NSA reports put Western media in difficult situation

MADRID: The spying revelations by former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden have made it a high-pressure, high-stakes time to be a top media executive.
In Britain, the editor of the Guardian pulverized entire hard drives of data leaked by Snowden to keep the government from seizing them.
In the United States, The New York Times pointed out in a major NSA expose this month that it agreed to self-censorship of “some details that officials said could compromise intelligence operations.”
And in Spain, the El Mundo newspaper said last week it would turn over Snowden documents to prosecutors inquiring whether the privacy rights of Spaniards had been violated.
As revelations about the staggering scope of the NSA’s surveillance have leaked out, newsroom leaders around the world have been weighing ethical decisions over how much they should reveal about intelligence-gathering capabilities. Their decisions are guided, in part, by media protection laws that vary widely from country to country.
“It’s a new era. There are new questions coming up and there are no clear answers here,” said Robert Picard, a specialist on media policy and director of research at the University of Oxford’s Reuters Institute.
“The media are trying to navigate it and it is not comfortable. You will get different opinions on the decision-making in different newsrooms and within the same newsroom.”
The huge number of Snowden documents has generated a barrage of exclusive stories in the Guardian and The Washington Post, along with a stream of revelations about the NSA surveillance in countries such as France, Germany, Spain and Brazil.
In some cases, publications that normally compete on stories have teamed up to get the news out.
Britain’s Official Secrets Act guards against the dissemination of confidential material, and the government’s response to the Snowden leaks has become stormier and stormier.
When Britain’s deputy national security adviser warned that agents would confiscate the Guardian’s hard drives containing Snowden files, editor Alan Rusbridger made the deal to have them destroyed.