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WashPost makes history: first paper to call for prosecution of its own source

News organisations usually owe duties of protection to their sources. The Washington Post is making history as the first paper to call for the prosecution of Edward Snowden, its own source, after accepting the Pulitzer Prize.

By Glenn Greenwald
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Juliet Linderman
Juliet Linderman

Former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden speaks via video conference in February 2016. Credit: Juliet Linderman/ AP/Press Association Images. All rights reserved.

Three  of the four media outlets that received and published large numbers of secret NSA documents provided by Edward Snowden — The Guardian, the New York Times, and The Intercept –– have called for the US government to allow the NSA whistleblower to return to the US with no charges. That’s the normal course for a news organization, which owes its sources duties of protection, and which — by virtue of accepting the source’s materials and then publishing them — implicitly declares the source’s information to be in the public interest.

This highlights a chronic cowardice that often arises when establishment figures want to denounce Snowden

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Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0