This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, October 9th, 2013.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The role of journalists in the still unfolding NSA scandal cannot be overestimated but they too have been

targets of NSA surveillance.

Spencer Ackerman is national security editor for Guardian U.S.

We spoke at today's Cato Conference on the NSA's Surveillance Overreach.

On the panel that you were on this morning, one of your fellow journalists said, if he had not

assured either Ed Snowden or other sources that he had access to strong

cryptography that his interview simply would not have taken place.

Is that something that reporters now are sort of cluing into

that this is necessary?

Over the last couple years,

as we've seen the Obama administration very aggressively go after whistleblowers and increasingly

go after the journalists who are the conduits for those whistleblowers.

Journalists are starting to wake up to the need to protect their communications in the interests of

protecting their sources. And one of the outcomes of the Edward Snowden

revelations that we and others have published is sort of the seeds of a

sense among journalists that we're not very good as an industry about

educating ourselves about basic data hygiene, about how to obscure

our digital footprints, and about how to make sure that we just even understand the size of the digital footprints that we leave behind.

And without going into too much detail, what are what would you recommend to your fellow reporters?

It would be useful probably for us to create tools that allow potential whistleblowers

...