Daniel Ellsberg: Snowden Leaks Most Significant Disclosure in U.S. History
More important than his Pentagon Papers or the Bradley Manning leaks, he says
Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg calls the revelations by a government contractor on U.S. secret surveillance programs the most "significant disclosure" in the nation's history.
In 1971, Ellsberg passed the secret Defense Department study of U.S. involvement in Vietnam to The New York Times and other newspapers. The 7,000 pages showed that the U.S. government repeatedly misled the public about the war. Their leak set off a clash between the Nixon administration and the press and led to a landmark Supreme Court ruling on the First Amendment.
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