Following Up on the N.S.A. Revelations: Were They Really ‘Confirmations\'?

In my Sunday column, I wrote about the new era for news gathering, in which the number of outlets for a news source has expanded exponentially. In it, I mentioned The Times's Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting by James Risen and Eric Lichtblau in late 2005, the groundbreaking disclosure of extraordinary surveillance of Americans by their government.

Here are a few follow-up items on the same subject that have come my way:

â€" A reader, Stanley Green, wrote to mention an important piece â€" a cover story by James Bamford - in Wired magazine last year which, he believes, laid out much of what was in the recent leaks to The Guardian and The Washington Post, and, he thinks, should have been prominently mentioned in the recent National Security Agency coverage. Mr. Green wrote:

That story, headlined “The NSA is Building the Country's Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say),” contained virtually all the “revelations” supplied by Snowden's “leaks,” including this paragraph:

“… the N.S.A. has turned its surveillance apparatus on the U.S. and its citizens. It has established listening posts throughout the nation to collect and sift through millions of e-mail messages and phone calls, whether they originate within the country or overseas. It has created a supercomputer of almost unimaginable speed to look for patterns and unscramble codes. Finally, the agency has begun building a place to store all the trillions of words and thoughts and whispers captured in its electronic net. And, of course, it's all being done in secret. To those on the inside, the adage that the N.S.A. stands for Never Say Anything applies more than ever.”

It seems to me that Snowden didn't reveal anything of importance that had not alrea dy been reported.

â€" Somewhat along the same lines, Walter Pincus wrote last week in The Washington Post that USA Today, in 2006, published â€" and then, seemed to qualify â€" revelations about the N.S.A.'s surveillance of Americans' phone records.

The Times had a front-page story soon after that with phone company denials. On June 30, 2006, a story and editors note in USA Today reported that the phone companies were now saying that they had had no contact with the N.S.A. Other media outlets, including The Times, interpreted that as USA Today hedging on its original piece.

The article ended up largely forgotten; part of the reason for that was that the documents that Edward J. Snowden has now provided were not released. There's nothing quite like documentation to make the definitive case and to send the naysayers scurrying.

In a Talk of the Town piece in The New Yorker published on Monday, Hendrik Hertzberg mentions the revelations in a “60 Minutes” report in 2000 and a May 2006 article in “a national newspaper” (he somewhat mysteriously does not name USA Today). With these in mind, he calls the recent disclosures “more in the nature of confirmations than revelations.”

I mention these only to further the discussion and give credit where credit is due, not to take anything away fro m the recent stories. Without a doubt, they have been significant â€" or in Mr. Hertzberg's term, “scoops of a high order.”

And, as another reader, Stephen Barrett, has pointed out, one of those I quoted in my column, Ed Marston â€" identifying him only as a Times reader - is a well-known journalist in the Rocky Mountain area. He was the longtime publisher of High Country News, a magazine that focuses on land use and environmental issues in the West.