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from the anyone-who-expects-to-give-up-freedom-for-security-will-get-neither dept.
Glenn Greenwald at The Intercept writes A Response to Michael Kinsley
Kinsley has actually done the book a great favor by providing a vivid example of so many of its central claims. For instance, I describe in the book the process whereby the government and its media defenders reflexively demonize the personality of anyone who brings unwanted disclosure so as to distract from and discredit the substance revelations; Kinsley dutifully tells Times readers that I "come across as so unpleasant" and that I'm a "self-righteous sourpuss" (yes, he actually wrote that). I also describe in the book how jingoistic media courtiers attack anyone who voices any fundamental critiques of American political culture; Kinsley spends much of his review deriding the notion that there could possibly be anything anti-democratic or oppressive about the United States of America.
But by far the most remarkable part of the review is that Kinsley--in the very newspaper that published Daniel Ellsberg's Pentagon Papers and then fought to the Supreme Court for the right to do so (and, though the review doesn't mention it, also published some Snowden documents)--expressly argues that journalists should only publish that which the government permits them to, and that failure to obey these instructions should be a crime.
I can't say I want my government to have its fingers in what is and what is not reported.
See also: Cory Doctorow's review of Greenwald's book at BoingBoing
(Score: 1, Troll) by Grishnakh on Thursday May 29 2014, @03:42PM
Fuck yes.
I don't like it personally, but you might as well get used to it. This country is headed quickly into fascism, and nothing is going to stop it. The government has set up a system where it perpetuates itself, regardless of the wishes of the electorate, by limiting the choices on the voting ballot. Other Amendments to the Constitution are already ignored through a little legal trickery, so it won't be hard to nullify the First Amendment too. We already do this today with "First Amendment zones" or "free speech zones"; they'll just do something similar for journalism: they can argue that since you're allowed to express yourself in a "free speech zone", the 1A still applies, and restrictions on the press aren't abridging the 1A.