

A Response to Michael Kinsley - aburan28
https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/05/23/response-michael-kinsley/

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suprgeek
"The Government gets to decide what Journalists can & cannot publish". Anyone
who publishes against the express wishes of the Govt. is a perpetrator
possibly even a criminal.

This is pretty much the central theme of this mans argument. Shockingly there
is a small thing called the First Amendment (Freedom of press clause) which
would seem to disagree with this opinion strongly.

Why he still continues to be taken seriously - given his very serious
misunderstandings of basic US laws is beyond me.

~~~
harshreality
That clause doesn't say what a "free" press means. No prior restraints,
presumably, but does it mean the media can't be punished for anything and
everything short of outright libel or inciting readers to commit crimes? I'm
starting to dig through the FP (Federalist Papers) and AFP to try to figure
out if the founders had any opinions on the subject of the press publishing
classified information, but the entire idea of classification as it exists
today may have been foreign and unforeseeable to them.

~~~
adinb
Classified or secret information certainly existed in those times—though it
was probably much more limited to direct military concerns.

Examples of classified info: Strategic information would be troop movements
(not into battle), supply build ups, orders for materials. Tactical
information would be 'order of battle' related —troops and arms being brought
directly to conflict, troop movements, etc.

I would be very surprised if free press didn't include the ability to write
things that the government didn't approve, short of actual, no kidding
treason.

~~~
harshreality
But treason is very likely what would be claimed.

Suppose the U.S. army were running a secret, covert war against Native
Americans. Someone gets wind of operational details and publishes them in a
newspaper. What then? Do we side with the government because operational
details are legitimately protected by a doctrine of military secrets or
classified information, or do we side with the newspaper because the war
against Native Americans was a human rights travesty?

Or suppose the colonies had spies or a method of procuring information about
Redcoat army operations, and some redcoat sympathizer published that. In those
times, the publisher might have had his house torched and been driven out of
town.

Of course information about the NSA's surveillance is at least one step
removed from actual operational information that would be classified
historically. You didn't classify knowledge of tradecraft, although such
knowledge always has and will mark one as an unusual sort of person; what was
classified was the information obtained through tradecraft.

The Intelligence Community's argument is that it's so difficult to get the
information we need through actual targeted tradecraft that we have to rely on
mass surveillance, and that works best if the details of how that mass
surveillance works are kept classified. Isolation from public oversight leads
to intelligence capabilities that keep escalating until privacy of the
country's own citizens or allies is in jeopardy. And the rather simplistic
notions from the founding era of secrecy, for military operations or
diplomatic negotiations, pitted against freedom of the press, don't shine a
lot of light on this ideological divide.

------
001sky
Glenn Greenwald's response seems to be focused on the ad-hominem.

 _But here, it wasn’t just Kinsley who mounted an argument for the
criminalization of journalism when done against the government’s wishes.
Almost instantly, other prominent journalists–NBC’s David Gregory, The
Washington Post’s Charles Lane, New York’s Jonathan Chait–publicly touted and
even praised Kinsley’s review._

This is really a question of US law, and of the US constitution. It's not for
greenwald to declare what and what not any legal system may deem illegal. If
he want's to makew a debate as a matter of constitutional law...OK, but its
not a suitable topic for blanket statements. Nor is is appropriate to resort
to ad-hominem against anyone who believes that the law should either be
enforced or legally invalidated.

The biggest argument against journalists is the hypocrisy to wedgeing their
business model into a space as the "fourth branch" of government in the US.

Note that none of this pre-judges the outcome of greenwalds work. The stuff on
the NSA is very damaging and very important to have out in the public for
debate. A nation cannot exist in a system where privacy is fundamentally
undermined and systemically made impossible through pervasive technological
means.

~~~
tmzt
For some reason I'm reading that as "Prominent journalists claim profession
illegal"

~~~
001sky
The reader needs to be careful--"wishes" are at once irrelevant "unkowable"\--
as such they don't make anything "illegal". The language greenwald uses is
intentionally mis-leading and manipulative, in this regards.

