Step 1: Description
For the description phase, you will need to research and take notes on some of the major news stories and recorded interviews resulting from this case.4
AMERICAN JOURNALIST GLENN GREENWALD worked for the London newspaper the Guardian when he wrote several shocking stories in 2013 based on Edward Snowden’s leaks about U.S. and British government mass surveillance. Greenwald left the Guardian later in the year to join a new journalism venture with Pierre Omidyar, founder of the online auction site eBay.
The main articles revealing the Snowden leaks were written by Glenn Greenwald, a columnist on civil liberties and U.S. national security issues for the Guardian, a major newspaper in London, and Barton Gellman, a Pulitzer Prize–winning writer and contributor to the Washington Post who writes about digital security issues. Other articles were based on Glenn Greenwald’s reporting:
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- Glenn Greenwald, “NSA Collecting Phone Records of Millions of Verizon Customers Daily,” Guardian, June 5, 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/nsa-phone-records-verizon-court-order.
- Dan Roberts and Spencer Ackerman, “Anger Swells after NSA Phone Records Court Order Revelations,” Guardian, June 6, 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/obama-administration-nsa-verizon-records.
- Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill, “NSA Prism Program Taps in to User Data of Apple, Google and Others,” Guardian, June 6, 2013, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-nsa-data.
- Snowden’s rationale for the leaks is in an interview Greenwald conducted with Snowden, published on June 9, 2013, on YouTube. See Freedom of the Press Foundation, “NSA Whistleblower Edward Snowden: ‘I Don’t Want to Live in a Society That Does These Sort of Things,’” YouTube, June 9, 2013, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5yB3n9fu-rM.
- Barton Gellman, “U.S. Surveillance Architecture Includes Collection of Revealing Internet, Phone Metadata,” Washington Post, June 15, 2013, http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/us-surveillance-architecture-includes-collection-of-revealing-internet-phone-metadata/2013/06/15/e9bf004a-d511-11e2-b05f-3ea3f0e7bb5a_story.html.
The U.S. government responded with a fact sheet to defend its intelligence activities:
- Director of National Intelligence, “Facts on the Collection of Intelligence Pursuant to Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act,” June 8, 2013, http://www.dni.gov/files/documents/Facts%20on%20the%20Collection%20of%20Intelligence%20Pursuant%20to%20Section%20702.pdf. (This fact sheet was issued by the U.S. government in light of news reports based on Snowden’s leaks.)
A helpful time line was prepared by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which is sympathetic toward Snowden’s cause:
- Electronic Frontier Foundation, “Timeline of NSA Domestic Spying,” https://www.eff.org/nsa-spying/timeline (spans the period from 1791 when the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution went into effect up to today).