Edward Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor whose leaks of classified documents transformed the debate about government surveillance, is ready to tell his story.
Metropolitan Books, an imprint of Macmillan Publishers, announced Thursday that Snowden’s “Permanent Record” will be released Sept. 17 in more than 20 countries.
According to Metropolitan, Snowden will describe his role in the accumulation of metadata and the “crisis of conscience” that led him to steal a trove of files in 2013 and share them with reporters. Metropolitan spokeswoman Pat Eisemann declined to offer additional details.
Snowden noted in a tweet Thursday that the book would be released on Constitution Day and added that he had “just completed an international conspiracy across 20 countries, and somehow the secret never leaked.”
I wrote a book. pic.twitter.com/wEdlOFMnMn
— Edward Snowden (@Snowden) August 1, 2019
Snowden, who faces U.S. charges that could land him in prison, is currently living in exile in Moscow, and promotion elsewhere will likely be restricted to interviews done remotely.
He has been widely condemned by intelligence officials, who allege Snowden has caused lasting damage to national security, and defended by civil libertarians and other privacy advocates who praise Snowden for revealing the extent of information the government was gathering. Notable revelations included a massive program collecting metadata on millions of domestic phone calls.
“Edward Snowden decided at the age of 29 to give up his entire future for the good of his country,” John Sargent, CEO of Macmillan, said in a statement. “He displayed enormous courage in doing so, and like him or not, his is an incredible American story. There is no doubt that the world is a better and more private place for his actions. Macmillan is enormously proud to publish ‘Permanent Record.’”
Financial details were not disclosed for a book that was itself a covert project, quietly acquired a year ago by Macmillan and identified under code names in internal documents. Snowden’s primary contact with the publisher was his principal legal adviser, Ben Wizner, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project.
“Publishing Ed Snowden has been a remarkable learning experience,” Sargent told the Associated Press. “The complexities of internet security today have been eye-opening.”
Snowden’s story was told in part in the Oscar-winning documentary “Citizenfour” and in the Oliver Stone movie “Snowden.” In 2014, Metropolitan published “No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State,” by Pulitzer Prize winner Glenn Greenwald, whose reporting for the Guardian helped break the Snowden story. Greenwald also was featured in “Citizenfour.”
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The Intercept Shuts Down Access to Snowden Trove
First Look Media, the company that owns the Intercept, also announced that it was laying off several of the researchers who had been charged with maintaining the documents.
First Look Media announced Wednesday that it was shutting down access to whistleblower Edward Snowden’s massive trove of leaked National Security Agency documents.
Over the past several years, The Intercept, which is owned by First Look Media, has maintained a research team to handle the large number of documents provided by Snowden to Intercept journalists Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald.
But in an email to staff Wednesday evening, First Look CEO Michael Bloom said that as other major news outlets had “ceased reporting on it years ago,” The Intercept had decided to “focus on other editorial priorities” after expending five years combing through the archive.
“The Intercept is proud of its reporting on the Snowden archive, and we are thankful to Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald for making it available to us,” Bloom wrote.
He added: “It is our hope that Glenn and Laura are able to find a new partner—such as an academic institution or research facility—that will continue to report on and publish the documents in the archive consistent with the public interest.”
First Look Media’s decision to shut down the archives puts an end to the company’s original vision of using The Intercept as a means to report on the NSA documents. In its original mission statement, Poitras, Greenwald, and Jeremy Scahill wrote that the initial mission of the site was, in the short-term, to “provide a platform and an editorial structure in which to aggressively report on the disclosures provided to us by our source, NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.”
Wednesday’s decision—coupled with an announcement that First Look would lay off 4 percent of its staff—was not received well by many Intercept staffers, including Poitras.
In a series of internal memos, Poitras admonished First Look Media for its decision to shut down its archives, and lay off several researchers who had maintained them.
In a note to the First Look board of directors obtained by The Daily Beast, Poitras called on the board to review the decision to eliminate the archives, and criticized the company’s decision to keep her in the dark about their plans until this week.
