"Winning the Pulitzer Vindicates NSA SPYING Revelations: Snowden Journalists Win Top Honor"

[KoKo]

Guardian and Washington Post each honored with Pulitzer for Public Service
- Lauren McCauley, staff writer

The Washington Post and the Guardian/US were both awarded one of journalism's top honors on Monday—the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service— for their separate but related reporting on the NSA's widespread surveillance documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.




Ewen MacAskill, Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras in Hong Kong to meet NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden on June 10, 2013. (Photo by Laura Poitras)

Journalists Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras and Ewen MacAskill from the Guardian and the Washington Post's Barton Gellman sent shock waves across the globe for their reporting on the leaks—eliciting responses from citizens and governments alike and spurring a new era of backlash against government intrusion.

Following news of the honor, Snowden released a statement thanking the Pulitzer committee for recognizing those involved in the NSA reporting. He wrote:

Today's decision is a vindication for everyone who believes that the public has a role in government. We owe it to the efforts of the brave reporters and their colleagues who kept working in the face of extraordinary intimidation, including the forced destruction of journalistic materials, the inappropriate use of terrorism laws, and so many other means of pressure to get them to stop what the world now recognizes was work of vital public importance.

This decision reminds us that what no individual conscience can change, a free press can. My efforts would have been meaningless without the dedication, passion, and skill of these newspapers, and they have my gratitude and respect for their extraordinary service to our society. Their work has given us a better future and a more accountable democracy.

The Pulitzer committee awarded the prize to the publications for their "revelation[s] of widespread secret surveillance by the National Security Agency," specifying that the Guardian, "through aggressive reporting," helped "to spark a debate about the relationship between the government and the public over issues of security and privacy." They credited the Post for their "authoritative and insightful reports that helped the public understand how the disclosures fit into the larger framework of national security."

The Guardian team broke the first report on the NSA's collection of Verizon phone records and Gellman, with help from Poitras, reported on the wide-ranging surveillance program known as "PRISM." In addition to Greenwald, Poitras, MacAskill and Gellman—who are primarily credited for the NSA revelations—a number of other reporters working at the publications also contributed to the reporting that followed.

Following the announcement, many hailed the selection as a vindication of the actions of both the journalists and the whistleblower, a number of whom have been threatened for their work and are forced to remain in exile for fear of persecution by the U.S. government.

“The stories that came out of this completely changed the agenda on the discussion on privacy and the NSA,” David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, said prior to the announcement. “There’s an enormous public good in that, and it’s yet to be proven at all that somehow did great damage to national security.”

"I can't imagine a more appropriate choice for a Pulitzer Prize," New York University media studies professor Mark Miller told AFP. Miller said that the winning team of reporters did what "American journalists are supposed to do, which is serve the public interest by shedding a bright light on egregious abuse of power by the government."

"The real journalistic heroes in this country tend to be the mavericks, the eccentrics, those who dare to report stories that are often dismissed derisively as 'conspiracy theory,'" Miller continued.

On Friday, Poitras and Greenwald returned to the U.S. for the first time since breaking the NSA stories to accept the prestigious George Polk Award for national security reporting.

During his acceptance speech for the George Polk award, Greenwald discussed the intimidation that both whistleblowers and journalists face.

"The only way to deal with threats," he said, "is to just do the reporting as aggressively, if not more so, than you would absent those threats."

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[G_j]

1. K&R!!

[BrotherIvan]

2. I guess this shows that DU is not "the real world"

Here it's standard to mock Greenwald and Snowden as traitors and Russian spies. It's SOP to dismiss what they have said and downplay everyone's concern of overreach and the invasion of privacy. Because the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are totally unimportant, and defending it will get insults hurled at you such as "hair on fire" "poutrage" "purist" or "fringe left". Yes, the label "authoritarian" has been well-earned by the nannies and hall monitors around DU.

But out in the real world, people do care; they see democracy, privacy, and the future of our planet auctioned off. I, for one, applaud these journalists for their work and hope it encourages whistle blowers to continue to take the ultimate risk in order to bring these crimes to light.

[ChisolmTrailDem]

7. I have said nothing about this entire affair...until now. Whoever here who has a problem

with Snowden, Greenwald, and/or anyone else who exposed this treacherous activity by the NSA, are closet righwingfuck authoritarians and are on the same team with same. And I don't give a shit what their nick is or how long they've been here or how much they wail about it.

It's not Snowden who is the traitor, it's the NSA.

[Maedhros]

10. The people doing the mocking are of two general types:

1. Hyperpartisans that see revelations of NSA wrongdoing as direct attacks on Obama and who are compelled to kill the messenger to deflect criticism away from the President.

