This era of journalism is a significant departure from the way it used to be. The Snowden era of journalism

Welcome to the Edward Snowden-era of national security journalism — a time when no scoop is too small, no detail too minor, and revelations about government surveillance pour forth on an almost daily basis.

It’s a significant departure from the way things used to be.


After Sept. 11, reporters and editors often heeded tremendous pressure from government officials, including the president and/or national security adviser, to hold blockbuster articles concerning classified U.S. spy operations — accepting the warnings that publishing the information could put national security in danger or even lead to another catastrophe.

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But just as Watergate changed the ethos of political journalism, the Snowden leaks appear to have upended the way many journalists approach national security reporting. While substantial portions of Snowden’s massive cache of information has been withheld, Americans have been treated to a seemingly endless wave of articles since the first stories landed in June — leaving Obama administration officials and members of Congress fuming and even some veteran journalists concerned that the bar to publish has fallen too low.

Snowden has prompted a free-for-all among journalists itching to tell America’s surveillance secrets, an important generational shift as the nation faces years of growing debate about privacy in an increasingly wired world. The litany of stories come not just from the handful of reporters with access to the former NSA contractor’s treasure-trove of documents but also from competitors eagerly searching for scoops to move the dial on what has become one of the biggest stories of the decade.

“For years … it was like the number of articles to come out on NSA you could count on the fingers on one hand,” said James Bamford, who has written four books on government surveillance. “Now it’s almost impossible to keep up.”

“What we’ve seen with the Snowden revelations is the impact that putting documents out there really has,” added Siobhan Gorman, a national security reporter for The Wall Street Journal, during a recent panel discussion hosted by Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism and the Reporter’s Committee for Freedom of the Press.

She recalled her own work in 2008 about the George W. Bush administration gathering internet meta-data — a story that upset the intelligence community but didn’t have anywhere near the public resonance of the Snowden-inspired articles that have run in The Guardian and The Washington Post.

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While Snowden made off with an estimated 1.7 million documents — that number comes courtesy of National Security Agency officials — only a couple dozen have been released in public. They’ve made up the backbone for about 200 original stories, including blockbusters that described the government sweeping up of billions of phone records and surveillance on some of the closest U.S. allies.

James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, repeated his call Tuesday during a hearing of the House Intelligence Committee for Snowden and his “accomplices” — he hasn’t been specific, but most believe he’s referring to journalists who have access to the material — to return documents that haven’t been reported on “to prevent even more damage to U.S. security.”

But there has been an evolution of how government officials try to prevent publication of stories on intelligence secrets as well. Obama administration heavyweights have also shown a willingness to engage with reporters digging on the surveillance story. The NSA itself has gone on a charm offensive, opening up its Fort Meade headquarters just outside the Washington Beltway to print reporters and for an unusual on-site television interview with “60 Minutes.”

Clapper has also released reams of once-classified materials, including opinions from the federal court that has approved the surveillance programs but also criticized NSA for poor management.

“The presumption I think that the government has had in some cases prior to Snowden, that they could get you to just not at all publish a story, or hold it for some extensive period of time, there are fewer of those conversations and more of the kind of conversation about, ‘Do you really need this detail to tell your story?’” Gorman said. “It’s less of a wholesale pushback, and it tends to be a little more focused.”

( Also on POLITICO: Greenwald denies selling NSA docs)

Barton Gellman, a Washington Post reporter who has worked with Snowden, said during the Medill-RCFP sponsored panel discussion that he’s been following many of the same procedures he’s long used on the national security beat, checking with editors and also giving government sources an opportunity to explain why something touchy shouldn’t be published.

The Post met last spring with administration officials before running its first story based off the Snowden documents about the PRISM program that allows U.S. officials to tap directly into the servers of nine major Internet companies, including Microsoft, Yahoo, Google and Facebook.

At first, the government urged the Post to not publish the company names. Asked for a reason, Gellman said the government argued that it was concerned about losing out on future cooperation with private industry.

“In my view, and it was shared by the editor, was that if the harm you’re worried about consists of the public disliking what you’re doing and responding either politically or in terms of the marketplace to that, then that’s why we publish it,” Gellman said. “That’s the nature of accountability.”

Gellman said he has more stories in the works based off the Snowden documents, but he won’t be publishing all of the materials he has either.

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“It’s a very peculiar relationship to be in with the reading public, in which I am doing the blacking out because I think part of the information is vital to understand the story and part of it shouldn’t be disclosed,” he said.

That there is now a vast library of NSA stories is also due, in no small part, to the nature of digital journalism. Glenn Greenwald, the Rio-based journalist who has worked most closely with Snowden, has been an aggressive presence online and on social media.

His approach to the biggest leak since the Pentagon Papers marks a radical departure from past coverage where reporters from the major dailies would sometimes go all the way to the president with their findings — and sometimes accept delays even if it meant getting scooped.

“There’ll be blood on your hands,” President George W. Bush reportedly warned The New York Times’ publisher in a 2005 Oval Office meeting before the newspaper published a Pulitzer Prize-winning story about warrantless NSA eavesdropping in the U.S. — a story it had held for more than a year.

It’s not just Washington that is struggling with the new journalistic calculus on surveillance coverage. In the Snowden story, Guardian reporters working with Greenwald have checked with British government sources before publication.

But it’s not been a good relationship. British security officials forced the newspaper’s editors to destroy computers used to store the Snowden documents. To avoid losing all the materials, The Guardian partnered with The New York Times for several NSA-related stories.

