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Journalism of Courage
Whisked out of a luxury Hong Kong hotel,vanishing into a mysterious wing of a Moscow airport,Edward Snowdens continent-jumping,hide-and-seek game seems like the stuff of a pulp thriller a desperate mans drama played out before a worldwide audience trying to decide if hes a hero or a villain.
But the search for the former National Security Agency contractor who spilled government secrets has become something of a distracting sideshow,some say,overshadowing at least for now the important debate over the governments power to seize the phone and Internet records of millions of Americans to help wage the war on terrorism.
Snowden,he says,can get back on track by utilizing whatever information he has like big bombs in a campaign, so the focus returns to the question of spying and not his life on the run.
Snowdens disclosures about US surveillance to Guardian and The Washington Post have ignited a major controversy in Washington that shows no signs of fading. A petition asking President Barack Obama to pardon Snowden dubbing him a national hero has collected more than 123,000 signatures. Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein,meanwhile,has called Snowdens disclosure of top-secret information an act of treason. And Republican House Speaker John Boehner is among those whove called Snowden a traitor.
Some say Snowden is losing ground in the battle for public opinion by cloaking his travels in secrecy,creating more interest in his efforts to elude US authorities than his allegations against the government.
By disappearing in Russia,he loses access to rehabilitate himself in the publics mind, says William Weaver,a professor at the University of Texas at El Paso who has written about government secrecy. You have to keep selling yourself,if you will,and do it in a smart way so people dont get tired of you8230; His only hope was to hit a grand slam home run with the public and make it stick. For every hour that hes not doing something like that,hes in trouble.
US bugged EU offices,computers: German magazine
BERLIN: The United States bugged European Union offices and gained access to EU internal computer networks,according to secret documents cited in a German magazine Saturday,the latest in a series of exposures of alleged US spy programmes. Der Spiegel cited from a September 2010 top secret document of NSA which it said Edward Snowden had taken with him and which the weeklys journalists had seen in part. Reuters
