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[olemars]

In other other news, boffins are calculating what the cost will be for big IT.

[SalmonGod]

I generally tend to agree with high rating user comments on slashdot.org site and this one I think is worth quoting entirely:

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

So far, Poitras and Greenwald have done an incredibly good job of handling the Snowden material. They have been implementing a long term, strategic, plan that seems to have 2 goals:

    * Restore the US Constitutional limits on the Executive branch.
    * Make the Executive branch accountable to the Legislative and Judicial branches.

As ambitious as it seems, this level of correction has happened several times in US history. I believe that these goals can be achieved if 3 conditions are met:

    1) Poitras and Greenwald must succeed in maintaining public awareness of the problem.
    2) Poitras and Greenwald must continue to be regarded as responsible journalists.
    3) The Public must agree that the threat of an unbridled Executive is greater than the external threat.

So far, Poitras and Greenwald have played Obama and the US Intelligence like a hooked trout. They have skillfully countered every attempt to divert or end the discussion. It looks like they have a chance of advancing reform of the US Executive branch. They may also help bring reform to England.

But now, I think we are seeing the beginning of more strategic responses from the US Intelligence community. I suspect that they are now trying to end the discussion by re branding Poitras and Greenwald as traitorous threats. This approach worked so well with Manning and Assange. Not only did they succeed in discrediting the messenger, they also turned the messenger into an external threat. Now, they can use 'Traitors' to justify Executive excess.

I suspect that the goals of US Intelligence are now:

    * Get Poitras and Greenwald to do an irresponsible disclosure. From the Intelligence communities viewpoint, even an immediate, complete disclosure of the Snowden material is a small price to pay in return for swift end to the discussion and discrediting the whistle-blowers.
    * Or create an irresponsible disclosure of the Snowden material. Remember, neither Manning nor Assange/WikiLeaks did the big, irresponsible disclosure. But, they were blamed when it happened. On considering this objective, it seems to me that the primary objective of the Miranda incident may have been to acquire the secret key of the distributed file, so they could create an irresponsible disclosure.

If they can't shutdown or re-brand Poitras and Greenwald, then I expect the next step will be to create an immediate, external threat that requires an unbridled Executive.

I am praying for Poitras and Greenwald. We need their help. And their enemies are capable of doing terrible things.

In short: that last attacks on Miranda and the Guardian headquarters may seem pointless intimidation of journalists at first but may actually have been attempts to get material that will be anonymously disclosed in a way to show the Guardian in bad light and minimise the "damage" to US spy agencies in the long term.

That is a testable theory - time will tell. Or maybe one day a new leaker will provide information about whether what happened in this case was really gross incompetence (physical destruction of a local copy of the data, really?) or malice (can detaining a public person for the maximum possible under law 9 hours without charges even be explained away under incompetence?).

What's most disturbing to me about this is how much control they seem to have over hindsight of these events -- how they've spun the story that Manning/Wikileaks irresponsibly performed a "mass dump" of information and that seems to be how everyone remembers those events at this point, even though I thought it was widely reported when it happened that they were not responsible for the mass dump of information.  Everyone seems so susceptible to just forgetting facts they once knew and replacing them with whatever story is reinforced more repeatedly from mainstream discussion over the long term.  If that continues to happen, the battle for public awareness/opinion will be an impossible one for the dissenting side.

[Scoops Novel]

I agree with the thrust, if not the reasoning, of ringmasters point. The Guardian seems to be presenting a slippery slope idea, but why should there be? If you're already prepared to shut down protests, why wouldn't you keep a tight grip on the press? It's not as if PRISM is a new idea or freshly rolled out, and they have failed to say why their leak couldn't have been shut down.

[GlyphGryph]

As often, Novel Scoops, I have no idea what you are actually trying to say or what your point is. Or really what you are talking about.

[freeformschooler]

As often, Novel Scoops, I have no idea what you are actually trying to say or what your point is. Or really what you are talking about.

I, too, have been trying and failing.

[Scoops Novel]

Why should there be freedom of the press when you have governments with a less then credible history and the capability to minimize it? Jesus, glyphgryph, the second line at least seems easy enough to understand. It was: "If you're already prepared to shut down protests, why wouldn't you keep a tight grip on the press?".

Why should freedom of the press be something we're losing rather then something we've already lost?

[GlyphGryph]

I don't understand what you are asking or why. I really, really don't. I'm sorry, I want to, I just can't, and it's terribly frustrating because it's the case for almost everything you've written in this thread.

I don't know what you are trying to communicate to me, and I don't know what you want in return. T_T It just leaves me so confused. It's, like, the words are grammatically correct, and take individually they seem at least tangentially relevant, but taken altogether, it just doesn't mean anything.