2. Operatives who come to DU with the agenda of sowing discord and disinformation in order to deflect discussion away from NSA wrongdoing.

Both types can be summarily ignored.

[840high]

13. I do ignore them.

[BrotherIvan]

14. Both types SHOULD be summarily ignored

Unfortunately, it has made discussion nearly impossible and I spend much less time on DU (mostly as a lurker as I have in the past) because it is so damn draining. The hyperpartisans are now unleashing their hippie whips in their unity rants and I am sure liberals will be blamed for any losses in the upcoming elections. Beatings will continue until morale improves.

[Maedhros]

17. I have put those posters on my ignore list, and it has completely transformed my DU experience.

It's like I've been teleported straight from the middle school playground into a university quad.

I highly recommend that others do the same. Maybe if enough of them realize that they are shouting into a void then they may come back to Earth a bit.

[ProSense]

23. You forgot

1. Hyperpartisans that see revelations of NSA wrongdoing as direct attacks on Obama and who are compelled to kill the messenger to deflect criticism away from the President.

2. Operatives who come to DU with the agenda of sowing discord and disinformation in order to deflect discussion away from NSA wrongdoing.

....3. People who already knew about the NSA wrongdoing, and aren't impressed with Greenwald or Snowden.


I mean, the Pulitzer was for Public Service reporting.

http://www.pulitzer.org/citation/2014-Public-Service


Judith Milller won a Pulitzer for Explanatory Reporting.

http://www.pulitzer.org/citation/2002-Explanatory-Reporting



This year's award for Investigative Reporting goes to Chris Hamby, The Center for Public Integrity

http://www.pulitzer.org/citation/2014-Investigative-Reporting

That's impressive.

[DisgustipatedinCA]

25. Oh look. Here's one now. I think this one is a Type II.

[WhaTHellsgoingonhere]

18. Hear Hear!

Once a DU Grand Poobah "Naders" someone, it's GSM!

[Octafish]

3. Jail Them.

The traitors, not the reporters.

[WillyT]

4. Who... The NSA ???

[Octafish]

9. No no no. The Secret Bosses who count. Votes.

Did the NSA help Bush hack the vote?

January 9, 2006
Columns
Bob Fitrakis

What do we make of the President boldly proclaiming that he has “spy powers?” Does he have X-ray vision too?

When he and his cronies crawl up into Cheney’s bunker with the sign on the door “He-man Woman-haters Club. No Girls Allowed (except Condi),” do they synchronize their spy decoder rings and decide what new absurd folly to unleash on the world?

Illegal invasion of Iraq, suspending writs of habeus corpus, secret CIA torture dungeons, or election rigging? Most people outgrow such childish games and fantasies by the time they’re ten years old. And by age twelve, most understand that the President is not a king. Or a dictator. That U.S. citizens have inalienable rights.

That there are such things as search warrants. If the executive branch of government is going to conduct surveillance on the American people, they have to get a warrant from the judicial branch specifying what they’re looking for and the reasons for the search.

The Bush administration’s utter contempt for the U.S. Constitution and the specific information we now know about its use of the National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance network should further call into question Bush’ 2004 presidential “election.” In a recent revelation, we have learned that the NSA shared the fruits of its illegal spying on behalf of Bush with other government agencies.

What are e-voting machines and central tabulators that pass the voting results over electronic networks from the internet to phone lines? No more than data easily spied on and tapped into. The Franklin County Board of Elections, for example, tells us that it was a “transmission error” in Gahanna Ward 1B, where 638 people cast votes and Bush, the Wonder Boy, received 4258 votes. It’s not magic, nor is it an accident or an act of God. If the vote total wasn’t so hugely illogical, no one would have caught it.

CONTINUED...

http://www.freepress.org/columns/display/3/2006/1294

Happy the Pulitzers who got I am.

[Ichingcarpenter]

5. I'm tired

after today but my for profit for jails still need occupants for the bottom dollar.

Now my for profit parole system needs help too.

Both of these are stock items on the US stock exchange and doing very well.

[Octafish]

11. No be tired. Just drink more juice. Titan Size.

New NSA docs contradict 9/11 claims

“I don’t think the Bush administration would want to see these released," an expert tells Salon

By Jordan Michael Smith
Salon.com
Tuesday, Jun 19, 2012 04:24 PM EDT

Over 120 CIA documents concerning 9/11, Osama bin Laden and counterterrorism were published today for the first time, having been newly declassified and released to the National Security Archive. The documents were released after the NSA pored through the footnotes of the 9/11 Commission and sent Freedom of Information Act requests.

