Yesterday, I asked if the story about the US National Security Administration secretly requisitioning phone records went deeper – if social networking data might not be as easily requisitioned by security forces as phone metadata. Within hours, the Guardian provided the answer, in the form of a leaked PowerPoint presentation, classified ‘Top Secret’, which was “apparently used to train intelligence operatives” as part a program named PRISM.
This is now the second of two such ‘Top Secret’ documents obtained by the Guardian in as many days; an astonishing achievement, considering that the last documents of this level of American security classification to be actually published in the press were the famous “Pentagon Papers”, by the New York Times in 1971, forty-two years ago.
Nothing that WikiLeaks published ever carried this level of security classification. Most of the documents they leaked to the press were “secret” level, with a few “confidential” and unclassified documents thrown in.
This puts the Guardian in a unique position. Whoever leaked these documents – both the Verizon court order, and the intelligence training PowerPoint presentation the following day, two separate leaks – could be in real trouble under the Espionage Act as well as several other US statutes.
It is also worth mentioning that the Nixon administration did place an injunction on the New York Times and the Washington Post over the release of the Pentagon Papers, though it was lifted after fifteen days by the Supreme Court, which upheld the papers’ First Amendment rights. Attorney General Eric Holder said yesterday that the DoJ “will not prosecute any reporter from doing his or her job.”
Nonetheless, this leak is absolutely unprecedented in the internet age, and the Obama administration is developing a worrying reputation for hostility to journalists; the DoJ named Fox News reporter James Rosen as a ‘co-consipirator’ under the Espionage Act in order to put him under surveillance in 2010, the first time a journalist had ever been targeted this way in the US.
This also comes at a time when Army Private Bradley Manning, who gave WikiLeaks their biggest information-dump of classified material, is facing military trial for leaks. Prosecutors are seeking to prove that he was “aiding the enemy” – which is technically a capitol offence in the US, though they apparently do not intend to seek the death penalty.
US Director of National Intelligence James R Clapper gave a statement yesterday condemning the leaks, saying that they threaten “potentially long-lasting and irreversible harm to our ability to identify and respond to the many threats facing our nation,” and highlighted that everything the NSA has been shown to be doing is “within the constraints of the law”. House intelligence chairman Mike Rogers defended the phone data requisition program to the Washington Post too, saying that within the last few years, the phone record requisition program had been used to stop a terrorist attack within the United States. But libertarian senator Rand Paul called the seizure shown by the first leak an “astounding assault on the constitution”.
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