Polk Award for Snowden Coverage Draws 2 to U.S.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/11/business/media/polk-award-winners-to-accept-in-person.html

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Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, two of the journalists who reported on documents about government surveillance leaked by Edward J. Snowden, plan to return to the United States on Friday to accept a Polk journalism award for national security reporting.

Their arrival in New York from Berlin, where Mr. Greenwald gave a speech on Thursday and where Ms. Poitras lives, would be the first time either has been in the United States since Mr. Snowden’s disclosures became public in June.

Mr. Greenwald and Ms. Poitras are returning to the United States to accept the prestigious Polk Award for their reporting in The Guardian newspaper along with The Guardian’s Ewen MacAskill and Barton Gellman of The Washington Post. Reporters from The New York Times won three of the awards, which will be given out at the Roosevelt Hotel in Manhattan on Friday afternoon.

Federal prosecutors have charged Mr. Snowden with violating the Espionage Act for revealing top-secret National Security Agency documents on government surveillance, and legal experts said the case could have legal implications for the journalists who helped him disseminate the N.S.A. material.

Mr. Greenwald, who lives in Rio de Janeiro, said he did not expect trouble when he entered the country, though he said in an interview on Thursday from Berlin that his lawyers would be meeting him at the airport. “The chance of being arrested is pretty low, otherwise I wouldn’t be going,” he said.

Daniel C. Richman, a professor at Columbia Law School, also said he did not expect any action to be taken against Mr. Greenwald and Ms. Poitras by the authorities, not because he couldn’t imagine a situation where prosecutors could compel their testimony in a case against Mr. Snowden but because they would be “very sensitive to the First Amendment values” involved and decide not to.

The four journalists receiving the Polk national security reporting award delivered a series of articles based on the top-secret materials disclosed by Mr. Snowden, a former contractor for the National Security Agency.

The normally staid Polk Awards have been shaken up by the imminent arrival of Mr. Greenwald and Ms. Poitras, which was reported earlier by The Huffington Post. The award for national security reporting has been pushed back in the schedule to allow the two time to arrive from the airport, and a news conference has been added, said Edward Hershey, a spokesman for the awards, which are administered by Long Island University.

The journalists are working on bigger projects related to their reporting. Next month, Metropolitan Books is publishing a book by Mr. Greenwald, “No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State.” Ms. Poitras has said she is making a documentary about the issues that have been highlighted by the Snowden reporting. And Mr. Gellman is at work on a book about the expansion of government surveillance.

The Pulitzer Prizes, the journalism awards administered by Columbia University, will be announced on Monday.