Glenn Greenwald • NSA

Now Greenwald Denies ‘Direct Access’ Reporting

11 years ago
37 Comments

So Greenwald wrote a thing yesterday in which denied ever claiming that the NSA had “direct access” to servers belonging to the tech giants. He wrote, instead, that he was merely illustrating the discrepancies between the PRISM slide and statements from the tech giants.

But Charles Johnson at LGF compiled numerous examples of Greenwald ballyhooing “direct access” as the central scoop in his original article. For example:

With this program, the NSA is able to reach directly into the servers of the participating companies and obtain both stored communications as well as perform real-time collection on targeted users.

And…

By reporting that the NSA had “direct access” regardless of where they got the information, Greenwald was reporting that it was true. Otherwise, he would’ve written in the article and within subsequent tweets: “reportedly direct access” or “the NSA claims to have direct access, but The Guardian hasn’t been able to confirm…” There was nothing in Greenwald’s reporting indicating that it might be untrue, other than the tech giants’ refutations. But the onus is on any journalist to take responsibility for what he reports as the truth — and especially to discover from his IT expert source how such a process might work, thus confirming its existence.

He’s seriously weaseling out of what way too many people interpreted to be truthful in his original article about PRISM.

Adding… Greenwald also wrote: “Rick Perlstein falsely accuses me of not having addressed the questions about the PRISM story.” Perlstein responded here.