CNET Interviews Glenn Greenwald on Media, NSA Revelations and Journalism
Published on Sunday, December 8, 2013 by CNET
Saving the Net from the Surveillance State: Glenn Greenwald Speaks Up (Q&A)
CNET: n your back-and-forth with New York Times journalist Bill Keller, you said that "reclaiming basic press freedoms in the US is an important impetus for our new venture." Can you explain?
Greenwald: One of the things that's happened to media outlets in the United States is that because of the financial struggles they've undergone, there is a fairly risk-averse, fear-driven climate in which these institutions are eager to avoid protracted [legal] battles with the government or with large corporations because they simply can't sustain those kind of battles financially. So one of the benefits of being a well-funded media organization is that you can do the kind of journalism you want to do without being afraid of ending up in those battles.
And those battles are often necessary to defend the basic prerogatives of press freedom. I mean, if the government is threatening you in a certain way that clearly violates the First Amendment's free press guarantee, but you're financially incapable or unwilling to have that fight, and you instead voluntarily walk away from that journalism, then I think the ground of press freedom will be invaded, and that's what's happened. And I hope that we're going to be -- and I think we're going to be -- an institution that'll be willing to have those fights in defense of our press freedom.
And another, crucial part of press freedoms that's been attacked is the way sources have been deterred from going to journalists out of fear that surveillance will immediately detect who they are and then they'll be prosecuted very aggressively. And source protection, meaning enabling sources to come to us with the confidence that they can do so safely, is a crucial part of our strategy. That too will go a long way to revitalizing press freedoms.
CNET: In a recent tweet, you pointed to a Foreign Affairs article that discusses how the digital era and the massive leaks it enables (e.g., those by Snowden and Chelsea Manning) mean an end to government hypocrisy. Government's policy and its rhetoric "will have to move closer to each other," the piece says. Can you talk about that, and the importance of whistle-blowers, WikiLeaks, and the Snowden-NSA pieces?
Greenwald: Well, the West in general, and the United States in particular, has spent the last four years vehemently condemning the Chinese government for using its surveillance powers for economic purposes rather than national security purposes and has insisted this is a breach of all international norms and jeopardizes the fairness of international markets. And what a lot of our reporting has revealed is that the United States and the UK in particular have used their surveillance systems to spy for plainly economic ends as well. And that kind of exposure of the huge gap between the rhetoric of the United States government and the reality, as people perceive it, has been a major part of what I think our reporting has achieved.
MUCH MORE OF A LONG Q&A...GOOD READ at:
http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/12/08-0
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