The Independent publiceerde voor het eerst een artikel met, naar eigen zeggen, informatie afkomstig van documenten die NSA-klokkenluider Edward Snowden heeft gelekt.

Die claim is vals, zegt Glenn Greenwald, de journalist van The Guardian die als een van de eerste over de NSA-surveillancepraktijken publiceerde. Snowden zegt nooit samengewerkt te hebben met The Independent.

Volgens de klokkenluider lekt de Britse overheid nu informatie om The Guardian en de Washington Post in een kwaad daglicht te stellen.

The Independent this morning published an article - which it repeatedly claims comes from "documents obtained from the NSA by Edward Snowden" - disclosing that "Britain runs a secret internet-monitoring station in the Middle East to intercept and process vast quantities of emails, telephone calls and web traffic on behalf of Western intelligence agencies." ...

...That leads to the obvious question: who is the source for this disclosure? Snowden this morning said he wants it to be clear that he was not the source for the Independent, stating: 'I have never spoken with, worked with, or provided any journalistic materials to the Independent...'

The Independent's Oliver Wright just tweeted the following: "For the record: The Independent was not leaked or 'duped' into publishing today's front page story by the Government."

Leaving aside the fact that the Independent article quotes an anonymous "senior Whitehall source", nobody said they were "duped" into publishing anything. The question is: who provided them this document or the information in it?

Alles bij de bronnen; Vilamedia & TheGuardian