The material contains much new information about the hunt before and after 9/11 for bin Laden, the development of the drone campaign in AfPak, and al-Qaida’s relationship with America’s ally, Pakistan. Perhaps most damning are the documents showing that the CIA had bin Laden in its cross hairs a full year before 9/11 — but didn’t get the funding from the Bush administration White House to take him out or even continue monitoring him. The CIA materials directly contradict the many claims of Bush officials that it was aggressively pursuing al-Qaida prior to 9/11, and that nobody could have predicted the attacks. “I don’t think the Bush administration would want to see these released, because they paint a picture of the CIA knowing something would happen before 9/11, but they didn’t get the institutional support they needed,” says Barbara Elias-Sanborn, the NSA fellow who edited the materials.

SNIP...

Former National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice has taken credit for the drone program that the Bush administration ignored. “Things like working to get an armed Predator that actually turned out to be extraordinarily important, working to get a strategy that would allow us to get better cooperation from Pakistan and from the Central Asians,” she said in 2006. “We were not left a comprehensive strategy to fight al-Qaida.” Rice claimed that the Bush administration continued the Clinton administration’s counterterrorism policies, a claim the documents disprove. “If the administration wanted to get it done, I’m sure they could have gotten it done,” says Elias-Sanborn.

Many of the documents publicize for the first time what was first made clear in the 9/11 Commission: The White House received a truly remarkable amount of warnings that al-Qaida was trying to attack the United States. From June to September 2001, a full seven CIA Senior Intelligence Briefs detailed that attacks were imminent, an incredible amount of information from one intelligence agency. One from June called “Bin-Ladin and Associates Making Near-Term Threats” writes that “[redacted] expects Usama Bin Laden to launch multiple attacks over the coming days.” The famous August brief called “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike the US” is included. “Al-Qai’da members, including some US citizens, have resided in or travelled to the US for years, and the group apparently maintains a support structure here,” it says. During the entire month of August, President Bush was on vacation at his ranch in Texas — which tied with one of Richard Nixon’s as the longest vacation ever taken by a president. CIA Director George Tenet has said he didn’t speak to Bush once that month, describing the president as being “on leave.” Bush did not hold a Principals’ meeting on terrorism until September 4, 2001, having downgraded the meetings to a deputies’ meeting, which then-counterterrorism czar Richard Clarke has repeatedly said slowed down anti-Bin Laden efforts “enormously, by months.”

CONTINUED w LINKS...

http://www.salon.com/2012/06/19/new_nsa_docs_reveal_911_truths/

[zeemike]

16. Yes but there was no "actionable intelligence".

So there.

[Octafish]

19. LOL! More cats!

We get that a lot nowadays. Thank Moon.

[SaveOurDemocracy]

6. It's amusing how absent the usually voracious critics have been in response to this news.

[BrotherIvan]

15. Once they get the talking points

They'll arrive en masse.

Resistance is futile.

[Rex]

8. That's great, but can we get back to focusing on the personalities and not the main issue

of the state illegally spying on the citizenry? I really want to know what was in those boxes in the garage. I think it is more important.

[Maedhros]

12. I think it's much more important to get back to criticizing journalists

for publishing their work and trying to draw attention to it.

[Glassunion]

20. But... But... But...

He had a stripper girlfriend.
He's a Russian Spy!!!! OMGZ!!!!1!!
He's a narcissist!!!1!!
Dianne Feinstein(D) sayz he's badz!!!@@!
and other really, really bad stuffs!!! OMGZ!!@!@!!!

[bvar22]

21. This makes it really EASY to see WHO is on the WRONG side of this issue at DU:

*Rampant Government Secrecy and Democracy can not co-exist.

*Persecution of Whistle Blowers and Democracy can not co-exist.

*Government surveillance of the citizenry and Democracy can not co-exist.

*Secret Laws and Democracy can not co-exist.

*Secret Courts and Democracy can not-co-exist.

*Our Democracy depends on an informed electorate.

You either believe in Democracy and a Government accountable to The People,
or you don't.
It IS that simple.

[Douglas Carpenter]

22. However important this may be to the issue of our civil liberties - it is still NEVER, NEVER, NEVER

acceptable to expose government wrong doing during the tenure of any Democratic Administration - if it is even possible that exposing any abuses of power by the clandestine services might indirectly reflect negatively on a Democratic Administration. What is more important - protecting our civil liberties or sheltering a Democratic Administration from any hint of criticism? I for one am proud to say, the Party first, the Party last, the Party always!! Let the Constitution thumpers screech away. But I for one stand with the Party!!

[DisgustipatedinCA]

26. We don't allow anyone to spew homophobic bullshit here.

If you have nothing better to say than this hateful garbage, shut your mouth.

[idendoit]

27. Get your mind out of the gutter then.

You traitor supporters sure are a paranoid bunch.