Press freedoms sunk to a decade low across the globe, thanks to major regressions in the Middle East and to the Edward Snowden leaks, according to an annual media watchdog report.
Both Britain and the United States edged lower because of government crackdowns like the one the Guardian reported in the wake of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden's revelations, according to Freedom House's report of 2013 global press trends.
Consider what the report said about the United States, for example, which is among the world's "Free" countries:
The limited willingness of high-level government officials to provide access and information to members of the press, already noted in 2012, remained a concern, and additional methods of restricting the flow of information became apparent during the year. For example, there was an increase in the number of Freedom of Information Act requests that were either denied or censored on national security grounds. Journalists who endeavored to cover national security issues faced continued efforts by the federal judiciary to compel them to testify or to hand over materials that would reveal their sources in a number of cases—the James Risen case being the most prominent ongoing dispute. Finally, the practices disclosed by Edward Snowden, a former NSA contractor, regarding mass surveillance and the storage of metadata and digital content by the NSA, coupled with the targeted surveillance of the phones of dozens of Associated Press journalists, raised questions regarding the ability of journalists to protect their sources and cast a pall over free speech protections in the United States.
The British government threatened legal action against the Guardian since the paper first disclosed some of the Snowden leaks last year. That government's top spy agency sent officials to the Guardian's main newsroom to monitor the destruction of leaked Snowden data.
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