of drip, drip, drip leakage begin to crumble, there is a more distributed method available. Torrents! He does his own weeding of documents. Create a zip file, or rar if you will, and create a torrent. Let 10 friends or colleagues know about it. Have them let 10 like minded people know about it. Then when a hundred or so copies are ‘out there’ publish the file name via the many many avenues available. Demand will be intense.
Should it come to this, I hope he vets the stuff carefully. No field agents revealed. So far a sources and methods, I think the US govmint let that cat out of the bag already.
The NYT is about the GCHQ files
Reading the linked story, the Guardian apparently handed copies of their GCHQ files to the NYT. This is presumably because they fear the UK government will prohibit publication of resulting news stories in the UK. To me, it sounds like a bit of legalistic arbitrage — they get a US paper to write about the UK, while the UK-based paper writes about the US, and thus they attempt to reduce the chances they run into the Official Secrets Act or similar court orders against publication.
The story in the Independent is weird, but among other things, it claims that “Information about the project was contained in 50,000 GCHQ documents that Mr Snowden downloaded during 2012. Many of them came from an internal Wikipedia-style information site called GC-Wiki. Unlike the public Wikipedia, GCHQ?s wiki was generally classified Top Secret or above.” These could be (some of?) the documents copied to the NYT.
Considering these documents, setting aside the obvious (wtf a wiki), one HUGE question might be how the hell someone working in Snowden’s position was a able to download (what sounds like) a whole damn database that the UK classifies as “Top Secret or above.” That’s some amazingly crap security.
Revelations to come:
– NSA paid MSoft the billion to buy Skype
– TrueCrypt has either been cracked, or is an NSA created program in the first place
– And perhaps a FPV movie from Bill and Monica?
I really have to question the judgment here, more so than the motivation. 1st Amendment rights are not the guarantee they once were. Feinstein is trying to redefine journalism.
Our constitution is under attack – first comes gov’t abuses, then a little pushback from citizens, then pushback from gov’t, then trends toward self-censorship, leading to what? The Patriot Act effectively, is a stage one or stage two removal of the fourth, maybe the fifth amendments and others, more to come. How long do we have with a 1st Amendment guarantee?
Totalitarianism does not suffer the Bill of Rights’ authority for long.
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> How long do we have with a 1st Amendment guarantee?
That’s the problem- no one can say how long we have.