Why the Pulitzers for articles on the NSA and Snowden are warranted.

[JDPriestly]

I would like to mention that the NSA surveillance poses a serious danger to freedom of the press. We have seen with the Risen story that our free press -- or what remains of our free press -- is under attack.

The Risen case concerns an alleged breach of the secrecy concerning some past CIA action.

But the freedom of the press does not protect just our right to know about what our federal government and agencies like the CIA and our military may have done.

Freedom of the press also protects our right to know what state and local governments including our police forces do.

The NSA programs that Snowden disclosed permit the NSA and thus our government to know the sources of news stories at all levels. In the wrong hands, the NSA information could thwart citizen efforts to enforce the laws that permit us to have clean government, any clean government. The NSA programs, the all-encompassing knowledge about who talks to whom that the NSA programs provide to our government could and probably do shield the corruption of power at all levels of our government.

How could that happen? The NSA spying apparatus would make it dangerous for whistleblowers to come forward and to talk to the press. Just the existence of the NSA programs and the NSA's overly broad authority to collect data on the communications of everyone in the world inhibits the collection of news about corruption and crime on the part of the powerful, those in and out of government.

So, that is the way that the NSA programs violate freedom of the press. They inhibit the ability of the press to collect information from witnesses to wrongdoing. They protect corruption among other things. The excuses for the NSA's violations of our rights sound noble, terrorism, drug crimes, but they are simply a power grab. Pure and simple, the NSA wants and gets power over the lives of our political representatives, over contacts with the press and over us.

[Scuba]

1. Kick.