A common and shameful tactic by parties whose misconduct is exposed by investigative journalists is to sabotage their reporting by initiating cooperation with other mass media. This happened e g in the spring of 2012 when Swedish Radio unveiled the gov't secret plans to build an arms factory for Saudi Arabia and the Swedish politicians only talked about it with other media. This tactic will undoubtedly lead to easier questions for the responsible and will also steal away some of the valuable publicity from the news organization that invested in costly research.
A more sinister tactic is when the powerful compromised party starts to actually co-opt the reporting by themselves releasing information exclusively to media competitors.
It seems the UK gov't may now be doing just this.
Yesterday morning the Independent exposed a significant top secret matter - surveillance operations in the Middle East. Prominently in the headline and text they write that the information is "...revealed in Edward Snowden leaks" and that "information on [the internet-monitoring station] was contained in the leaked documents obtained from the NSA by Edward Snowden".
How does the Independent know exactly which documents Edward Snowden obtained from the NSA, one wonders. Snowden himself tells his confidante Greg Greenwald that he has "never spoken with, worked with, or provided any journalistic materials to the Independent". This comment was published yesterday in an article by Greenwald headlined "Snowden: UK government now leaking documents about itself".
UK authorities recently confiscated computers and portable media that Guardian freelancers/reporters Greenwald and Poitras have been using. Did the UK authorities find therein this information, and hence decided that they might as well leak chosen parts of it out to a competitor, the Independent, in order to sabotage and co-opt the Guardian revelations?
Worse, such leaks attributed hazily to Snowden but carried out by someone else may also be used to discredit him, since they may contain wrongful or harmful information.
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