“This decision and the way it was handled would be a disservice to our source, the risks we’ve all taken, and most importantly, to the public for whom Edward Snowden blew the whistle,” she wrote.
In a separate memo to Bloom that was sent to many of the company’s staffers, Poitras wrote that she was “sickened” by the decision to eliminate the research team and “shut down” the Snowden archive.
“Your email’s attempt to paper over these firings is not appropriate when the company is presented with such devastating news,” she said.
Late Thursday evening, Greenwald tweeted that both he and Poitras had full copies of the archives, and had been searching for a partner to continue research.
Over the past several years, The Intercept has published several major stories based on information in the archives, which include millions of files, many of which include sensitive internal U.S. national-security secrets and trade practices. Other major media companies also have access to large portions of the archive, which yielded Pulitzer Prize-winning scoops for The Guardian and The Washington Post.
In a 2016 post, Greenwald laid out the site’s vision for how best to report on materials in the archive.
“From the time we began reporting on the archive provided to us in Hong Kong by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, we sought to fulfill his two principal requests for how the materials should be handled: that they be released in conjunction with careful reporting that puts the documents in context and makes them digestible to the public, and that the welfare and reputations of innocent people be safeguarded,” Greenwald wrote in a 2016 post.
“As time has gone on, The Intercept has sought out new ways to get documents from the archive into the hands of the public, consistent with the public interest as originally conceived.”
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Journalist Barrett Brown burned his National Magazine Award at home on a live stream Tuesday evening, a protest against the Intercept’s decision to close its Edward Snowden archive, while the outlet’s staffers celebrated their news publication’s fifth birthday in New York.
On Twitter, Brown lambasted the “self-congratulatory party” then incinerated the journalism award he won in 2016 for a series of columns written for the Intercept from prison called The Barrett Brown Review of Arts and Letters and Jail.
Let's help The Intercept celebrate shutting down the Snowden archive and laying off the research staff!
Posted by Barrett Brown on Tuesday, April 16, 2019
The Intercept’s parent-company First Look Media made the controversial decision in March to shutter access to its Snowden archive and lay off the research team that had maintained it.
The archive represented a portion of the trove of National Security Agency documents that had been provided by whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013 to journalists Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald, who would go on to help found the Intercept with the expressed mission of “aggressively” reporting on them.
The Snowden leak included millions of highly classified documents and turned out to yield explosive revelations about mass surveillance. Over the past five years, the disclosure continued to produce major news stories, with the Intercept one of the few publications still dedicated to reporting on and publishing the documents into this year.
The decision to close the archive entirely was first announced in an internal email to employees from First Look CEO Michael Bloom. Bloom cited budget reprioritization as the reason for the “restructuring.”
Poitras, in particular, however, was angry. Before the decision was made public, she issued multiple internal emails to the CEO and company Board of Director opposing it, but to no effect.
On Mar. 23, two weeks after the news went public, Brown published a detailed timeline of events and leaked internal correspondence given to him by someone involved—exposing the internal process that led to the axing of the archive.
Brown then decided to burn his award on the night of the Intercept’s party.
Sic semper yuppie careerists pic.twitter.com/gCzzWTYhS0
— Barrett Brown (@BarrettBrown_) April 17, 2019
The closure of the archives, in his view, is evidence of a deeper lack of understanding of the leak’s intrinsic value to current conversations on the surveillance state and part of a wider perceived inertia or failure within the media, which he contrasts with the risks taken by whistleblowers and activists, often imprisoned for leaking revelatory materials.
“I’d already vowed to burn my National Magazine Award shortly after learning of [the closure],” Brown told the Daily Dot. “These people have the right to do whatever they like, but when they pretend to be competent to make that decision, it’s necessary that their surreal failures to handle even the things I handed them with a bow on it […] be made very, very plain.”
The closure was not Brown’s sole reason to protest.
In other Medium posts, and also in a Facebook post accompanying the certificate burning live stream on Tuesday, Brown sought to demonstrate the dysfunctionality of the press by listing specific grievances with the conduct of former Intercept reporters and editors in handling or passing on relevant stories.
