Is this still journalism or activism already? This is a question Glen Greenwald was frequently faced with. But in a time of mass surveillance, we need journalists like him, journalists that don't hide behind the superficial balance between journalism and activism.
On June 6, 2013, the British daily newspaper and news website the Guardian published an article with the rather inconspicuous headline: “NSA collecting phone records of millions of Verizon customers daily.” [1] The sheer number of comments that were subsequently submitted to the newspaper’s online version—more than 2,500—was a sign that this would evolve into by far the most important story of the year, if not the blockbuster of the century. The Guardian’s story was the beginning of an avalanche of other articles [2] based on the material that U.S. whistleblower Edward Snowden had passed on to a handful of journalists. These ensuing articles became the catalyst for the most important story of the year—a story about the media, the role of journalism in society, and the role of journalists in the media. It is these aspects that I wish to explore in this article.
1. Journalism Or Activism?
While the title of this article is “Journalism after Snowden,” it could arguably be called “Journalism after Greenwald.” We owe it to Glenn Greenwald, the brilliant, defiant and renegade bestselling author and blogger-turned-journalist that Snowden’s revelations were made public in the first place. The disclosure, which threw Greenwald into the firing line of intense criticism, personal attacks, and even open hatred by other journalists, also served to launch a long-overdue debate on journalism. That debate is about the line between journalism and activism, about whether it is more important to be “fair and balanced” or truthful. It is also a debate about whether one can even call oneself a journalist while openly taking a stand on an issue. This discussion is by no means new. But recently it has received renewed attention by Dan Gillmor, now the director of the Knight Centre for Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University and author of the book We the Media, in which he popularized the concept of citizen journalism. [3]
One year after the Lehman Brothers went bankrupt, triggering the 2008 financial crisis, the Guardian published an article by Gillmor titled, “The New Rules of News.” [4] Describing the coverage of the events leading up to the crisis, Gillmor said that it “reminded me that journalists failed to do their jobs before last year’s crisis emerged, and have continued to fail since then.” To rectify this, he proposed 22 rules that he would implement if he were head of a news organization. Number 17 states:
The more we believed an issue was of importance to our community, the more relentlessly we’d stay on top of it ourselves. If we concluded that continuing down a current policy path was a danger, we’d actively campaign to persuade people to change course. This would have meant, for example, loud and persistent warnings about the danger of the blatantly obvious housing/financial bubble that inflated during this decade.
So let’s take another look at what Glenn Greenwald is doing. Greenwald undoubtedly provided a world-class coverage of the vast body of immensely complex data and files that Edward Snowden provided. Yet, he also explained the implications of his reporting: that we live in a surveillance state, that our governments are violating our laws and even our constitutions, and that the intelligence and security services, such as the NSA in the United States, the GCHQ in Great Britain and many others, are completely out of control.
2. A Disgrace for a Constitutional Democracy, But Not a Surprise
Most of you know what happened to Edward Snowden. The U.S. government seized his passport and thus deprived him of his right to travel. The U.S. government also pressured the governments of Portugal and France to prohibit that an airplane carrying no less than the President of Bolivia fly over their territories over suspicions that Snowden might be on board. They forced the plane to land and searched it, with no trace of Snowden. Many experts consider this a breach of international law. U.S. allies such as Germany were pressured to abstain from granting Snowden asylum. All of this is a scandal, yet hardly surprising. In fact, there’s much to learn from what happened to Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who published one shocking story after another about the abuse of power by intelligence services. I am not talking about the fact that people who work with him, such as filmmaker Laura Poitras and security specialist Jacob Appelbaum, are continuously harassed by the U.S. Border Patrol when they enter their own country—to the extent that they felt compelled to settle outside the United States. Nor am I speaking about the fact that the British authorities, with the blessing of high-level government officials, detained Greenwald’s partner David Miranda for nine hours at London’s Heathrow airport, in clear violation of the controversial British Anti-Terror Law. To sum up: all this is a disgrace for governments who call themselves democratic. Yet, it is to be expected that those who attack the surveillance state will face aggressive repercussions.
3. The Attacks of Journalists on Glenn Greenwald
Less expected, however, was that fellow journalists would attack Greenwald in droves. Greenwald was accused of aiding and abetting a crime because he published the confidential information of Snowden. He is accused of blurring the boundary between his own opinion and direct reporting. One columnist for the New York Times said in a talk show “I’m this close to supporting the imprisonment of Glenn Greenwald—that journalist out there who wants to help [Snowden] escape to Ecuador.” Bill Keller, former chief editor of the New York Times explained that under his leadership Greenwald would not have been allowed to publish articles on the Snowden data because he was a columnist and not a reporter. And Bob Woodward, known from the Watergate scandal, attacked Greenwald for not having protected his source, and for not having issued a coherent story about the information he received.
