[Infowarrior] - Puhlease. Rep. Mike Rogers: Glenn Greenwald 'a thief'

[Richard Forno]

Senior US congressman Mike Rogers: Glenn Greenwald 'a thief’

	• Spencer Ackerman in Washington
	• theguardian.com, Tuesday 4 February 2014 16.39 EST

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/04/us-congressman-mike-rogers-glenn-greenwald-thief-snowden-nsa

A senior US legislator has accused the former Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald of illegally selling National Security Agency documents provided to him by the whistleblower Edward Snowden.

Congressman Mike Rogers, chairman of the House intelligence committee, suggested Greenwald was a “thief” after he worked with news organizations who paid for stories based on the documents.

“For personal gain, he’s now selling his access to information, that’s how they’re terming it … A thief selling stolen material is a thief,” Politico quoted Rogers as saying after a committee hearing on Tuesday. Rogers said his source for the information was “other nations' press services”.

Greenwald said that the claim was foolish, unfounded, and designed to intimidate journalists. “The main value in bandying about theories of prosecuting journalists is the hope that it will bolster the climate of fear for journalism,” he tweeted Tuesday.

At the hearing, the US director of national intelligence, James Clapper, reiterated a statement he made last week criticizing Snowden’s unnamed “accomplices,” an apparent reference to the journalists who have published articles based on the material he took from the NSA. 

Greenwald was not named specifically during the hearing, but Rogers pressed agency chiefs to say that reporters “selling the access of material that was stolen from the United States government … for personal gain and profit” was a criminal act.

FBI director James Comey said that a reporter “hawking stolen jewelry” was a crime, but it was “harder to say” journalism based off the Snowden leaks was criminal, since such a determination had “first amendment implications.”

“It’s an issue that can be complicated if it involves a news-gathering or a news promulgation function,” Comey said.

Rogers asked: “Entering into a commercial enterprise to sell stolen material is acceptable to a legitimate news organization?”

Corney replied: “I’m not sure I’m comfortable answering that in the abstract."

The attorney general, Eric Holder, said in November he did not plan to prosecute Greenwald. 

Almost as soon as Greenwald, one of two journalists in possession of the entire set of documents Snowden took from the NSA, began publishing Snowden’s revelations, a largely-online whispering campaign began about his motives.

A more recent permutation of the accusation is that Greenwald is selling access to the Snowden trove, either to the new journalism organization he left the Guardian to help found, First Look, or to the variety of news outlets he has partnered with worldwide to publish information about controversial surveillance programs.

Greenwald has repeatedly batted the accusation down as foolish, and treated the typical act of publishing journalism on a freelance basis as nefarious and potentially criminal. “It’s completely idiotic,” Greenwald told Fox News in December.

Greenwald has said he receives the same sort of freelance rate from his partner outlets that other freelancers receive, when he is contracted to write stories based on Snowden documents.

At the House hearing, the chairman of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Mike Flynn, an army lieutenant general, said the organization’s investigation into the impact of the NSA leaks operated off the presumption that Snowden took every document he ever had access to as an IT contractor – a potential clue into the unsubstantiated claim from the government that Snowden took 1.7m documents. “Everything he touched, we assume he took, stole,” Flynn said.

“What we do have is the 200 or so news articles that have been published around the world that give us some insight into what was taken,” Clapper said.

Both Flynn and Clapper said they “absolutely” believed the Russian intelligence services had an interest in exploiting Snowden, who was granted a year-long asylum in Russia after the Obama administration revoked his passport.

But Flynn said he did not “have any information” that Snowden was under the influence of Russian intelligence. Clapper said he would find it “incredulous” if Russian intelligence had not already had conversations with Snowden.

Snowden has said for months that he acted alone in exfiltrating data from the NSA, without any internal or external help, a claim US officials have not provided evidence to contradict.


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