“The institutional press, as a whole, has proven that it cannot deal with the information age threats that some of us have given them every opportunity to address,” he said. “So long as incompetence, amoral conduct, inertia, and all of these other factors are considered acceptable, the press will continue to fail and the powerful will continue to develop capabilities involving information that we’re already behind in understanding, even those of us who have spent a decade on the subject.”
Some of the issues Brown outlined include the refusal of reporters to take seriously revelations about the private surveillance contractors uncovered a number of years ago by independent media outlets and groups like Project PM, Brown’s own crowdsourced investigative collective.
One specific incident cited by Brown to the Daily Dot involved his frustrated attempts to have Intercept editorial staff bring attention to a sophisticated data-mining apparatus called Romas/COIN in 2011, uncovered by volunteer researchers digging through the enormous file dump stolen from intelligence contractor HBGary and published by Anonymous hacktivists.
“Among the specific people I’d warned repeatedly and at length was Greenwald,” Brown said, “who’d been targeted by the same firms and initially been interested in the info my volunteers and I compiled for him but gradually lost interest.
“Later the 2016 election was undermined to some substantial degree via a data mining and targeted propaganda operation by Cambridge Analytica in conjunction with Palantir and Archimedes,” he continued, “which itself was one of the firms I’d exposed in my reporting on Romas/COIN.”
The Intercept is not the only publication in the firing line, however. Of late Brown has contacted several other outlets, including the New Yorker, over costly erroneous stories and questioning the work or motive of certain reporters who have since moved to other organizations.
“Before I was an activist, I was primarily a press critic,” Brown justifies. He regards journalistic failures as dangerous and is promising an alternative framework “centering on curated crowd-sourced research” supported by a Process Congress.
“Naturally if I can also discredit allegedly high-end journalists and editors largely by myself,” he writes, “it helps to give an indication of what we can do later this year.”
A formal announcement is coming soon, he says, but until then he hopes to single-handedly force oversight and accountability against those within the media.
“If burning this award helps to focus the necessary attention how much worse the problem is and how much easier the solution can be than many think, then it’s obviously worth burning,” Brown mused in closing. “Particularly since I have three other national journalism awards and all are equally worthless.”
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The Prosecution Against Julian Assange: Where Presidential Candidates Stand
WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange has been jailed in London’s Belmarsh Prison since April 11, when Ecuador authorities revoked his political asylum in their embassy and British authorities arrested him.
The United States government had Assange arrested for extradition on charges of violating the Espionage Act and conspiracy to commit a computer crime that stem from the disclosures from U.S. Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning that were published in 2010.
As part of a questionnaire on presidential executive power, the New York Times asked each candidate for president whether they support the charges against Assange and if they believed they were constitutional.
Multiple candidates gave exceptional answers. A few plainly stated they would drop the charges immediately while Senator Michael Bennet, former Vice President Joe Biden, Senator Cory Booker, and Senator Kamala Harris offered responses that were particularly mediocre.
“Prosecutors recently expanded a criminal case against Julian Assange to include accusations that he violated the Espionage Act by soliciting, obtaining, and publishing classified documents leaked in 2010 by Chelsea Manning, which could establish a precedent that such common journalistic activities (a separate question from whether Assange counts as a “journalist”) can be treated as a crime in America,” the Times wrote.
“Are these charges constitutional? Would your administration continue the Espionage Act part of the case against Assange?” the Times asked.
Before getting to the answers from candidates, there is a flaw in the question. The computer crime charge against Assange stems from the publication of information just like the Espionage Act charges. Media organizations should not be suggesting that a smaller part of the prosecution is possibly defensible, especially since it was the first public charge put out as he was arrested. It set this whole process of jailing a journalist in motion.
Biden, Booker, Harris, Montana Governor Steve Bullock, and former Representative Beto O’Rourke each declined to answer the specific question.
“I won’t speak specifically about the Assange case—it isn’t appropriate for me to offer an opinion on an ongoing criminal prosecution that is now pending in court and about which all the details are not publicly available,” Biden stated.
