Pullitzer Prize-winning journalist and bestselling author Barton Gellman was invited to be a part of the “ Leakers or Whistleblowers? National Security Reporting in the Digital Age” event organized at the Sanford School of Public Policy Monday evening. He sat down with The Chronicle’s Georgia Parke to discuss the ethics of journalism and his recent involvement with Snowden’s leaked documents.
The Chronicle: What do you think journalists, in this particular case with Snowden or in the broad sense, are obligated to disclose? Is there some sort of invisible oath they take? Where do you personally draw the line?
Barton Gellman: It’s not as though we’re a profession bound by guild rules or years of training. It’s more like a craft that you learn by doing it, by apprenticing yourself and you absorb the values. I think fundamentally we’re obliged to tell the truth and we’re obliged to tell it in context and shed light on things rather than obfuscate. If something has a big impact on the public. If something raises a big question about the kind of thing ordinarily we debate among ourselves and decide collecitvely how we want to organize ourselves. Then there’s a pretty strong reason to publish.
TC: What was the point where you decided to trust what Snowden was saying? When did it seem that the information he was sending you was something to take note of?
BG: My own gut told me that this was the real thing, that he was telling the truth, that he knew what he was talking about a considerable time before the first story. But you know it's not about gut. It’s about authentication. Honestly, we couldn’t make the final decision to publish the story about the PRISM slide deck until we talked to the government about it. And they in essence stipulated that it was accurate because they wanted to talk to us about withholding material. You can't say, "That’s probably just a bunch of made up junk, but please don’t publish it." You have to kind of acknowledge that its true and then you can engage in a substantive way about whether it should be published.
TC: I was curious how you decided to use only four of the slides [of information about PRISM] that Snowden sent you? There were 41 or so originally and that was after you consulted with government officials. How did you make that consultation without disclosing what you had?
BG: I asked them how they wanted to handle that consultation and I assumed they did not want to discuss it on the phone and they did. We talked about it on the phone, except we did it mostly by reference to page numbers. Someone would say, you know, on the 17th slide there’s a little box in the middle surrounded by a circle and the words there would be a big problem for us if you printed those words. And you can find that slide and you’ll see that there’s a little spot blacked out in the center because I understood why they wanted to remove those words.
It’s not that they’ve only approved 5 slides. These things were really hard to understand. They’re sort of putting up a lot of really complex stuff that required a lot of reporting and a lot of references to other documents to even begin to understand. For a general readership that didn’t make any sense. We did eventually come back and print more. We ended up putting up maybe eight or nine slides. But we did a lot of annotations.
TC: Do you think he did the right thing by releasing what he did to journalists? Do you think he did ultimately benefit the public and the world by making the releases that he did?
BG: Let me give you a caveat. I don’t think it’s my job to sort of judge the conduct of my sources, so I don’t want to be in that position. But I think it’s self-evident that what he did enabled a very important national and international debate about what our policy should be, about what the boundary should be of secret intelligence in a democratic society. And without that, there was no path for that debate. You know a lot of times you have from the president on down saying that we welcome this debate but we are against Snowden releasing this information. There was no debate possible without this information today.
TC: And was he the first one to let that happen?
BG: Yeah, this was the first time. The number of very important big issues and stories that he put out there for the first time is substantial.
TC: So on that note, if this is a big moment for that debate to come up, are people concerned enough about what’s going on with the government? Especially people of my age who have grown up almost entirely in this age of the Internet—are we as concerned as we need to be?
BG: I don’t know. I kind of can’t wait to find out what happens. I mean that’s why I like being in an empirical profession. My crystal ball is terrible. I don’t know how to tell what’s going to happen. But I do know that things are different if people know more and the more concrete you make it, the more they are able to decide things for themselves. But I do know when you make it concrete, when you show someone this is what surveillance is, this is what it feels like, this is the type of thing exactly that they know about you personally, not just hypothetically, it tends to make an impression.
