http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/feb/12/nsa-direct-threat-journalism-cpj-report
The NSA spying has created a huge threat in the world of journalism. A big red flag that this issue rose is a weakening of reporter to source confidentiality. According The Guardian, the Committee to Protect Journalists is worried that journalists are a major target for the NSA spy program. There is a great threat to sources if they are exposed giving information about controversial issues. This article gives two great examples of the consequences that whistleblowers had to face for releasing controversial information. Both are receiving pretty hefty jail time for blowing the whistle on intelligence gathering.
https://www.cpj.org/2014/02/attacks-on-the-press-surveillance-storage.php
This is a very great article from the Committee to Protect Journalists’ website. This article goes into much more depth about the threats the NSA causes for journalism. It also hits on the topic of how the collection of mass amounts of data can affect the average citizen as well. If you aren’t a citizen of the US though, well, you get “the short end of the stick.”
The NSA is capable of storing any and all communication that it gets its hands on for “up to 10 years” or even longer, seeing as there operations are confidential. For journalists this factor will dictate the way they are able to report on spying and intelligence gathering. In this article they talk about the imminent use of this mass of data to create artificial intelligence machines. Now, this sounds like science fiction, but it’s not. A computer, once programmed to know what is or is not important, could be used to look through this mass of data and adapt to improve what key words to find. Now that scenario is in a closed environment where the program would be retroactively combing through information. But imagine that program running on “real-time” information. This article believes that that new technology could be used to spy on journalists and determine what kind of stories they are working on before they are to be published.
The article goes on to talk about the “ignorant” danger of automated spying. This can be dangerous because a computer will put two and two together and not take in outside factors. If the NSA is only collecting metadata a computer that is programmed to find threats could see that a journalist contacted a suspicious person, and that could red flag the journalist. Therefore any journalist working on a story about national security could wind up being deemed a terrorist.