Read More of the Same Day's Blog

Edward Snowden became the face of the National Security Agency spy story. The 29-year-old publicly confessed, via The Guardian's video, that he was the source of the exposed secrets about the NSA's monitoring of telephone call logs and its PRISM system for keeping tabs on the Internet. For the third straight weekday, NSA was Story of the Day: this time ABC joined in and made it a unanimous decision to make spying its lead (Friday and Monday, ABC chose weather instead). CBS kicked off with Seth Doane in Hong Kong, where Snowden had been hiding in the luxurious Hotel Mira. NBC had Lester Holt substituting in the anchor chair.

All three newscasts used The Guardian's soundbites of Snowden, video that had been made by a filmmaker close to Julian Assange, creator of WikiLeaks.org, according to CBS' Doane. That would be Laura Poitras, who was credited by ABC and NBC. Snowden's biography was recapitulated by ABC's Brian Ross and NBC's Andrea Mitchell, a high-school dropout and onetime Geneva-based CIA spy, turned IT troubleshooter for Booz|Allen|Hamilton, the NSA contractor, working in Hawaii.

CBS' David Martin explained that it was because Snowden worked in the IT department, debugging software, that he had access to the closely-held secrets that he leaked, which were above his level of clearance. CBS' in-house ex-spook John Miller surmised that this is what Snowden meant when he said he was "authorized" to tap into the NSA's database -- not that he had legal authority to do so, but that he had the IT systems access to do so.

Andrea Mitchell took the opportunity to showcase NBC's newsgathering prowess in her update of the Snowden story. She used a soundbite from her own Exclusive sitdown with Director James Clapper, in which he denounced Snowden's leaks as damaging. She quoted from the appearance by The Guardian's scooper Glenn Greenwald on NBC's Today. She folded in a stand-up from Ian Williams, NBC's correspondent in Hong Kong. And she used a couple of soundbites she had gathered herself earlier in the day on her lunchtime program Andrea Mitchell Reports on MSNBC.

The Snowden manhunt presented the perfect opportunity to draw back the curtain on what David Martin, CBS' man at the Pentagon, dubbed the "espionage-industrial complex." Both he and NBC's Lisa Myers detailed the mushrooming of the spy business in the decade since the attacks of September 11th, 2001. They both counted -- and ABC's Brian Ross did too -- the hundreds of thousands of workers (Ross 850K, Myers 1.4m, Martin 791K plus 483K) with a top secret clearance, both working for the government and for corporations that are the business of government contracting. The boss of Booz|Allen|Hamilton, Snowden's employer, is the former Director of National Intelligence, Martin noted, and the current Director of National Intelligence, is the former boss of Booz|Allen|Hamilton.

NBC's Myers offered a plug to author William Arkin's book Top Secret America. Both she and CBS' Martin went down the list of businesses, both household names and inside-the-Beltway shadows, that profit from the espionage-industrial complex. Those you have heard of: Boeing, General Dynamics, Hewlett Packard, IBM, Lockheed Martin, Northrup Grumman, Raytheon; and those whose you have not: Booz|Allen|Hamilton, CACI, CSC, Harris, Intelligent Decisions, L3 Stratis, ManTech, Parsons, Praxis, Proteus, SAIC, Serco, TASC, URS.
Andrew Tyndall 6/12/13 5:32:49 pm

© 2010 Tyndall Report