Month: June 2013

Suddenly members of the media (thanks to some heroic, anonymous leakers) are doing what we wish they did every day — they’re enthusiastically skewering the state, and reporting in outraged detail all that the government has done to violate the sacred rights of the people. Maybe we should back a federal media shield law, to protect brave journalists like Glenn Greenwald and the folks at The Washington Post, as well as their sources.

But first, check out a few of the supporters of such a bill. President Barack Obama is a fan of the idea. So is Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC). He co-sponsored the return of a dead 2009 law — the so-called Free Flow of Information Act — along with no-intervention-in-your-life-is-too-small Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY).

Earlier this week Graham told a collection of reporters that he supported such a law, because it’s important to suss out who deserves protection from federal prosecution. Said the Senator:

“Is any blogger out there saying anything — do they deserve First Amendment protection? These are the issues of our times.”

Graham suggested that yes, media giants get that. But “So, if classified information is leaked out on a personal website or [by] some blogger, do they have the same First Amendments rights as somebody who gets paid [in] traditional journalism?”

Why wouldn’t they?

If there is any group dragging their foot more than traditional media over just who counts as the press, it’s lawmakers. In a world of Julian Assange, Bradley Manning, and kick-ass, semi-“official” bloggers of all stripes, it would be incredibly convenient (yet would look magnanimous) for government officials to decide that yes, of course The New York Times deserves some protection when they publish leaked documents, but your average scrappy blogger does not. And Julian Assange definitely does not, nor does Bradley Manning.

Atlantic Wire notes that the dead 2009 Federal law that Obama is keen on resurrecting would, by their own interpretation, cover bloggers. But we’re already past the age of the long-form blogger. The next big question is social media — Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr — all the ways millions of people now spread information without even the formality of blogging.

And are those who deserve added protection to be protected because they’re news reporters, or because they work for news organizations? Muses The Atlantic:

Let’s say that a person regularly shares news stories over Twitter. He looks for interesting articles, composes a summary and a link, tweets it out. One day, a friend who works for the government sends him a classified document. The person puts that up on a file sharing site and tweets a link with a description of the file. Does that person deserve protection as a journalist? If he posted it to his blog where he comments on news items, would he then? What if he worked for Fox News, but not as a reporter?

Another example: A woman who doesn’t usually tweet about the news shares a photo of the failure of a top secret weapon, sent to her by a friend in the military. Should she be protected? Is a person who stumbles onto something newsworthy a journalist?

And even within official outlets, there’s going to be a hierarchy. Huffington Post is official enough to warrant an invite to Eric Holder’s off-the-record chats about the press and the Department of Justice. But, what about student media? Or bloggers who have other jobs ? According to a U.S. A. Today, the House version[pdf] of the shield law wouldn’t protect either of those. They highlight the case of student journalist Josh Wolf who was jailed for 226 days when he refused to hand over protest footage he had taken.

Like any other institution, the press too often seems to feel that if everyone is the press, then it somehow diminishes their unique power and responsibility as gatekeepers of information.

Wall-Street Journal columnist James Taranto was a recent exception to this jealous rule, noting his deep discomfort with the prospect of government legally differentiating between “real” reporters or not. Fox News reporter James Rosen, Taranto notes, is currently in trouble because he is being accused of being a “co-conspirator” with his source, not because he was attempting to protect that source.

Reason‘s Jacob Sullum also wrote that Graham — who at least Tweeted a follow-up clarification that yes, bloggers deserve free speech protection —  is still wrong about the First Amendment on a basic level. The press:

refers to a technology, not a profession or an industry. “The press,” like “speech,” is a means of communication that all citizens have an equal right to use, regardless of their occupation. Today the press should be understood to mean any medium of mass communication, including the Internet. Freedom of the press in this sense is not a special privilege that belongs only to officially recognized members of the Fourth Estate.

It’s hard to know what should be done about protecting dispensers of news, besides a futile prayer that the government stop haranguing those folks. But stronger protections for whistleblowers and distributors of information, period, would be a better solution than a limited, potentially dangerous law like this.

At least it pays to approach such feel-good legislation with caution. After all, it’s hawks and big government advocates clammering loudest to “fix”  the awful — but supposedly “limited” — Authorization for Use of Military Force; similarly, it’s power-hungry politicians touting a media shield law as the solution to (sometimes their own) spying on and harassment of the press.

FISA Court Chief Judge Reggie Walton objects to the characterization of his court as a “rubber stamp” that will approve literally anything. Even though they approved an order to spy on every goddamn phone call in the United States.

President Obama objects to the media calling PRISM a “secret” program, even though the Powerpoint presentation that finally revealed it’s existence, some 5 years after it started, is stamped “Top Secret.”

