Secrets and Leaks: The Dilemma of State Secrecy
by Rahul Sagar
Princeton University Press, 281 pp., $35.00
Fighting for the Press: The Inside Story of the Pentagon Papers and Other Battles
by James C. Goodale
CUNY Journalism Press, 260 pp., $35.00
What should we make of Edward Snowden, Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning, and Julian Assange? Their names are known across the globe, yet the actions that made them famous have also driven them to lives of intense isolation—in hiding, in prison, or in a foreign embassy. They have been lionized as heroes and condemned as traitors. Snowden, a former contractor for the National Security Agency (NSA), and Manning, a low-level army intelligence analyst, are responsible for the two largest unauthorized disclosures of classified information in the nation’s history.
Manning released to Assange’s website, WikiLeaks, about 720,000 secret documents from the State and Defense Departments, and Assange published them on the Internet. TheNSA still doesn’t know the full extent of the information Snowden stole and passed on to the journalists Glenn Greenwald, Laura Poitras, and Barton Gellman, but it estimates the number to be 1.7 million classified documents, concerning some of the US’s most closely guarded secret surveillance programs.
No comments:
Post a Comment