Decision to Publish Against Government Request Was ‘Not a Particularly Anguished One\'

The New York Times has come under fire in the past for agreeing to government requests to hold back sensitive stories or information, but it bucked such requests in publishing a front-page article in Friday's paper.

The executive editor, Jill Abramson, told me that while she and the managing editor Dean Baquet went to Washington to meet with officials and gave them “a respectful hearing,” the decision to publish was “not a particularly anguished one.”

The article says that the National Security Agency has the ability - and uses it - to break the encryption used in a great deal of Internet communication. It's an important part of a continuing set of stories on the N.S.A.'s surveillance and its implications for privacy, the early ones of which have been published largely in The Guardian and The Washington Post, as a result of a huge leak by Edward J. Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor.

Top editors at The Times listened to government officials' concerns over national security but decided to publish despite their request, because it was in the public interest to do so.

“Our default position is to inform the public,” Ms. Abramson told me. “Publishing information in the public service is our mission in our democracy.” The balance between national security and the public's right to know must be considered, she said. In this case, the latter clearly prevailed.

She said that the conversations - in which Times editors described “in an impassioned way” the importance of the public's right to know and the need for an informed debate - “have been helpful in creating a background of understanding” on the government's part.

The Times has not always made that kind of decision, sometimes agreeing to government requests and coming under fire for doing so. In fact, Mr. Snowden has indicated that he gave his information to The Guardian and The Post, in part because he didn't trust The Times to withstand government pressure.

Ms. Abramson said that the three-way partnership on this story among The Times, The Guardian and ProPublica was one that played to the strengths of each one.

“I have a huge amount of respect for Alan Rusbridger and Janine Gibson, so I went in with a high level of confidence” after being approached by The Guardian, Ms. Abramson said. Mr. Rusbridger is The Guardian's editor, and Ms. Gibson is the editor of The Guardian U.S.

Ms. Abramson is on the advisory board of ProPublica, and knows its editor Stephen Engelberg well, so she said she also had confidence in that relationship.

“The Guardian at the beginning was highly concerned about working in a way that kept the material secure - we went to lengths to safeguard the material,” Ms. Abramson said, adding that The Times strictly limited the number of people, “a very small group of journalists.” The article that was published online Thursday and in Friday's newspaper was written by Scott Shane, Nicole Perlroth and Jeff Larson; John Markoff contributed reporting.

Along with its version of the article, ProPublica ran a lengthy editor's note on the reasons behind publication. The Times handled that aspect - quite adequately, in my opinion - with a paragraph within the story itself.

The Times did agree to withhold some material from the story, Ms. Abramson said, describing it only as “a level of detail that caused concern.”

“The few particulars we did not publish were not essential,” she said.

Ms. Abramson said The Times is continuing to report, based on the material, and indicated there will be more to come.

My take: I've been critical of The Times in the past for agreeing to government requests too readily, including the long delay in publishing what is arguably the most important surveillance story of the past decade - the Pulitzer Prize-winning article by James Risen and Eric Lichtblau about the government's warrantless wiretapping of citizens in 2005.

And I have also written about The Times's efforts to play catch-up on this set of N.S.A. stories that it did not break.

The encryption article - an important story, published courageously - is a very welcome development. The American public has the right to know, and debate, what its government is doing. Times editors and reporters, as well as those at The Guardian and ProPublica, deserve plenty of credit for how they have handled this.

Updated, 12:08 p.m. | Reuters reported Friday morning that intelligence officials objected to the articles, saying that they provide a “road map” for adversaries of the United States.