[rad-green] Reporters Face New Threats From the Governments They Cover -- James Risen in the New York Times

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/26/opinion/greenwald-brazil-reporter.html

*New York Times*          *January 30, 2020 *




*Reporters Face New Threats From the Governments They CoverThe cases
against Julian Assange and Glenn Greenwald may be models for a crackdown.
The Trump administration and the right-wing Brazilian government of
President Jair Bolsonaro seem to have decided to experiment with such
draconian anti-press tactics*



*By James Risen  *
[image: image.png]
*Glenn Greenwald is an American journalist working in Brazil., Credit:
Adriano Machado/Reuters // The New York Times*

When Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, was charged last year by the
Trump administration in connection with the publication of secret United
States government documents nearly a decade earlier, many journalists
expressed deep concern about the dangerous precedent the case could set for
investigative reporting in America.

But few seemed to consider that the case might also serve as a model for
other nations eager to clamp down on press freedom.

On Tuesday, Glenn Greenwald, an American journalist living and working in
Brazil, was charged
<https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/21/world/americas/glenn-greenwald-brazil-cybercrimes.html>,
in a criminal complaint brought by Brazilian prosecutors, with cybercrimes
in connection with his stories on private messages among Brazilian
officials that revealed corruption and abuses at the highest levels of the
government. Brazilian prosecutors asserted that Mr. Greenwald was part of a
criminal organization that hacked the cellphones of government officials.
He has denied the charges. (Full disclosure: Mr. Greenwald is a co-founder
of The Intercept <https://theintercept.com/>, where I work as a reporter; I
also run the First Look Press Freedom Defense Fund
<https://www.firstlook.media/freedom-of-press-defense-fund>, part of the
nonprofit organization that includes The Intercept.)

The case against Mr. Greenwald is eerily similar to the Trump
administration’s case against Mr. Assange. Last April, the Justice
Department charged Mr. Assange with aiding a source
<https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/11/world/europe/julian-assange-wikileaks-ecuador-embassy.html>,
the former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, to gain access to a
United States military computer database. In May 2019, the charges against
him were broadened, and he was indicted under the Espionage Act
<https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/23/us/politics/assange-indictment.html> in
connection with the publication of American military and diplomatic
documents by WikiLeaks.

Both cases are based in part on a new prosecutorial concept — that
journalism can be proved to be a crime through a focus on interactions
between reporters and their sources. Prosecutors are now scrutinizing the
processes by which sources obtain classified or private information and
then provide it to journalists. Since those interactions today are largely
electronic, prosecutors are seeking to criminalize journalism by turning to
anti-hacking laws to implicate reporters in the purported criminal activity
of their sources in gaining access to data on computers or cellphones
without authorization.

This blunt approach gives the government enormous leverage over journalists
and, in the United States, provides them with a detour around First
Amendment concerns. If these cases become templates that prosecutors in the
United States and other nations follow, virtually every investigative
reporter will become vulnerable to criminal charges and imprisonment.

Both the Trump administration and the right-wing Brazilian government of
President Jair Bolsonaro seem to have decided to experiment with such
draconian anti-press tactics by trying them out first on aggressive and
disagreeable figures.

In fact, by the time of his indictment last year, there was still an
ongoing debate within the media about whether Mr. Assange should even be
considered a journalist at all.

In 2010, when WikiLeaks began publishing the huge leaks of United States
government documents it had obtained from Ms. Manning, Mr. Assange suddenly
emerged as a strange new player in the modern journalistic landscape. Under
his leadership, WikiLeaks both published the documents itself and also
shared many of the leaked documents with other major news organizations,
including The New York Times.

Mr. Assange was both a publisher and an intermediary between sources and
reporters, which made it difficult to define his journalistic role. His
later involvement in the Trump-Russia case — in 2016, WikiLeaks obtained
and released emails and other documents from the Clinton presidential
campaign and the Democratic National Committee from a hacker believed to be
a front for Russian intelligence — transformed Mr. Assange into an even
more incendiary character with little public support. (The federal charges
against Mr. Assange are not related to his involvement in the 2016
campaign.)

