Government likely to open criminal probe into NSA leaks

I didn't know the WaPo story had been authored by someone working with Assange to make a documentary on WikiLeaks. That would at least explain why "data directly from" was misinterpreted to mean "backdoor direct access" since I doubt she had the training to disambiguate the terms used.

Not that it matters too much anyways, I'm assuming it wasn't an OpEd and therefore she'd still have received the normal editing and source-checking services. But I do wonder if there is any reporting that was done by those who don't hold quite as much of a bias as Poitras and Greenwald, for the same reason I would be suspicious of a history of the Iraq invasion authored by Rumsfeld...

So which is it? Is he "welcoming a debate over spying on Americans" or is he prosecuting the whistleblowers (again) and requesting state privileges to protect themselves against further scrutiny? I don't think the two can really co-exist. And if all of this was "already known" what's there to prosecute then? The amount of double-speak from the Obama administration astonishes me.

What's the point of classified information if you don't punish those that leak it?

Don't get me wrong, the treatment of Bradley Manning is absurd, and there shouldn't be any sort of prosecution of the journalists involved (which has been happening recently), so it's fair to complain that they are coming down too hard on whistle-blowers. However, you have to expect some sort of investigation into who did the original leaks.

We can also have the debate about whether they overly classify things and should be more open in the first place, but that's not the same thing.

Expected, unless the leaked doc said "ignore court order" or "kill the Presi..." leaking is illegal.

The person that leaked this knew that he /she would be prosecuted, if... Let's hope that he took care not to leave any crumbs as he gave the info to the Guardian

The Washington Post story was double-bylined (and also credited several other reporters and researchers), and the lead byline went to Barton Gellman, who used to be full-time at the WP but (AFAIK) is at TIME magazine. Not sure what the publishing process for this story was about (it seems unusual to have a story lead-bylined by only non-staff members), but I imagine it had something to do with the Guardian dropping their bombshells and the WP deciding that it also should publish (perhaps this story had been in the works, but wasn't originally going to be published this week).

disclosure: I know Gellman as an acquaintance through a colleague and consider him to be a great reporter...but I'd probably say that anyway just based on him wining the Pulitzer for his reporting on Dick Cheney (http://www.pulitzer.org/citation/2008-National-Reporting)