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US Spy Agencies See Bloggers as Journalists
Sniper223 writes with a link to ABC's Blotter blog. That site observes that at least in the realm of US intelligence gathering, the 'are bloggers journalists' question is already decided. "Despite the rap that bloggers simply 'bloviate' and 'don't try to find things out,' as conservative newspaper columnist Robert Novak once sniffed, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Agency (NSA) have altered policies to indicate they're taking blogs seriously, and a growing number of public offices are actively reaching out to the blogosphere. The CIA recently updated its policies on Freedom of Information Act requests to allow bloggers to qualify for special treatment once reserved for old-school reporters. And last August, the NSA issued a directive to its employees to report leaks of classified information to the media — "including blogs," the order said."
Donut shop workers are seen as police officers.
... is that a good thing or a bad thing?
I do know there are few bloggers worse than the vast majority of Croatian journalists; I can't say much about the rest of the world.
Ignore this signature. By order.
The greatest strength of the web is that anyone can publish to a worldwide audience. The greatest weakness of the web is that anyone can publish to a worldwide audience. However, this is only a minor weakness. I'm not forced at gun point to read everybody else's blogs, I get to pick and choose what I read and when I read it.
And this is what the old media don't like about the rise of the blog. They no longer get to control content and the blogs are eating in to what used to be their advertising revenue.
A leak, however it happens, is a leak. I don't think the fact they mentioned blogs means much. If people started leaking by carrier pigeon I'm sure that would get included in such a directive as well.
Simon.
My experience tells me that journalists are seldom better than the newpaper they work for, so I think you will find that it's the management that is lacking. Taking it futher it's probably the public that doesn't care about good news. But this is true all over, the quality of new papers sinks because there are less people that care about reading a couple of thousand words on a subject.
Though the quality of blogs just goes up, with more people there will be more quality stuff.
...by CIA and NSA. I'm just a harmless jackass. No need to pay any attention. Nor to wiretap me.
Novak proves again and again that he has a significant LACK of foresight.
They don't want more "free speech" or more information protection. Quite the opposite.
The reason is simply that they want people to tell when they have inside knowledge. Without protection, people would beat around the bush until someone from law enforcement picks it up and starts looking into it, all without the blogger actually being responsible for it. He just posted hints and allegations.
With protection, he'll simply state the fact that something's going wrong in a company. This allows more efficiency. To prosecure or to cover up, depending on circumstances...
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
... for this is something along the lines of: "Hey, if we recognise them as journalists, and give them equal access, maybe they'll regurgitate the same junk we feed the mass media."
Please excuse my cynicism of an organisation (i.e. the CIA) that relies on disinformation, propaganda, and psychological warfare, and uses the mass media and journalists to spread it.
'If Christ had tweeted the sermon on the mount, it might have lasted until nightfall.' - John Perry Barlow
That this tautology can be considered news is perhaps more interesting.
Waaaah!!! I'm a foreigner and teh big bad NSA is spying on all the phone calls I've been making to the remote tribal regions of Pakistan! Waaaahhh!!! Who will be soft-headed enough to take up my cause? I know - well-to-do liberals who have a nihilist view of the world! Their overblown sense of self-importance and misplaced self-righteous outrage might be able to be used to make them think that someone actually cares enough about them to listen in on them dictating a grocery list to their gay lover over the phone. And maybe those spineless wonders in Congress will jump on the anti-security bandwagon as well - at least until it comes time for a vote on FISA.
Give me a fucking break. You want the government to feed you, pay for your cage, keep you safe, and even pay for all of your meds, and generally keep their good little tax-paying pet fed, dumb, and happy, but God-forbid they listen in on your no-doubt inane and tedious phone conversations.
Given what the "intelligence" services think of real journalists, I wouldn't get too excited about them lumping bloggers in with them if I was a blogger.
"Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
Good because maybe they'll finally get the rights and protections everyone so rightly deserves.
Bad because it only further validates that you can only be a journalist (and thus have those previously mentioned rights and protections) if the federal gov'ment says you are a journalist.
