NSA Spy Report Among Potential Pulitzer Contenders

[Capt. Obvious]

....

Among the potential contenders are reporters who revealed the massive U.S. government surveillance effort. Revelations about the spy programs were first published in June in The Guardian and The Washington Post, which last week received a George Polk Award for national security reporting.

....

The disclosures by The Guardian and The Post showed that the National Security Agency has collected information about millions of Americans' phone calls and emails based on its classified interpretations of laws passed after the 2001 terrorist attacks. The documents revealed that telephone and Internet companies such as Verizon, AT&T, Apple, Microsoft and Facebook have been cooperating with the government on these national security programs.

The stories were based on thousands of documents handed over by NSA leaker Edward Snowden. The reports were published by Barton Gellman of The Post and Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Ewan MacAskill of The Guardian, all of whom shared the Polk Award for national security reporting.

....

Snowden has been charged with three offenses in the U.S., including espionage, and could face up to 30 years in prison if convicted. He is currently living in Russia, which granted him asylum for one year.

TPM

[sabrina 1]

1. Good, it is great to see that the smear tactics used against Whistle Blowers and Journalists

have all failed as the issues themselves take center stage. The effort to smear the messengers no longer works. There have been too many Whistle Blowers, too many Journalists, exposing these egregious violations of our Constitutional Rights over the years for the petty smear campaigns to have any impact anymore.

They all deserve every award they get, as does Wikileaks and all the other Whistle Blowers, including Chelsea Manning who shamefully sits in jail while the War Criminals she exposed, walk free.

[Dragonfli]

7. I see it as a victory for the victims of the War on Whistleblowers

The War on Whistleblowers is now on Netflix, hopefully it will open some eyes.

[sabrina 1]

9. I had not heard of that, thanks for the information. Will definitely be watching it.

[randome]

2. Why do they keep throwing 'emails' into the mix?

No one has shown that the NSA is collecting domestic emails. No doubt they get some incidentally when gathering up foreign communications but there is no evidence that they target American email.

So much for accuracy in journalism.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]Stop looking for heroes. BE one.[/center][/font][hr]

[clffrdjk]

3. Lol

[Capt. Obvious]

4. And really

if you've done nothing wrong you have nothing to worry about.

[Dragonfli]

8. Those that don't like all of their private emails being read must be terrorists

and should be arrested Without question or trial, even if it requires a secret rationalization to to do so. Also I hear a drone can take someone out while at a wedding without any innocents getting hurt. I think we need to use them here where there are hundreds of millions of Terrorists (they must be terrorists because they only collect all your data and locations if you are one)

[dixiegrrrrl]

5. No one has shown it except .........

Here’s just some of what we’ve learned, or had confirmed, in 2013:

While prior to 2013 the NSA's public line was that it was forbidden from spying on Americans in America, but with the Snowden revelations (and help from a wide range of journalists and technologists that helped explain them)
the NSA was forced to admit that it secretly expanded its mandate from limited surveillance of specific foreign intelligence targets to a massive "collect it all" strategy where its goal is to ensure that no communication in the world is ever truly private or secure.

The NSA "is searching the contents of vast amounts of Americans’ e-mail and text communications into and out of the country."
the New York Times
The NSA collects virtually every phone call record in the United States—that’s who you call, who calls you, when, for how long, and sometimes where. (Guardian)

The NSA "is harvesting hundreds of millions of contact lists from personal e-mail and instant messaging accounts around the world, many of them belonging to Americans." (Washington Post)

The NSA is collecting "communications on fiber cables and infrastructure as data flows past," as part of what it calls "upstream" collection, including content and metadata of emails, web activity, chats, social networks, and everything else. (Washington Post)

The NSA "is gathering nearly 5 billion records a day on the whereabouts of cellphones around the world." (Washington Post)

NSA "is winning its long-running secret war on encryption, using supercomputers, technical trickery, court orders and behind-the-scenes persuasion to undermine the major tools protecting the privacy of everyday communications in the Internet age." (New York Times and Pro Publica)

NSA "has secretly broken into the main communications links that connect Yahoo and Google data centers around the world" and has "positioned itself to collect at will from hundreds of millions of user accounts, many of them belonging to Americans." (Washington Post)

NSA has "has been gathering records of online sexual activity and evidence of visits to pornographic websites as part of a proposed plan to harm the reputations of those whom the agency believes are radicalizing others through incendiary speeches." (Washington Post)

NSA "is secretly piggybacking on the tools that enable Internet advertisers to track consumers, using "cookies" and location data to pinpoint targets for government hacking and to bolster surveillance." (Washington Post)

NSA "officers on several occasions have channeled their agency’s enormous eavesdropping power to spy on love interests." (Wall Street Journal)

NSA and GHCQ spied on online games, including World or Warcraft and Second Life. (ProPublica)

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2013/12/2013-year-nsas-collect-it-all-strategy-was-revealed

[Capt. Obvious]

6. See? Terrible journalism.

[randome]

12. Communications into and out of the country is different from collecting domestic email.

Granted, the world is a lot smaller than it used to be -and those rules should probably change- but it's still not the same as the NSA watching us and storing all our communications.

Precision is important.
[hr][font color="blue"][center]No squirrels were harmed in the making of this post. Yet.[/center][/font][hr]

[sabrina 1]

10. Lol! At this point even the President has acknowledged the outrageous violations of

rights by proposing putting an end to these Bush practices.

I wouldn't be trying to excuse or defend any of it if I were you. At least President Obama has stopped trying to do so since his own panel proved that once again, the 'Left' was right. Kudos to him for that and for his proposal to end it.

[LondonReign2]

11. The NSA's top defender

To The Rescue!

[Ichingcarpenter]

14. As always but he says

he is just a truth teller for them but has been proven WRONG in assertions and innuendos.

Listen..... we have a problem

and its not just Houston.

[LondonReign2]

15. Of course he's been proven wrong

Again and again he's been proven wrong. Does that stop him from spinning thr same lies? Not at all. Truth telling is not his objective. (I know I'm preaching to the choir here...)

[Tierra_y_Libertad]

13. It's a disgrace. The administration's CYA speechwriters didn't even get an honorable mention.