I’m a great friend of media criticism. I think it’s necessary to monitor the so-called fourth estate and to maintain a degree of control and accountability of an institution that itself is part of a system of control and accountability. However, in this case we have a situation where people are slow to acknowledge that journalism itself has changed—and for the better. That has a lot to do with the advent of blogs and that, these days, anyone can publish online. Yet, this goes beyond the tiresome “bloggers versus journalists” argument, an antagonism of the past. [5] Rather, the question today is how journalism and activism relate to each other, whether journalists are meant to chronicle events or to fight for change.
In countries with a British heritage, especially the United States, the division between reporting and commentary is almost a question of faith. Those who believe in the distinction are journalists, and those who don’t are activists. And, in the eyes of a journalist, being an activist is despicable. In their view, they convey facts whereas activists advocate a world view, belief or ideology. While the internet complicated that divide, the Snowden story leaves it on thoroughly shaky ground. The Snowden coverage brought a style of journalism to the forefront that had until then been limited to regional news or the internet. It certainly had not been seen in a 192-year-old British newspaper with a monthly readership of several million people from across the globe.
We are indebted to the reporters of the Guardian for choosing and staying with this story in spite of the intense political pressure to which they were subjected. They worked in a legal environment where government was allowed to significantly impede reporting and to force journalists to destroy evidence. And they worked under a government that actually made use of such powers, which are so fundamentally unworthy of a modern democracy. Further, we have to thank the editors of the Guardian for permitting someone like Greenwald to continue working on the story, and for doing so in a way that corresponds to Gillmor’s vision. Here, we need only think of the above-mentioned rule number 17: “The more we believed an issue was of importance to our community, the more relentlessly we’d stay on top of it ourselves. If we concluded that continuing down a current policy path was a danger, we’d actively campaign to persuade people to change course.”
Now—and this is the most recent development in a story already replete with unexpected twists and turns—Greenwald wants to go one step further. He has decided to leave the Guardian to start a news organization with money from the billionaire and founder of eBay, Pierre Omidyar. This is a unique opportunity, says Greenwald—and he’s no doubt right. Whether this endeavor will succeed and whether such a media venture, once established, won’t evolve into a normal newsroom remains to be seen. In any event, I very much look forward to seeing how this experiment unfolds.
4. Journalists and Technology: A Strained Relationship
I have one last item on my list, namely technology. For nearly 15 years (and still, at times, today), I have been a lecturer at universities and have taught at journalism schools. My specialty is everything digital: online research, the use of social media in journalism, how to build a good website, and so on. Whenever I have had the opportunity to design the curriculum myself, I integrate a theme I call “communications security for journalists,” although a more apt title would probably be “digital source protection.” My aim is to teach participants how to use technology to fend off technology, to use encryption to prevent NSA spyware from infiltrating their e-mail communication, to use hard drive encryption to protect their information if they were to be arrested and interrogated by a “rogue state” such as Great Britain, and to use anonymizing technologies like Tor to allow surfing the web without anyone finding out where they’re going to or coming from.
My experience was the following: the less repressive the regime of a seminar participant’s home country, the less likely they were to be interested in such things. I’m pretty sure that I never, in any of my workshops, convinced a German journalist to use technologies for email encryption actively and permanently. Yet, when I was in Syria a few years prior to the war, I didn’t have to convince anyone to use technologies to conceal their internet communication. In fact, the colleagues there were already using them. And now it is us, the journalists coming from nation states deemed to have functioning democracies and rule of law, who have to acknowledge that we haven’t been paying attention. We placed confidence in our constitutions, which guarantee the freedom of speech and the press, in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights [6] and in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, [7] which promises to protect the freedom of expression and privacy on the Internet.
The Global Network Initiative states that:
States must ensure these protections for anyone within their effective power and control. In many instances they must also protect individuals against violations of their rights by other individuals or companies. Restrictions on rights must be based on published, clear, specific legal rules; serve a legitimate aim in a democratic society; be ‘necessary’ and ‘proportionate’ to that aim; not involve discrimination; not confer excessive discretion on the relevant authorities; and be subject to effective safeguards and remedies. [8]
We now recognize that it is our own intelligence services and governments who are double-dealing us, spying on us and treating us like criminals and enemies of the state. There were plenty of warning signs, such as the unveiling of the ECHELON surveillance system of the United States in 2001. [9] Most of us ignored those signs, including myself. We must not make that mistake again.
