Can you have a democracy when the government spies on the press?
by digby
Steve Coll of the New Yorker (and dean of the Columbia University Graduate School of journalism) writes about the threat to the freedom of the press posed by government incursion on our privacy through technology. He’s moved to do it by his viewing of Laura Poitras’ “Citizen Four” about the Edward Snowden story, in which it’s revealed just how thoroughly the government has infiltrated all of our communications systems:
In fashioning balanced practices for reporters, it is critical to ask how often and in what ways governments—ours and others—systematically target journalists’ communications in intelligence collection. For all his varied revelations about surveillance, this is an area where Snowden’s files have been less than definitive. It seems safe to assume the worst, but, as for the American government’s practices, there are large gaps in our understanding. White House executive orders, the Patriot Act, and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act might all be grounds for targeting journalists for certain kinds of collection. Yet the government has never disclosed its policies, or the history of its actual practices following the September 11th attacks. (For a chilling sense of how vulnerable a journalist’s data would be if targeted by sophisticated surveillance, read “Dragnet Nation,” by Julia Angwin, an investigative reporter, formerly at the Wall Street Journal and now at ProPublica.)
In September, the Reporters Committee on Freedom of the Press and more than two dozen media organizations asked the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, an independent federal body, to look into these questions and report their findings publicly. “National security surveillance programs must not be used to circumvent important substantive and procedural protections belonging to journalists and their source,” their letter said. “Sufficient details about these programs must be disclosed to the public so that journalists and sources are better informed about the collection and use of their communications.”
From a working journalist’s perspective, the Edward Snowdens of this world come around about as often as Halley’s Comet. It is not possible to report effectively and routinely while operating as though every communication must be segregated in a compartment within a compartment. The question of what constitutes best practices is a work in progress, as is the protection of personal privacy more broadly.
Thank you.
Maybe you don’t think that it’s important that journalists get these stories in which case you probably think it’s just fine that the government is not only spying on them it is intimidating them with threats of legal action. (Indeed, this administration has taken these threats to unprecedented levels — even as the Attorney General continues to say that they are not …) But if you are a journalist and you defend this behavior it’s very hard to see why you chose that career. This really doesn’t strike me as that complicated of a question.
Coll sounds eminently reasonable to me. Why are so many other reporters so complacent about this? Or worse, why are they actively hostile to people who are trying to tell these difficult stories simply because they are offended by their “tone” or their personalities? How can we possibly believe what they tell us?
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