The NSA can tell who the journalists' sources are

Feb 13, 2014 14:24 GMT  ·  By

The NSA surveillance isn’t just damaging everyone’s privacy, but also poses a direct threat to journalism in the digital age.

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, an organization seeking to promote press freedom everywhere in the world, the mass surveillance conducted by the National Security Agency threatens to destroy the confidence between reporters and sources, something that most investigations depend on.

The first two chapters in the annual report on global threats written by the Committee to Protect Journalists are dedicated to an assessment of the impact of NSA’s effort to know everything, The Guardian reports.

This, of course, has been said several times over – by collecting all information, the NSA could easily find out who’s the source to a particular story, which journalists fight to protect and even go to prison for.

“It could soon be possible to uncover sources with such ease as to render meaningless any promise of confidentiality a journalist may attempt to provide – and if an interaction escapes scrutiny in the first instance, it could be reconstructed later,” reads the report.

The Press Freedom Index has also revealed today that the US has dropped 13 spots in the annual chart.