Journalists and Snowden expose NSA (video)

Ashley Wells, Irma Quintero, CC Liu, Wisdom Quarterly; Amy Goodman, Juan Gonzalez, Nermeen Shaikh (DemocracyNow.com, April 14, 2014); Firstlook.org/TheIntercept

Journalists exposing NSA (zimbio)

Months ago, Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald (The Intercept) flew from New York to Hong Kong to meet NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. Poitras and Greenwald did not return to the US until Friday when they flew from Berlin to NY to accept the George Polk Award for National Security Reporting. They arrived not knowing if they would be detained or subpoenaed after Director of National Intelligence James Clapper described journalists working on NSA stories as Snowden’s "accomplices." At a news conference following the ceremony, Poitras and Greenwald took questions from reporters about their reporting and the U.S. government intimidation it has sparked. More

Obama: Yes to NSA's unconstitutional spying

In their first return to the US since exposing the NSA’s mass surveillance operations, the Intercept journalists were honored in NYC on Friday. They play key roles in reporting the massive trove of documents leaked by Snowden. 

They were joined by colleagues Ewen MacAskill of The Guardian and Barton Gellman of The Washington Post, with whom they shared the award. In their acceptance speeches, they paid tribute to their source: "Each one of these awards just provides further vindication that what [Snowden] did in coming forward was absolutely the right thing to do and merits gratitude, and not indictments and decades in prison," Greenwald said. "None of us would be here...without the fact that someone decided to sacrifice [his] life to make this information available," Poitras said. "And so this award is really for Edward Snowden."