Snowden: Journalists Are a Threatened Class in Era of Mass SurveillanceBy Nika Knight In a live-streamed discussion on investigative journalism hosted by Germanys Sddeutsche Zeitung, Snowden explored the threats to journalists posed by hostile governmental forces and a vast global surveillance network. Journalists are increasingly a threatened class when we think about the right to privacy, Snowden said. Yes, I can give you tips on how to protect your communications, but you are going to be engaging in an arms race that you simply cannot win. You must fight this on the front pages and you must win, if you want to be able to report in the same way that youve been able to do in the previous centuries. Snowden went on to highlight the critical role journalists play in provoking crucial public debate about government policy, such as the United States spying activities: We have technologies that can protect communications in an unbreakable format when theyre in transit. Governments have reacted to this as if weve thrown them in a pool of acid, saying you know, youre shutting us out, youre going dark. This is false. Any government official who claims were going dark is lying. We know this because we have classified documents from inside governments and we have reportage from journalists who have been in private sessions with these officials. Things are pretty bad for our side. For the governments side, its never been easier. How do we reconcile this with this idea that these are theoretically, as far as our understanding of mathematics goes, unbreakable communications? Its because what were doing is were thwarting mass surveillance when we use encryption. Were not stopping targeted surveillance. Because even, again, if you have the most well-encrypted device in the world, if the government spends a million dollars to pay a hacker to exploit your phone personally, they will very likely succeed. But unfortunately we dont have this pressurethat should be simply blisteringcoming from newspapers, going, We are the most advanced societies in the world, we are the most connected societies in the world, and in some sort of computer-based conflict[] we have more to lose. We can hack Russia ten times; it will cause less damage to them than one hack to us will cause. We can hack North Korea 1,000 times, and they will suffer less damage than if they hacked us a single time. This is not a game that we want to get into, so why are we doing so? Its because policy is short-sighted. And policy is only short-sighted here because it is not being publicly debated, Snowden added. It is not being openly scrutinized outside of this audience of a few special interests. Watch the whole hour-long talk here: This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. Nika Knight is a staff writer for CommonDreams.org, where this article first appeared. Image Credit: Anthony Freda Art There are no journalists left in the mainstream media. ZERO. Reading or publishing a report written by the CIA is not journalism. In fact, its about as opposite from journalism as it can be. .. the MSM neozioncon Wall St/ N.W.O. techno/fascist oligarch 0.01% have fired replaced all the good journalists with natural innate abilities for independent critical thought instead have cherry-picked their most obsequious sycophantic no-minds to replace the honest journalists with genuflecting Talking Head presstitute parrots with I.Q.s of a line of fence posts(imo) 