Biden spoke specifically in 2010 when he was part of President Barack Obama’s administration. He suggested Assange probably “conspired to get these classified documents with a member of the U.S. military” and added “that’s fundamentally different than if someone drops [documents] on your lap” and says “you’re a press person. Here’s classified material.”
He even agreed with Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell that Assange is much more like a “high-tech terrorist” than a journalist.
Biden wrote, “I’m not assuming in any way that Assange is in fact a journalist,” which indicates he believes he would have the authority to decide who is and is not a journalist.
“Government officials often have compelling reasons to keep national security information confidential, and professional journalists have long recognized and respected those reasons. Unlike WikiLeaks, responsible journalists historically have declined to publish information when publication would put lives in danger or threaten harm to the national interest,” Biden declared.
When current and former government officials like Biden reflexively state that WikiLeaks has endangered lives, they typically are referring to the publication of the Afghanistan War Logs. But Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell stated, “We have yet to see any harm come to anyone in Afghanistan that we can directly tie to exposure in the WikiLeaks documents,” and later, the Associated Press concluded on August 17, “There is no evidence that any Afghans named in the leaked documents as defectors or informants from the Taliban insurgency have been harmed in retaliation.”
Biden continued, “The First Amendment does not immunize journalists from responsibility for breaking the law. Journalists have no constitutional right to break into a government office, or hack into a government computer, or bribe a government employee, to get information. The perpetrator of a crime should be subject to prosecution.”
This may seem like a fairly innocent statement, however, it was essentially the argument the Obama Justice Department employed when it targeted New York Times reporter James Risen with a subpoena and tried to force him to divulge his confidential sources for a leak prosecution.
The Fourth Circuit agreed with the Obama Justice Department. “There is no First Amendment testimonial privilege, absolute or qualified, that protects a reporter from being compelled to testify by the prosecution or the defense in criminal proceedings about criminal conduct that the reporter personally witnessed or participated in, absent a showing of bad faith, harassment or other such non-legitimate motive, even though the reporter promised confidentiality to his source.”
Biden did concede the government should be “hesitant to prosecute a journalist who has done nothing more than receive and publish confidential information and has not otherwise broken the law.” He referenced the Pentagon Papers case. Yet, Biden does not think Assange is a journalist so this remark carries no benefit for the dissidents who his administration may seek to exclude from First Amendment protections.
“I would ask my Attorney General to review DOJ policy and guidelines to ensure that my administration is upholding the First Amendment and protecting the free press,” Booker answered.
Booker engaged in sloganeering about democracy needing a free press to operate and opined about Trump’s vilification of the press, although Trump’s clashes with reporters are not relevant to the basic question.
The answer from Harris was terribly abstract. “The Justice Department should make independent decisions about prosecutions based on facts and the law. I would restore an independent DOJ and would not dictate or direct prosecutions.”
No one would guess from reading only that answer that she was responding to a question about the Assange prosecution and the threat it poses to press freedom.
Similar to Biden, Bennet said there should be a “distinction” between the press and whistleblowers who serve a public purpose and “those, like Assange, who publish classified information without regard to whether it may put American forces in danger.”
Of the candidates who oppose the prosecution of Assange, South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, Representative Tulsi Gabbard, Senator Bernie Sanders, Senator Elizabeth Warren, former Representative Joe Walsh, and Marianne Williamson gave the best answers.
Buttigieg said the charges against Assange may be unconstitutional, depending on how the Justice Department argues the case. Warren contended prosecuting Assange could set a dangerous precedent. (Both used qualifiers to make it clear they were not defending Assange.)
“It is not up to the president to determine who is or is not a journalist,” Sanders declared. “The actions of the Trump administration represent a disturbing attack on the First Amendment and threaten to undermine the important work that investigative reporters conduct every day.”
Williamson deserves credit for an answer that, unlike the other responses, incorporated some of the history of the Espionage Act.
“The Espionage Act is a relic of President Woodrow Wilson’s prosecution of Eugene Debs for opposing his military frolic in the Soviet Union,” Williamson wrote. “The Act violates freedom of speech and press by criminalizing publications without proof that the disclosures were intended to and did cause material harm to the national security of the United States.”
