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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: 3, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Thursday May 29 2014, @03:53PM
Sixty years ago, the government was much less involved in people's lives;
That's not really true. Back in the 1800s, different states actually had state religions, and the Bill of Rights was thought to only apply to the Federal government. 100 years ago, the government worked with business owners and Pinkerton to violently oppress protesters for worker's rights. Many localities had laws requiring people to have someone walking in front of their car waving a flag to avoid scaring horses. Sodomy and homosexuality were illegal until only recently. Lots of places have had laws forbidding oral sex, or even sex with the lights on, until recent years. Drinking (or producing) alcohol was strictly forbidden for about a decade. Producing or consuming various recreational drugs has been illegal for less than a century, and still is for the most part.
What you're seeing is that some freedoms people had decades ago are now gone, while other things which were forbidden are now legal. Marijuana was legal in the 1800s, but was banned in the 1930s or so, and is now being decriminalized or legalized in select jurisdictions. Alcohol was legal in most places until around 1920, then forbidden for about a decade, then legalized again, in most places (but not all; there's some dry counties still).
Don't forget that 160+ years ago, black people had no freedom at all in part of the US, and had less freedom than white people until the 1960s.
In a nutshell, freedoms come and go.