5. Mathematics and Engineering are Raising the Cost of Surveillance
There is no simple solution to combating surveillance. Mathematics, of course, is always a reliable tool; but, according to cryptography expert Bruce Schneier, only to a certain extent. [10] This is because the surveillance state is a condition, a state of affairs. Neither can technology, alone, protect us against people who have the authority to break into our homes, search our offices and confiscate our mobile phones and computers, who monitor our phone calls and read our emails without having to produce a single piece of evidence of our alleged misconduct. We must use technologies to protect ourselves. I strongly recommend using technologies like PGP, Tor, TLS and IPSec, OTR and open source technologies. Anyone who does not know what all this means needs to educate themselves. There are a number of online and offline tools and manuals out there to introduce neophytes. [11] I also recommend using Disconnect [12] to hide information from Google. Finally, it is important to spread the word. We should make every effort to share what we learn with friends, relatives, and colleagues and to report about it in newspapers, on the radio, on television, in blogs or any other means of information-sharing. Because the more we use these tools, the higher the cost of surveillance. None of these tools provide complete security, because the full protection of privacy or of the reporter’s privilege is not possible in a surveillance state. Still, using them is a lot better than surrendering to the otherwise inevitable fate of having all our communications monitored around the clock.
6. False Balance and Lazy Journalism
This brings me back to my starting point, the critique of the false balance between journalism and activism. It hails from a vision of journalism in which a reporter should have no biased, opinion or stake in what is happening. It works like this: Someone makes a statement, the reporter writes it down, and then the reporter prompts the other side for their version of the story. [13] Such a method is meant to cover all the bases and ensure fairness, with the truth lying somewhere, anywhere, in the middle. Yet, we know that this does not capture any objective reality. We can’t say that the unconstitutional mass surveillance of citizens is wrong for a number of reasons and at the same time say that it’s fine for several other reasons, and that the truth lies somewhere in between. That’s simply lazy journalism. The truth is, it doesn’t really matter whether we use terms like “journalism vs. activism” or “reporting vs. lobbying,” [14] —what matters is that we fight for a society where the individual’s right to privacy is respected and where the media can fulfill its mission without being surveilled by an international gang of governments, that defies calls for legitimacy and the rule of law.
This article was first published by hbs headquarters in Berlin on July 31, 2015. Translated from German by Cathleen Poehler.
Please note that the views expressed by the author do not necessarily reflect those of the Heinrich Boell Foundation.
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[1] Greenwald, Glenn (2013): NSA collecting phone records of millions of Verizon customers daily
[2] Greenwald, Glenn et al. (2015): The NSA files. London; http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/the-nsa-files.
[3] Gillmor, Dan (2006): We the Media. Sebastopol; http://it-ebooks.info/book/137.
[4] Gillmor, Dan (2009): The new rules of news. London; http://www.theguardian.com/commentis-free/cifamerica/2009/oct/02/dan-gillmor-22-rules-news.
[5] Rosen, Jay (2005): Bloggers vs. Journalists is Over. New York; http://archive.pressthink. org/2005/01/21/berk_essy.html.
[6] United Nations (1948): Universal Declaration of Human Rights; http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/
[7] United Nations (1966): International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. http://www.ohchr.org/en/professionalinterest/pages/ccpr.aspx
[8] Brown, Ian/ Korff, Douwe (2012): Digital Freedoms in International Law. Washington, DC; https://globalnetworkinitiative.org/sites/default/files/Digital%20Freedoms%20in%20International%20Law.pdf
[9] European Parliament (2011): on the existence of a global system for the interception of private and commercial communications (ECHELON interception system) (2001/2098(INI)), http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//TEXT+REPORT+A5-2001-0264+0+DOC+XML+V0//EN
[10] Schneier, Bruce (2013): NSA surveillance: A guide to staying secure. London; http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/05/nsa-how-to-remain-secure-surveillance.
[11] Tactical Technology Collective and Front Line Defenders (2015): Security in-a-box. Berlin; https://securityinabox.org
[12] https://disconnect.me
[13] Rosen, Jay (2011): “He Said, She Said” Journalism: Are We Done With That Yet?, New York; http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jay-rosen/he-said-she-said-journali_b_187682.html.
[14] Rosen, Jay (2013): Politics: some / Politics: none. Two ways to excel in political journalism. Neither dominates. New York; http://pressthink.org/2013/06/politics-some-politics-none-two- ways-to-excel-in-political-journalism-neither-dominates.