The NSA cares when the information leaks and becomes publicly known. I don't think they really care what credentials the person that published the information has. They don't define bloggers as journalists,but rather define bloggers as another group that might disseminate classified information, and therefore should be watched.
When Geiger counters are outlawed, only mutants will have Geiger counters
Other countries might have similar laws. However, probably only running a 'blog counts (arguably even MySpace) because that's like having a regular newpaper column. You could probably argue successfully that posting to a 'blog is nothing more than a letter-to-the-editor which doesn't make anyone a journalist. But if the posts get too regular and come to be expected (localroger on K5) then you might be considered a journalist.
At first i thought it was a blogging-related buzzword run amok, but apparently it is a real word.
You learn something every day.
What?
... any idiot with a calculator is an engineer and any idiot with a screwdriver is a mechanic.
"Any idiot with a computer" is NOT a journalist.
If a blogger is willing to go to jail to protect his sources, he might be a journalist. If a blogger makes sure he has corroboration of a story from more than one independent source before publishing it, he might be a journalist. If a blogger refuses to publish innuendo ("how do we know he's not a child-molester?"), he might be a journalist.
I piss off bigots.
Grabs a tabloid
JAY: These are the hot sheets?
KAY:Best damn investigative reporting on the planet.
Wow. Opinion being treated as fact. That's a new one for this administration. But there's certainly some opportunities here. How about a blog describing Alberto Gonzales homosexual adventures with a known Al-Queda operative living in his basement, complete with photoshopped pix? How about blogging the truth behind Dick Cheney's rumored drug addiction and child molestation tendencies? And Condoleezza Rice's three abortions and stem-cell derived facial treatments (funded by Ansar al-Islam)? All these accusations can be proven via anonymous sources whispering pseudo-facts. Truth is in the eye of the beholder, or so it seems.
The Russians have won. They have made the world a cesspool of distrust, greed, fear and hate.
Its mostly made up of attorneys. ( at least the parts that have control )
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Everyone knows that U.S. Spy Agencies are evil and hate all things that smack of freedom of the press or privacy. I know because I read it on Slashdot!
When "fake but accurate" is acceptable to the highest, most successful journalists, you better believe that there are some real idiots in the dregs of the profession.
Because your standards for a blogger to be a journalist are higher than Dan Rather could meet, are higher than the the reporters who caved and revealed their sources in the Plame affair, and they're higher than those "journalists" at The New Republic who swallowed Scott Thomas Beauchamp's fantasies hook, line, and sinker, never bothering to corroborate his story and despite the fact they knew that Beauchamp's story was being investigated and that he had signed some sort of statement regarding the veracity of his claims. Yet they ran the story anyway.
So, by your own standards for bloggers, Dan Rather, NY Times writers who've won Pulitzer Prizes, and the biased fools at The New Republic are NOT journalists.
DOD, CIA, NSA ... all should now know (by 2000 a/o now) that there are many kinds of filters on the internet.
... have more reliable (even by guesses) actionable information then others, some users/aliases that prove to be of consistent intelligence analyst value, will be of interest to US, EU, Russia, China, Egypt, Israel, terrorist ... collectors and handlers. Some sources you may want to hire and take dark from the internet, some you may want to turn off permanently, others would be of value for collecting content from many sources, special ones would be superb at disinformation. The DoD Original Software Development/Developers (OSD) for identifying a/o categorizing the sources a/o content, would be under a blanket of secrecy.
/.s and some shadowy paranoid geeks/phreaks/ritzes, because I know you folks have for almost a decade been prescient in predictions, which indicate ...
... EVERYONE HIDE!] !HAVEFUN!.
Keeping track of journalists' content is (I suspect) legal under the USA Constitution, but I wounder if some agencies will try to recruit/track or spy on some individuals under this new "journalists" ploy.
Some blogs, wikis, portals
This is all a bit old for
[QUICK!
Oh, columnist Robert Novak, the Fox gang, and many others in news media are among the most clueless talking heads getting paid to be well dressed fashionable idiots for acceptable public presentation and consumption of bullshit. The Hilton gals and Bush babies are as believable/creditable. All they ever did was puke the marketing script drivel provided them by lobbyist, politicians, and business.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
You hit the bullshiteye of the government side.
