A couple of things... 1) The first half of the headline reads "An Attack on Press Freedom". How exactly was freedom of the press attacked? Did the US or Germ

A couple of things... 1) The first half of the headline reads "An Attack on Press Freedom". How exactly was freedom of the press attacked? Did the US or German governments stop Der Spiegel from publishing something? Were they blackmailed into suppressing a story (but for some reason not so for this one)? As far as the story indicates, the only action that was taken was to move the person accused of leaking from one department to another. But, hey, "An Attack on Press Freedom" gets more people to view those 9 ad banners scattered throughout the article... 2) I just read this article twice over, and I can't actually see any evidence that US intelligence services were targeting Der Spiegel. Somehow the CIA station chief finds out that someone in the German Department Six is passing information to Der Spiegel, and informs the head of Department Six. They don't actually give any indication as to how the CIA got that information, but just state that it was most likely the NSA spying on Der Spiegel as if it were a foregone conclusion. How do they know this? I can think of a number of other situations where the CIA may have received this information... - The CIA had a source inside Der Spiegel - The CIA was spying on their source (not Der Spiegel) - The NSA was spying on their source - The CIA/NSA was spying on a third party that knew of the leaks - The source was drunk at a bar and bragged about it to or within earshot of a CIA agent - One of the journalists was drunk at a bar and bragged about it. - The CIA/NSA was spying on Russian intelligence (or any other country in the region) and that foreign intelligence service was doing any of the above - etc. ... I accept that they don't want to reveal their source, but there's no mention of an anonymous source, or documents acquired by Der Spiegel, or anything else substantiate the US targeting the news outlet. As far as I can tell, this is the extent of their attribution: Research conducted by SPIEGEL has determined the existence of CIA and NSA files filled with a large number of memos pertaining to the work of the German newsmagazine. Really? That's it? They somehow know that documents exist which somehow make reference to a global news outlet known for breaking headlines concerning the work of these intelligence agencies? What kind of research was conducted, and what do these documents actually say? For god's sake - Der Spiegel is one of the few news agencies that has the whole Snowden trove and regularly releases documents from it, but they can't show anything from there proving their claim? Not too long ago, the Sunday Times in England ran a story claiming that documents stolen by Edward Snowden were in the hands of Chinese and Russian intelligence services, relying solely on anonymous sources in the British government. They were rightly lambasted for it in a number of other media outlets. Der Spiegel is now doing almost the exact same thing.