Reporters who worked together, not in the middle of the news room. But on a floor, remote from anybody else. Exclusively went through the documents. And after that long process, then moved to the next phase which is trying to put them in some kind of context, to start reporting. In our case i thought, some of what we brought to the table, you know, were our reporters in Silicon Valley who had very good sources on all the companies that the guardian could see, this was a source of controversy within the companies themselves. They had been required to cooperate with the government but whether it was right to or not became a very live debate. We could add reporting fire power on that type of thing as well as inside the u. S. Government and in the intelligence community. Thats a terrific, i think almost sort of textual kind of background. You almost file like it was like to be in those rooms. I want to bring in david and then caas on these legal issues and the response, if you like, with t
An activist, a community organizer. In a sense, what are you doing . Youre living off the great capitalist explosion of wealth that you didnt even create. Up, many strong men set its hard to know where to begin. Nobody said americas the most charitable place. But there are a couple of assertions that you have to take on faith that are astonishing. One is the idea that americas great invention was wealth creation, not based on theft at all. What about the theft of the entire continent . That was a theft. That doesnt mean [cheers and applause] 90 of the residents who lived here were murdered. And that was a part of it too. Bill ayer and anesh desouza debate whats to so great about america. Friday night at 8 00 on cspan. Last month, the Columbia University Journalist School began a yearlong project titled journalism after snowden. This 90minute forum talks about how they broke the Edward Snowden story. Also on the panel is executive editor of New York Times and members of the president s
I think thats a really important point. Its not the sexiest opponent but you were asking janine about the process by which they verified the story. I would say the process by which the guardian sort of schooled us in exactly how we needed to handle the documents, safe keep them, communicate in a very secure manner, that that is probably, you know, took up days of janine and me talking before we got a lick of actual work done. I just think that that point is somewhat lost on the public. Sometimes they think, oh, a leak, its just a bunch of stuff thats thrown at us and we just rush to publish it. And that is never the case and could be the least true in this situation. This touches on something that i want to come back to just before i move on. The two of you, the surprise of these stories, the unknowable end, you know, even with the pentagon papers, you could fit them into a shopping cart. And wheel them across the news room. And part of that was actually, you know, ellsberg had to make
Something that i think is an issue for journalists and citizens for the next 20 years, which is theres been a distinction in law and more generally between metadata and content, so some people have a thought that if government has access to your phone calls, thats really troubling. If they have access to metadata, meaning what numbers are calling what numbers, thats a completely different problem. We in the review group are uneasy with that distinction. That if the government has access to knowledge about whom you are calling and when and where, meaning the numbers, and it can figure out who those people are, thats a privacy problem. And that needs to be that distinction between metadata and data needs to be rethought. Certainly for policy purposes, the idea that government has, you know, your metadata, it can tell a ton about you. Whether its going to be used illicitly or, you know, to target people on the basis of illegitimate grounds, probably thats a risk and not a high one under c