Mr. Greenwald revels in his divisiveness and his disdain for the mainstream
media, and he and I have publicly clashed over our differing views of the
Trump-Russia case. But he is also a zealous journalist who came to
prominence in 2013 for his Pulitzer Prize-winning coverage
<https://www.theguardian.com/media/2014/apr/14/guardian-washington-post-pulitzer-nsa-revelations>
of
a giant trove of documents from the National Security Agency that were
leaked by the former N.S.A. contractor Edward Snowden.

Last year, Mr. Greenwald obtained another big leak, the private messages of
Brazilian government officials concerning a major corruption case in Brazil
that had led to the conviction of the former Brazilian president Luiz
Inácio Lula da Silva.

Mr. Greenwald’s reporting revealed that the investigation that led to Mr.
da Silva’s conviction was deeply politicized and corrupt. The stories were
explosive in Brazil, and ultimately helped lead to Mr. da Silva’s release
from prison in November.

But Mr. Greenwald’s reporting enraged President Bolsonaro, who had been
leveling threats against the journalist for months before the complaint
issued on Tuesday.

In an interview with me on Thursday, Mr. Greenwald agreed that there are
parallels between his case and Mr. Assange’s, and added that he doesn’t
believe that Mr. Bolsonaro would have taken action against an American
journalist if he had thought President Trump would oppose it.

“Bolsonaro worships Trump, and the Bolsonaro government is taking the
signal from Trump that this kind of behavior is acceptable,” he said.

The State Department has not issued any statement of concern about Brazil’s
case against Mr. Greenwald, which in past administrations would have been
common practice.

“This is all about targeting reporters who are publishing information that
is embarrassing, and not like the 90 percent of the leaks coming out of
Washington that are official leaks designed to support the people in
power,” said Joshua Dratel, a criminal defense attorney in New York who has
represented prominent whistle blowers and who also represented WikiLeaks in
a civil suit brought against it by the Democratic National Committee.

In fact, Mr. Trump’s anti-press rhetoric and actions have encouraged
authoritarian regimes around the world to prosecute and jail journalists,
and to impose new anti-press laws and other measures designed to curtail
negative coverage.

Joel Simon, the executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists
<https://cpj.org/>, said in an interview that one of the latest tactics
spreading around the globe is the creation of vaguely worded “fake news”
laws that criminalize news that government officials deem to be wrong.
“Fake news” is, of course, a phrase that Mr. Trump has helped popularize.

“Qatar just promulgated a fake news law this week,” Mr. Simon said, noting
that Singapore also has one. “These fake news laws are absolutely
correlated with the Trump administration.”

The most tragic evidence that Mr. Trump is enabling a global crackdown on
the press has been his failure to hold Saudi Arabia’s leader, Crown Prince
Mohammed bin Salman, accountable for the brutal 2018 murder of the
Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi. “The Trump administration is an
accessory after the fact to the Khashoggi murder,” Mr. Simon said.

While the Bush and Obama administrations were “inconsistent” on press
issues, “they were still willing to discuss concerns about press freedom
with another country in the framework of the bilateral relationship,” he
added. “That’s gone now with Trump.”

It will be tragic if journalists shrug off the attack on the contrarian Mr.
Greenwald and don’t see his case for what it truly signifies — that
Trump-like attacks on the press are spreading like a virus around the globe.

*[James Risen <https://theintercept.com/staff/jimrisen/> is the senior
national security correspondent for The Intercept
<https://theintercept.com/>. As a reporter for The New York Times, he and
another former Times reporter, Eric Lichtblau, received the 2006 Pulitzer
Prize for national reporting on secret domestic eavesdropping by the
federal government.]*

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