And you know people are starting to realize that even if they feel like they’ve got nothing to hide, my life’s an open book, I don’t have any secrets that I really care about—first of all, that’s never true. It depends on your audience. You don’t tell your parents everything, you tell your best friend. You can make a list of pairings, you don’t tell your this the things that you tell your that. You want control over who gets to know what and when. But also, even if you want to pretend that you’ve got no secrets whatever, which would be very rare, you’ve got other people’s secrets. Your email is full of other people’s secrets. They’re going to break up with their boyfriend, they’re flunking out, they’re you know, whatever. It’s not up to you to say, 'Sure, read all my emails' because they’re not just yours.
TC: Do you think that because of Snowden’s actions, other people will be encouraged to come forward with things that they know? A lot of precautions have been taken now that he has come out. Do you think something like this is ever going to happen again or soon?
BG: Again, this is a crystal ball thing. I don’t know what’s going to happen. I do think that it was his intention to inspire other people to follow him. And he wanted to show that it could be done, that you could have a big impact on public debate. There would be reverberations and consequences and that he also wanted to show that you could do it and not have your life destroyed. And so far, you know, I guess everybody has to judge for themselves, but he is not behind bars as Chelsea Manning is and looking to spend the rest of his natural days in solitary confinement. He’s trying to say, 'You can do this.' If it’s the right thing to do, do it, you’ll have an impact and you can still live a life. That’s his message.
TC: How would you characterize the change in the way you go about your life and your work now that this has happened?
BG: I’ve been cautious for a long time and have learned how to use sort of precautions, technologies that make my work relatively more secure. But I haven’t been especially paranoid and I have to acknowledge that there is a decent chance that I am under more scrutiny than I used to be, that I am a little more interesting than I used to be to people who are good at surveillance. So it’s an uncomfortable feeling. I need to be able to give people assurances that we can speak in confidence. It’s harder and harder to do that. I have to take precautions that are a big tax on my time. If you can only this computer for this, and this computer for that and you can’t copy and paste between them and you can’t have a thumb drive between them and you have to use a much slower, more laborious method of communication and you have to stop and talk to your lawyer. It’s not very efficient. If the stakes are high enough, then you do it.
TC: Another crystal ball question. Do you see it getting worse that people will have to be more protective because the government is surveilling more? Or was this kind of a reality check for them that they need to back off a little bit on NSA surveillance and be more open about what they’re conducting?
BG: Look, there are all kinds of reactions happening now and they’re evolving quickly. There are technology companies that are taking advantage of the fact that there is now for the first time really a substantial market that looks like it's developing for privacy. People going out wanting to seek services, to choose service providers based on privacy whether they pay for it or not. There is legislation, there is possibility of new legal challenges being heard on the merits in court. There is no one magic bullet solution. If more people are using privacy protecting technology, then they’re going to have more control over their own lives. If the government really wants to come after you and find out what you’re saying, doing, how you’re communicating, it's going to succeed. It’s very good at that. But in terms of protecting yourself from broad-ranging snooping—and that could be from your Hotmail account because Microsoft is interested in selling you ads. Or it could be from your employer because what most people just click though every time.
You’re using a Duke computer and you probably have to click somewhere before you get on the network to acknowledge that this computer is the property of Duke and it may be monitored for this, that and the other thing, you don’t really think about that. There may be things where you don’t want to be monitored for this, that or the other thing.
TC: Do you think that the publicity of 'where in the world is Edward Snowden' overshadowed the kinds of things that you published and what the real story was about?
BG: I really don’t think so. I think there has been legitimate interest in who this guy is and where this guy is and its kind of a dramatic story. He’s running around between countries and the U.S. is trying to get him back, and people are going to be curious about that and people are always going to be curious about people. But I can’t see any way that you can say that the issues have not been getting a good airing.
TC: Another thing I was wondering is about your relationship with Glenn Greenwald [the journalist who broke Snowden's identity]. There was some confusion about who had what and where the information was going. Since the thing came out, what has your relationship with him been like and have you’ve communicated at all?
BG: We were on friendly terms before all of this. I didn’t know him that well. We still don’t really know each other that well. We are competing on a big story. Whether it's Glenn Greenwald or someone from the New York Times. I’m not, you know, sort of exchanging information or casual conversations very much. I mean, we’re just each doing our own job.
TC: Have you ever collaborated or worked together with Greenwald?
BG: No, we’ve been taking our separate paths.
Get The Chronicle straight to your inbox
Signup for our weekly newsletter. Cancel at any time.