In the U.S., the Snowden leaks came out at a touchy moment in press-government relations. The Obama administration had secretly obtained The Associated Press’s phone records, named Fox News’s James Rosen as a criminal co-conspirator and is threatening to send The New York Times’ Jim Risen to prison unless he testifies in the trial of a former CIA analyst charged with leaking information to him.

During a hearing Tuesday, House Intelligence Committee Chairman Mike Rogers (R-Mich.) opened the door on prosecuting Greenwald by asking FBI Director James Comey whether “fencing stolen material is … a crime?”

Comey replied that “it would be” a crime in most cases, but he added that things get “complicated” when the person selling the information is engaged in newsgathering activities. “It could have First Amendment implications,” the FBI director said.

In an interview, Greenwald said he hasn’t been selling the Snowden documents. He added that his work is indistinguishable from that of other journalists, including freelance writers working on stories about national security secrets. He also complained that U.S. officials like Rogers are trying to discourage more reporters from following the story.

“What they’re trying to do is to remove it from the realm of journalism, so that they can then criminalize it,” Greenwald told POLITICO. “The fact that I’ve been more defiant about the U.S. government … makes them want to do something to me more. That fact that I’ve gone around the world doing this reporting in different countries and publishing reporting around the world — that is something they want to stop.”

There’s little doubt Greenwald and other reporters have rankled high-ranking U.S. officials concerned over compromised security. The stories have also forced President Barack Obama to deal with programs he opposed as a senator.

But while such relentless press commitment has kept the NSA front-and-center in the national news — a good thing, civil liberty advocates say — it has also threatened to desensitize the American public as the latest revelation seems almost as mundane as the baseball box scores. Public opinion polls since the Snowden leaks started show Americans still don’t know what to make of the disclosure of so many secret government operations.

Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.) said he’s felt “rainsoaked” by the amount of once-classified information that’s since been published.

Some journalists don’t like what they’re seeing either in their colleagues’ dash to get the next juicy scoop.

Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus fretted that the hunt among reporters has trumped the fact that “no one has come up with a violation of Americans’ civil liberties” in the first wave of Snowden document stories.

“Everyone is using these documents for their own particular purposes,” Pincus said in an interview. “You’ve got all these documents that are classified, and the temptation is to find something new and write about it — even if there’s no greater purpose than ‘I’ve got a classified document, here’s what it says.’”

“I think the temptation to keep using stuff is too much because there is a kind of competition,” he said.

National Journal chief correspondent Michael Hirsh argued in a recent column that Snowden had turned many unsuspecting reporters into activists. While praising Gellman as “one of the very best: intelligent, relentless, scrupulous, and always ethical,” he also questioned a January story The Washington Post reporter co-wrote that described NSA’s effort to build a “quantum computer” capable of breaking virtually all kinds of encryption.

“I wonder if, after all the disclosures that have already touched off a major reassessment of National Security Agency surveillance by the U.S. government, what we’re reading now is more like free advertising for a certain point of view — Edward Snowden’s point of view, that is, as well as that of his comrade-in-outrage, Glenn Greenwald,” Hirsh wrote.

Greenwald said he’s not been shy in trying to inspire more stories from other media outlets that reveal NSA’s secrets without a kowtow to government warnings. “Definitely, that was part of our goal,” he said. “In fact, we wanted to kind of revitalize the idea of what adversarial journalism was about.”

Snowden initially was pretty clear he didn’t want to provide documents to The New York Times because he thought they’d previously been too subservient to the government, Greenwald explained. “This model of journalism, of extreme collaboration between the government and the media, has become pretty discredited in large part over the last seven months because of what we have been able to do,” he said. “Other institutions are motivated now to show they’re not too captive to the U.S. government.”

The Snowden document dump has been “very valuable” as the spark for a much needed debate about the extent of the nation’s surveillance programs since 9/11, said Geoff Stone, a University of Chicago law professor and one of the members of a White House-chartered task force that examined the surveillance programs.

But Stone also cautioned that he didn’t think the reporters who got access to the documents were in the best position to decide what to publish from them.

“I think this has emboldened the press to take more autonomy about decisions,” he said in an interview. “They’re making judgments about what they think is harmful or not harmful based on very little understanding of how to think about what that harm might be. So there’s a kind of recklessness involved in this that’s problematic.”

“I don’t know how to solve it. But I think there really is a danger there of members of the press thinking they know more than they do and making important decisions for the nation based on that,” Stone added. “These are really hard issues that journalism as a profession needs to think about now because it’s come to the fore so much.”

Bruce Brown, executive director of the Reporters Committee, said reporters, editors and government officials need to re-engage in talks over these issues — picking up on meetings through the Aspen Institute that petered out several years before the Snowden leaks — and perhaps “develop protocols for handling sensitive or national security information prior to publication.”

“To have those kinds of conversations at a time not when it’s 5 o’clock and there’s a deadline the next day,” Brown said in an interview. “But in a more leisurely and relaxed setting, so going forward there’s some basis for better understanding each other when the deadlines do come along, which they inevitably will.”

Josh Gerstein contributed to this report.

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story did not include the Reporter’s Committee for Freedom of the Press as a co-sponsor of a recent panel discussion.

CORRECTION: Corrected by: Nick Gass @ 02/07/2014 02:42 PM CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story did not include the Reporter’s Committee for Freedom of the Press as a co-sponsor of a recent panel discussion.