Williamson added, “The First Amendment does not permit a British-style Official Secrets Act for classified information. I would drop the Espionage Act counts against Assange.”
The Obama administration transformed the Espionage Act into a de facto Official Secrets Act by using it to prosecute more leakers or whistleblowers than all previous presidential administrations combined (something which Biden ignored entirely in his answer).
“No, this is a violation of freedom of speech—unconstitutional,” Gabbard plainly replied. “No, my administration would drop this case.”
Stunningly, Walsh, a Republican, gave a really good response. “I’m troubled that within the lens of the Assange case, much of the coverage has focused on whether his activity was ‘journalistic’ or not. I reject this lens insofar as freedom of the press is vital as a manifestation of our constitutionally enshrined First Amendment rights to freedom of _expression_, a right that extends to many forms of _expression_ and speech.”
“Leaving it up to the court in our age of new media to make a determination about what constitutes journalistic activity and what doesn’t is dicey.”
Walsh added, “The burden must not be on a journalist to make a determination about whether information may legally be disclosed or not—that goes against the spirit of the Fourth Estate that is so central to our democracy.”
“Rather, to the matter of how to prevent classified information [from] finding its way into the wrong hands, I would work as president to strengthen whistleblower protections to prevent situations where otherwise law-abiding government employees or contractors feel that the only option for recourse when attempting to ring the alarm on bad actors (individuals, agencies, or otherwise) is to go to the media,” Walsh concluded.
Walsh’s answer contemplated issues that relate to the war against leaks waged by the government in the past decade. He did not specifically mention the overclassification of information but both that systemic problem and weak whistleblower protections (particularly for national security or intelligence officials) ensures there will be leaks to the press.
Overall, the vast majority of presidential candidates oppose the Assange prosecution. Many demonstrate a decent understanding of how this threatens press freedom.
Either would be in a position to stop the prosecution after they were elected because Assange’s first extradition hearing is not until February 20 and it could be years before the government succeeds in transferring him to the U.S. for a trial.
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The media blackout on Julian Assange's imprisonment
The same media that has spent years dragging Assange’s name through the mud is now engaging in a blackout on his treatment.
If you are waiting for corporate media pundits to defend freedom of the press, you’re going to be disappointed.
The role of journalism in a democracy is publishing information that holds the powerful to account — the kind of information that empowers the public to become more engaged citizens in their communities so that we can vote in representatives that work in the interest of “we the people.”
There is perhaps no better example of watchdog journalism that holds the powerful to account and exposes their corruption than that of WikiLeaks, which exposed to the world evidence of widespread war crimes the U.S. military was committing in Iraq, including the killing of two Reuters journalists; showed that the U.S. Government and large corporations were using private intelligence agencies to spy on activists and protesters; and revealed how the military hid tortured Guantanamo Bay prisoners from Red Cross inspectors.
It’s this kind of real journalism that America's First Amendment was meant to protect but engaging in it has instead made WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange the target of a massive smear campaign for the last several years — including false claims that Assange is working with Vladimir Putin and the Russians and hackers, as well as open calls by corporate media pundits for him to be assassinated.
The allegations that Assange conspired with Putin to undermine the 2016 Election and American democracy as a whole fell completely flat earlier this month when a U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York dismissed this case as 'factually implausible', with the judge noting that at no point does the prosecution’s 'threadbare' argument show 'any facts' at all, and concluding that the idea that Assange conspired with Russia against the Democratic Party or America is 'entirely divorced from the facts'.
Perhaps the brazen character assassination was priming the public to become apathetic towards Assange in preparation for his brutal fate, which would land him in the hands of U.S. and British authorities after spending years isolated inside the Ecuadorian Embassy in London.
Today, Assange sits behind bars in a London prison under shocking conditions even a murderer wouldn’t expect. Renowned filmmaker and journalist John Pilger visited him there and fears for Assange’s life, noting he is held in isolation, heavily medicated and denied the basic tools needed to fight his charge of extradition to the United States.
The United Nations has consistently condemned the actions of the U.S., U.K. and Swedish