Free Republic

When Russian President Vladimir Putin granted citizenship to NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden on Monday, the news revived a long-simmering debate about the propriety of his revelations of U.S. government secrets. At the same time, it prompted reiterations of a widely-embraced falsehood: that Snowden “fled to Russia.”The disinformation-trafficking wasn’t limited to random people on social media. Among others, The New York Times, The Guardian, ABC, Christian Science Monitor and Canada’s CBC all asserted in the past week that Snowden “fled to Russia” in 2013 after revealing that the United States government had created a mass surveillance regime targeting its own citizens,...

Of all the lies that Edward Snowden has told since his massive theft of secrets from the National Security Agency and his journey to Russia via Hong Kong in 2013, none is more provocative than the claim that he never intended to engage in espionage, and was only a “whistleblower” seeking to expose the overreach of NSA’s information gathering. With the clock ticking on Mr. Snowden’s chance of a pardon, now is a good time to review what we have learned about his real mission.

David Carr, a writer who wriggled away from the demon of drug addiction to become an unlikely name-brand media columnist at The New York Times, and the star of a documentary about the newspaper, died on Thursday in Manhattan. He was 58. Mr. Carr collapsed in the Times newsroom, where he was found shortly before 9 p.m. He was taken to St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital, where he was pronounced dead. Earlier in the evening, he moderated a panel discussion about the film “Citizenfour” with its principal subject, Edward J. Snowden; the film’s director, Laura Poitras; and Glenn Greenwald, a journalist.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Laura Poitras' travel nightmare began more than a decade ago when the award-winning filmmaker started getting detained at airports every time she tried to set foot back in the United States. She was stopped without explanation more than 50 times on foreign travel, and dozens more times on domestic trips, before the extra searches suddenly stopped in 2012. Only now is Poitras beginning to unravel the mystery, which goes back to a bloody day in Baghdad in 2004. Time after time, airport authorities searched her baggage, rummaged through her electronics and quizzed her for hours about her...

Bill Maher is throwing some shade on President Obama's credentials as a supposed champion of freedom of the press. The host of HBO's "Real Time" sat down Friday to discuss media coverage of secret government work with documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras, one of the journalists centrally involved in bringing revelations from former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden to light. "I don't understand why he is perhaps the worst president we've had on clamping down on the press," Maher said. "He's used the Espionage Act more than any other president, right?" Maher added. Other members of the media have blasted...

In March 2013, when Edward Snowden sought a job with Booz Allen Hamilton at a National Security Agency facility in Hawaii, he signed the requisite classified-information agreements and would have been made well aware of the law regarding communications intelligence. Section 798 of the United States Code makes it a federal crime if a person "knowingly and willfully communicates, furnishes, transmits, or otherwise makes available to an unauthorized person, or publishes, or uses in any manner prejudicial to the safety or interest of the United States" any classified information concerning communication intelligence. [snip] Before taking the job in Hawaii, Mr....

Hollywood is planning to bring movies centring on the story of data-snooping whistleblower Edward Snowden and the equally controversial US drones programme to the big screen, according to the Hollywood Reporter. Few details are available about either project, but the drones movie appears to be further along the road to a potential release. Production company Lakeshore Entertainment has picked up an untitled screenplay for an "action thriller with military elements" from writer Spenser Cohen, a recent University of Southern California graduate who last year sold a screenplay for upcoming true-life Somali pirate drama High Target Value. Hollywood agency WME is...

When Edward Snowden decided he wanted to release details about the NSA's intelligence operations to the public, he reached out to Laura Poitras, a 49-year-old film maker and political activist opposed to the war on terror. As the Washington Post noted on Monday, Poitras had "the odd distinction of sharing a byline in The Washington Post and in London’s Guardian newspaper last week on two blockbuster stories." snip But perhaps it isn't such a mystery why the U.S. government might want to question Poitras if you simply crack open John R. Bruning's 2006 book, The Devil's Sandbox: With the 2nd...

The coauthor of the Washington Post’s bombshell story on the National Security Agency’s PRISM surveillance program is a long-time activist filmmaker who has railed against U.S. counterterrorism policies put into place after the Sept. 11 attacks. Filmmaker Laura Poitras, who shared the lead byline with former Post journalist Barton Gellman on the paper’s front-page NSA story, is not on the Post’s staff and is not a print reporter. Poitras has criticized the “illegal” Guantanamo Bay detention facility, described enhanced interrogation techniques as “legalized torture,” and criticized the intelligence community’s surveillance methods in her films and public comments. While traditional media...