How the Washington Post Lost the PRISM Exclusive [media bias]

yahoo.com ^ | June 10, 2013 | Abby Ohlheiser

[grundle]

Barton Gellman posted a story cobbled from his chat transcripts with Snowden late Sunday, which contained this exchange concerning the whistleblower's conditions to keep the story the Post's:

To effect his plan, Snowden asked for a guarantee that The Washington Post would publish — within 72 hours — the full text of a PowerPoint presentation describing PRISM, a top-secret surveillance program that gathered intelligence from Microsoft, Facebook, Google and other Silicon Valley giants. He also asked that The Post publish online a cryptographic key that he could use to prove to a foreign embassy that he was the document’s source.

I told him we would not make any guarantee about what we published or when. (The Post broke the story two weeks later, on Thursday. The Post sought the views of government officials about the potential harm to national security prior to publication and decided to reproduce only four of the 41 slides.)

Snowden replied succinctly, “I regret that we weren’t able to keep this project unilateral.” Shortly afterward he made contact with Glenn Greenwald of the British newspaper the Guardian.

[abb]

We already know more about Snowden that we ever will about Obama’s past.

[maggief]

Years from now.

[Mercat]

I was voting “hero” until he said that Manning was one. Now I’m confused.

[citizen]

Hey! What’s wrong with Macon, Topeka, Orlando, or Flagstaff?

Nothing. They have a much higher percentage of real, honest people than does the fairyland of DC.

Apologies to the DC area workers of Fox News, for Glenn Beck and a host of conservative websites, and others....