What the Prism Stories Tell Us About the Press - Skating on Stilts

What the Prism Stories Tell Us About the Press

If you don't share my fascination with the journalistic ethics of the Snowden reporters, you can skip this long piece.  But both of the protagonists have now defended themselves, so I'm posting their messages, with commentary.  

I began the exchange when I questioned why Glenn Greenwald and the Guardian waited two weeks to release NSA's minimization procedures, which revealed extensive limitations on how NSA handles information about Americans. It seemed odd that Greenwald didn't tell us about those procedures in his original story about Prism, which after all quotes an intelligence community official who defends Prism by invoking the minimization procedures:

"The program is subject to oversight by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the Executive Branch, and Congress. It involves extensive procedures, specifically approved by the court, to ensure that only non-US persons outside the US are targeted, and that minimize the acquisition, retention and dissemination of incidentally acquired information about US persons."

In Greenwald's first story, this passage just sits at the very end, like the warnings that follow an ad for Viagra.  There's no hint that Greenwald has copies of the minimization procedures and can confirm much of what the official says.

So why, I asked, did he wait two weeks before publishing the documents and providing much-needed context? To my mind, that was the act not of a journalist committed to informing his readers; it was more like the act of an advocate hoping to get a firestorm started before disclosing information that might give readers second thoughts.

Greenwald is nothing if not diligent in tracking his online reputation.  He tweeted a truculent defense a few hours after my post:

@stewartbaker The WashPost had the same docs, yet didn't publish it until we did. How do you explain that? Do they also hate America?

A fair question. The Post story was similar in many ways to the Guardian piece; it too included the "extensive procedures" quote, though a bit higher and with a smidgen of backhanded confirmation:

The Obama administration points to ongoing safeguards in the form of “extensive procedures, specifically approved by the court, to ensure that only non-U.S. persons outside the U.S. are targeted, and that minimize the acquisition, retention and dissemination of incidentally acquired information about U.S. persons.”

And it is true that the PRISM program is not a dragnet, exactly. From inside a company’s data stream the NSA is capable of pulling out anything it likes, but under current rules the agency does not try to collect it all.

But why did the Post stop with the vague reference to "current rules" when it could have confirmed the official's statement by releasing the minimization documents it already had? I still didn't have a better answer than the one I started with.  So I sent Bart Gellman an email asking for comment.  (He's asked me his share of tough questions over the years, so it seemed only fair.)

To his credit he gave me a thoughtful response, and I'm reprinting it full, with a bit of commentary. It begins with some reflexive High Journalism:

I can’t discuss when and from whom I obtained particular documents, other than what I have already reported. Your analysis relies pretty heavily on assumptions about the answers. Glenn Greenwald is right to say, on that basis, that your critique of the Guardian would apply to my coverage as well.
I have taken no position on whether the programs at issue are good or bad, properly tailored or overbroad. I am doing my best to unearth the facts that would enable such a debate. That is what journalism is supposed to do.

But he then gets down to talking about the minimization guidelines:

The newly disclosed minimization procedures do indeed mitigate the privacy intrusions of the NSA domestic collection programs, for the reasons you state. Those procedures rebut broad claims of an unchecked program of espionage on Americans, but those have never been my claims. Each of my stories has included some version of this paragraph:

Foreigners, not Americans, are the NSA’s “targets,” as the law defines that term. But the programs are structured broadly enough that they touch nearly every American household in some way. Obama administration officials and career intelligence officers say Americans should take comfort that privacy protections are built into the design and oversight, but they are not prepared to discuss the details.
It has been in the administration’s power all along to release details of the minimization rules. Withholding them is hard to defend on national security grounds, and harder still when the president says he welcomes a debate on the appropriate boundaries of surveillance. When I asked senior legal and operational figures in the intelligence community for information about the NSA’s minimization procedures, they told me to submit a FOIA request.

I count a couple of different justifications in there.  Bart Gellman admits that disclosing the guidelines would have mitigated some privacy concerns. But, he seems to be saying, he had no obligation to mitigate those privacy concerns because his story was written to raise different privacy concerns -- and anyway, it was up to the administration to release the guidelines if they thought it would be helpful to them; instead they gave him the old FOIA schtick.  

Give Bart Gellman credit for some candor here, but I still don't find his reasons persuasive. Okay, the administration refused to declassify the guidelines. But really, so what?  The government didn't declassify Prism, either, and that didn't stop him from publishing the Prism slides.  Come to think of it, he ultimately published the guidelines, too.  So his defense boils down to saying that he didn't have to release documents when they might have eased Americans' privacy concerns about Prism because he was careful to avoid writing about any privacy concerns that could be eased by the documents. Really?  Somehow I feel as though I'm being asked to read the Washington Post the way Sovietologists used to read Pravda -- more for what it doesn't say than for what it does. 

The most interesting part of Bart Gellman's response, though, is the last section

more @ http://www.skatingonstilts.com/skating-on-stilts/2013/06/stewart-ba...

 

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This -> "hoping to get a firestorm started before disclosing information"

Newspapers need to sell newspapers. The paper gave Snowden a platform to reach millions of people overnight, but that platform has maintenance costs that extend far beyond 1 story.

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