Rieder: 'Guardian' deserves praise for Snowden work

Rem Rieder | USA TODAY

No good deed goes unpunished.

The British newspaper The Guardian deserves the highest of accolades for the powerful journalism it has published based on documents leaked by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden.

The Washington Post and New York Times have also broken Snowden-fueled scoops. But The Guardian has led the way.

The result has been a much-needed debate in the United States as well as Great Britain of rampant government surveillance of private citizens with absolutely no connection to terrorism.

But you would never know that from the way Guardian Editor-in-Chief Alan Rusbridger was treated when he was summoned to discuss the paper's coverage before a committee of Parliament Tuesday.

RIEDER: Turning point in government spying saga

The hostility exhibited by some members of the committee was astonishing. One asked Rusbridger whether he loved his country. (A somewhat taken aback Rusbridger said he did.) Another asked if he would have passed secrets on to the Nazis. A third suggested The Guardian may have broken the law by sharing some Snowden information with The New York Times.

And the government's efforts to cow the paper have been harsh.

Rusbridger told the committee that the tactics "include prior restraint. They include a senior Whitehall (British government) official coming to see me to say, 'There has been enough debate now.' They include asking for the destruction of our disks. They include MPs calling for the police to prosecute the editor. So there are things that are inconceivable in the U.S."

He added, with classic British understatement, "I feel that some of this activity has been designed to intimidate The Guardian."

Ya think?

To top it all off, the British police are considering whether Guardian staffers should be investigated under the country's Terrorism Act.

In fact, The Guardian's handling of the Snowden documents has been a model of responsible reporting. Rather than just pour everything out there, Rusbridger says The Guardian has used just "about 1%" of the roughly 58,000 files Snowden provided.

The editor also said the paper has consulted with government officials and intelligence agencies more than 100 times while deciding whether to publish information. What's more, Rusbridger said, the committee that scours articles for material that could damage national security concluded that none of The Guardian/Snowden revelations had put British lives in jeopardy.

This has been no indiscriminate document dump. The Guardian has carefully sifted and evaluated the material while publishing news articles very much in the public interest.

And The Guardian's work, along with pieces in other newspapers, has had an enormous impact, especially in the U.S. While much of the early reaction was critical of the famously "29-year-old" Snowden and supportive of the NSA, the sheer scope of the surveillance that was revealed, along with the lack of accountability and public knowledge, ultimately turned the tide.

A decisive moment came with the news that the U.S. had been listening in on calls on the cellphone of German Chancellor Angela Merkel, a staunch American ally, as well as conversations of other world leaders. Even such vehement defenders of NSA snooping as Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, had had enough.

Feinstein said her committee will undertake a "major review of all intelligence collection programs," while President Obama said his administration will review intelligence operations.

So The Guardian should be harvesting testimonials, not threats and insults, for its important journalism.

We'll give the last word to journalist Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame, who may know a little about government secrecy and blame-the-messenger tactics. In an open letter to Rusbridger, Bernstein called the notion of the MPs grilling the editor "pernicious" and accurately portrayed it as an attempt to deflect attention from government policies to the behavior of the press.

And he had some very smart advice for Parliament.

"Rather than hauling in journalists for questioning and trying to intimidate them," he wrote, the MPs "would do well to encourage and join that debate over how the vast electronic intelligence-gathering capabilities of the modern security-state can be employed in a manner that gives up little or nothing to real terrorists and real enemies and skilfully uses all our technological capabilities to protect us, while at the same time taking every possible measure to insure that these capabilities are not abused in a way that would abrogate the rights and privacy of law-abiding citizens."