Originally published in Tikkun Daily
Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald have both won the prestigious George Polk Award for their investigative work in revealing the NSA's mass surveillance, both at home and abroad. However, both Poitras and Greenwald, U.S. citizens who respectively live in Germany and Brazil,are afraid to accept their awards in person, fearing prosecution from the U.S. government for exposing documents leaked by whistleblower Edward Snowden.
Let's unpack this for a moment: two prominent American journalists, winners of one of the most prestigious journalism awards in the U.S., are hesitant to set foot upon U.S. soil for fear of being prosecuted. This fear is in line with Reporters Without Borders dropping the U.S. to 46th place in its World Press Freedom Index for 2014, behind Botswana and Romania, for its prosecution of investigative journalists and whistleblowers. This drop in America's press freedom ranking isn't arbitrary, nor an international dig. It's due to the U.S., in 2013, being a prominent example of a country willing to erode its press freedoms for the sake of national security, surveillance and secrecy.
Intercept, the new journalistic outlet where Greenwald and Poitras are now editors, notes that the two American journalists' fears are legitimate:
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