I object to the idea that either of these men was able to rise to a position above crossing guard on a not-too-busy street.

Just because the whole world seems to be talking about closing Guantanamo Bay prison — not to mention the President of the United States — doesn’t mean it’s going to happen any time soon. Not if congressional Republicans have anything to do with it.

Distracted by the flurry of scandals that seem to plague the White House on a daily basis, the media barely covered (beyond a brief Associated Press report) this week’s news that the House Armed Services Committee passed a new National Defense Authorization Act bill (NDAA 2014)  that includes restrictions  initiated by committee Chair Rep. Buck McKeon, R-CA., on transferring any prisoners from Guantanamo Bay to anywhere in the U.S or its territories, and to any foreign country that has a “confirmed case of any individual transferred from U.S. Naval Station, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to the same country or entity who engaged in terrorist activity subsequent to their transfer.” Knowing how the government fiddles with those statistics already, it shouldn’t be hard to find such ‘confirmed cases’ if they wanted to.

The bill also continues the current practice of requiring a waiver or “written certification” from the Department of Defense to congress based on “several requirements” before any prisoner can be considered for transfer to a foreign country, whether or not that prisoner has already been cleared for release. These certifications have been blamed in part for the roadblocks to getting any prisoners transferred in recent years.

The bill, which passed committee on June 5 by a 59 to 2 vote, also includes $248 million in new construction money for the Guantanamo Bay facilities, more signals of permanency for the controversial prison system.

An attempt by Democratic Rep. Adam Smith, D-WA., to strike the language regarding a prohibition on funds to transfer detainees anywhere in the U.S or its territories was thwarted along party lines, 23 to 38.

“While there are many good aspects to this legislation [NDAA], there are also portions and provisions that concern me. Specifically, this bill prevents the Administration from closing the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, by banning the transfer of detainees, and the construction or modification of facilities in the United States to house detainees,” Smith said in a press release before the Wednesday vote. “Republicans in Congress continue to stand in the way. It’s time to remove the restrictions.”

Not if McKeon, the biggest recipient of defense contractor contributions in the congress, has anything to do with it. It isn’t clear what the full House or the Senate will do with the NDAA once they get their hands on it, but if they pass the same restrictions on transfers, you can bet this issue will be put off for yet another year.

Already the press seems to have forgotten the 100-plus men who are hunger-striking at the prison — maybe some of them backed off when the general there assured them it was really a”hunger strike lite.” Canadian reporter Michelle Shephard weighs in:

Ah, Gitmo’s war on words. Over the years this has been an issue raised repeatedly in our reporting on Guantanamo. Do not call it a prison, journalists have been told, because it’s a “detention centre.” Do not write that there are interrogations, because in fact questioning detainees is called “reservations.” (That one was one of my favourites.) Suicides are “asymmetric warfare.”

And keeping Gitmo open is really just a “delay” in closing it, right? Forcing prisoners who have been cleared to leave is really a “protection measure,” too, I am sure. Meanwhile, the force-feeding or “enterally feeding” is taking its toll on the prisoners, some who are saying they expect to die in the island fortress that for many, has been “home” for the last 11 years.

More on the hunger strike, here.

 

 

Last night news broke that a FISA court granted the NSA an insanely broad warrant for literally every single call made by Verizon customers over a several month period.Tens of millions of phone calls.

It gets worse.

Apparently even though FISA judges are essentially just empty robes with a giant rubber-stamp attached, going to see them every time they wanted to spy on somebody was getting inconvenient for the NSA – mostly because that “somebody” was literally everybody, everywhere, for all time.

Enter PRISM, the Orwellian scheme which apparently began in 2007 with an NSA deal with Microsoft. Under the deal Microsoft allowed the NSA to directly access the personal data of Microsoft’s customers. Like, all of them.

And like any really, really bad idea it grew precipitously. Yahoo jumped on board in 2008. Google and Facebook joined in 2009. Skype, Youtube, AOL, and finally Apple this year.

What you search, what you browse, what you download. Every AIM chat, every VOIP phone call, every time you logged into any service with any of these companies, or made any Social Networking connections, the NSA was in the know.

It all sounds like a bad novel or some goofy conspiracy theory, but this is just the plain, undeniable facts, as presented to new NSA employees in a PowerPoint presentation (which has since been leaked). The presentation was apparently meant to get new hires up to speed on what they could expect in the way of cooperation when spying on Americans.

The answer is absolute, unfettered access to virtually everything done within the purview of any of the major US internet companies, with no questions asked.

Congress cheerfully defended the horrific abuse of privacy that was the FISA-Verizon fiasco – presumably we won’t be able to expect any better out of them after this.