Jay Rosen on Investigative Journalism: ‘This Battle Is Global’

After former NSA contractor Edward Snowden pulled the curtain on the US government’s extensive surveillance of global communications networks, Guardian columnist Glenn Greenwald broke the story of the leaks.

And now Greenwald, and a far flung network of his colleagues, have become a central part of the story.

Greenwald said today that lawyers acting for his Brazilian partner, David Miranda, have filed a lawsuit in the British courts.

Miranda, you’ll recall, was detained and questioned at London’s Heathrow airport Sunday for nearly nine hours under an anti-terrorism law.

He was carrying materials for Greenwald when authorities took his cell phone, computer and USB drives.

This got us thinking about how reporters around the world work with digital information these days, and to what extent journalism and surveillance have become “stateless.”

Jay Rosen is a professor of journalism at New York University and the author of the blog PressThink.

He says investigative reporting worldwide is at a crossroads.