Is it a real question? Is it rhetorical? Why are you asking it? Are you trying to make a point or actually requesting information? These are all things that are abundantly clear when most people post, but when you say things it's just confusing as hell.

[Sheb]

I think it's not a black and white situation, of either full press liberty or total control of the media. States are stretched on a continuum that goes from North Korea to Finland. What we're seeing here is a tightening of the screw, as slow fall toward the Korean end of the spectrum.

The fall is further slowed by the fact that the West is committed to freedom of the press on paper, so governments have to be extra cautious in their tightening of the screw. Just like they're committed to freedom of assembly on paper but create "free speech zone" that rob protests of all their meaning and then establish differences between "good" (those that follows the rules making them ineffective) and "bad" protestors (that can be jailed/pepper-sprayed etc etc).

A similar dynamic can be seen in much of the commentary about Snowden: the US protect "good whistleblowers" but not "bad" ones like Snowden. I've seen some article claiming Snowden is a "bad whistleblower" because he contacted the media rather than complain along official channels aka, actually blew a whistle.

Likewise, in Europe a lot of government have been trying to pass "minimum service" laws on strikes, mostly in public transportation, with again a distinction between "good" and "bad" strikes, with the "good" ones being totally useless.

So all of this to say that while we still have some measure of freedom of the press (The Guardian did publish his stories after all), I'm not optimist about the future, and I'm awaiting for governments to start talking about "good" and "bad" press anytime soon.

[SalmonGod]

He's saying that he doesn't understand why we're making all this fuss over threats to journalism, as if we're actively fighting to retain a free press, when there's no reason to believe that governments in the US/UK/similar wouldn't have already destroyed free press a long time ago, considering all the other things they've already done/do.

My response:  I think the mainstream media is controlled sporadically.  I think it's forcefed propaganda from official sources at times.  When it's not, it shoots for whatever story/spin is most sensational to get ratings and profit.  Either way is not honest or informative content, or healthy for the public. 

On the other hand, I think there is a lot of independent media that does its own thing.  Sometimes that means horrible biases, and sometimes that means real attempts at honest, factual reporting.  Either way, independent media gets harassed, intimidated, and outright attacked by corporate/government powers whenever their content opposes their interests.  They're not shut down, but it's a constant threat they have to deal with. 

With it being easier than ever for anybody to publish information independently, that form of media isn't ever going to be shut down with finality at this point... not without exerting direct, complete control over everyone's access and use of electronic communications, which would be a whole order of magnitude beyond monitoring.  Still, intimidation will prevent a lot of people from getting involved in spreading ugly truths.

Edit:  Sheb also covers another angle that I completely agree with.

[XXSockXX]

If you do not think we have a free press, why would we even have this debate? You can accuse the press of many things, various biases, bad journalism, not always doing the research and there is the occasional government interference. But if you think we don't have freedom of the press anymore, we would not only not know about PRISM, we wouldn't have a democracy. If you believe that, then the outrage against surveillance would be rather pointless. Sure, neither press nor politics do always work how they ideally should, but you can't make a case that everything is lost already and we live in a totalitarian state without realizing it. Democracy is a constant negotiation process, and we are just in the middle of such a negotiation.

[Scoops Novel]

It was generally presumed that PRISM existed for at least a decade though, wasn't it? This leak gave us a few unreliable details, and if it truly broke as much ground as the guardian claims it could have been muffled long before it hit the papers. The question rolling on from there is why you would create this leak. It's laughable that i could know why, but the idea that reasons exist is much more credible.

[Sheb]

Please tell me how exactly it could have been muffled?

[Scoops Novel]

Please tell me how exactly it could have been muffled?

Pretty much through all the ways that the guardian is claiming are now being used upon it. Intimidation, destruction of records, if nothing else stopping the presses and then cleaning up the mess.  It's not something that hasn't been achieved before.

I'd like to add that i don't think you can control every single news outlet on the internet and beyond. The Guardian however, as one of the UK's most popular newspapers with a significant presence beyond, certainly could be.

[GlyphGryph]

Except it's not actually working at muffling anything, and it's making the governments involved look even worse. And there's plenty of push back in certain parts of the government, at least in the US, against engaging in that sort of behaviour. The government is not a homogenous mass, and engaging in that sort of clampdown involves spending loads and loads of political will unless you can make sure the situation is happening just right that people can ignore it.

[Scoops Novel]

Except it's not actually working at muffling anything, and it's making the governments involved look even worse. And there's plenty of push back in certain parts of the government, at least in the US, against engaging in that sort of behaviour. The government is not a homogenous mass, and engaging in that sort of clampdown involves spending loads and loads of political will unless you can make sure the situation is happening just right that people can ignore it.

Such as? We've already noted lying to congress.