Ten years ago, Edward Snowden warned us about state spying. Spare a thought for him, and worry about the future

The Guardian

The abuses the Guardian helped him bring to worldwide attention go on: the authorities have merely made it harder to expose them. (...)

[O]ne story the Guardian published 10 years ago today exploded with the force of an earthquake.

The article revealed that the US National Security Agency (NSA) was collecting the phone records of millions of Verizon customers. In case anyone doubted the veracity of the claims, we were able to publish the top secret court order handed down by the foreign intelligence surveillance court (Fisa), which granted the US government the right to hold and scrutinise the metadata of millions of phone calls by American citizens. (...)

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‘Edward Snowden, like so many whistleblowers, has paid a heavy personal price for what he considered as an act of public service.’ Snowden in Hong Kong, June 2013. Photograph: Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras/AP.

It led to multiple court actions in which governments were found to have been in breach of their constitutional and/or legal obligations. It led to a scramble by governments to retrospectively pass legislation sanctioning the activities they had been covertly undertaking. And it has led to a number of stable-door attempts to make sure journalists could never again do what the Guardian and others did 10 years ago. (...)

So do not hold your breath for future Edward Snowdens in this country. The British media is, by and large, not known for holding its security services rigorously to account, if at all. (...)

[T]here has been little more than a whisper of protest over the new national security bill or the threatened extradition of Julian Assange.

This is curious. The notion that the state has no right to enter a home and seize papers was established in English law. (...) (1765) (...)

Please spare a thought for Snowden, who, like so many whistleblowers, has paid a heavy personal price for what he (and many others around the world) considered an act of public service. (...)

“The press,” as the editor of the Times wrote in 1852, “lives by disclosure … The statesman’s duty is precisely the reverse.” Amen.

Complete article

Tags: #news #press #newspaper #media #news_media #journalist #journalism #snowden #edward_snowden #censorship #surveillance #mass_surveillance #privacy #nsa #National_Security_Agency #secrecy #government #secret_service #state_spying