To many pet-rock managers ignoring real explicit and implicit knowledge/experience provided, and/or to little core knowledge on topics.
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
You are testing this BS-spin on the wrong crowed they will never buy in on these DoD, CIA ... talking points.
/.s the truth what is the real reason, and why is it so much fun to play "spot the fed" at DEFCON?
Come on tell the
However, I do agree, why/who moded that one up?
Unaccountable leaders are masters, and unrepresented people are slaves. How do US and EU fare?
So does that mean bloggers will have to apply for a "journalist's visa" or face deportation on enterting the US?
(The US being one of a handful of countries requiring it, the others being Iran, North Korea, Zimbabwe, and Cube)
Source: Guardian
Now that the CIA views bloggers as journalists, does this mean they are going to put the same effort into propagandizing blogs as they do newspapers?
We've already seen conservatives pay journalists to print pro-conservative propaganda. So does this mean they will start paying conservative bloggers to keep doing what they are already doing for free? Or will they simply continue poisoning the well, and try to use their money to corrupt the blogs they don't already have control of?
It's long past the time when the evil which conservatives represent should have been buried, but I simply don't see Americans as having the will to live as a free people. Republicans have always embraced corruption as a means of destroying the government and installing the corporatist fascist kleptocracy they have been dreaming since they failed in Germany. And Democrats, while they know what is right and wrong, just don't strike me as having the will to do what needs to be done.
Also, it's kind of silly to blame the institutions since we the people are where these parties derive their power from. The evil of one party and the lack of will of the other are entirely representative of the American people.
If people can't be bothered about their vanishing freedoms, perhaps they don't deserve them.
So what do you suggest. Anarchy? Violent retaliation? Peaceful resistance? Educating the masses through institutionalism? Educating the masses through grassroots? What?
Coming up with a realistic solution without resorting to a nihilistic attitude can at least get us somewhere. The problem has a year left and once they leave office we can finally move on with our lives. It depends on what the current administration will do to prove that they are right. People do crazy things to prove this point and they do it for their own egotistical agenda. They could have their reasons and those reasons could be easily qualified. The fact of the matter is they can make it worse for everyone else because they got a chip on their shoulder. I'm not talking about the administration itself but the reason why we are war in the first place. If the al qaeda terrorists responsible for the attack would have received their justice, we wouldn't be in the fiasco we are in today. Right now the administration is making the problem worst. Figure out a reasonable way to stop that and maybe we can keep our freedoms.
But I'm surprised. All those blogs out there and the only people reading them are the blog's owner. Not even their mom's care enough to look.
Legally, they have no more rights than anyone else.
Sure, there's the constitutional "freedom of the press" thang. But really it's not clear that gives one any rights that Joe Blow with a notebook and camera doesn't already have. There's no legal right to cross police lines, or enter private property; they can ask people questions, but there's absolutely nothing says anyone has to answer them. They get to go to press conferences, because they've been invited - not because they have a "right" to be there.
From the viewpoint of a government agency, the difference is that they'll have a set of policies for dealing with journalists, and another set for dealing with the public. But it's not law, it's just their own handbook, and then can rewrite it any time they like with no oversight and very little repercussion.
My blog was visited by wallwhale-pub.fda.gov earlier this year, shortly after I first started it and began making "dissident" remarks. I learned soon after that I wasn't the only one.
US Spy Agencies See Bloggers as Journalists
I'd say "US Spy Agencies See Bloggers as Occasionally-Useful Sources of Intel(ligence.)"
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
That would be a pretty dumb thing to do for a federal agency. Normally, they'd use IPs mapped to innocuous .com addresses. If they're using their "real" (as in: official) DNS PTRs, it's probably NOT meant as surveillance, but as random noise like we get from everywhere... unlikely something targetted.
If you have detailed logs (not just summaries), you may be able to analyze where this bot came from, and what pages it started crawling.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
That's the problem I'm talking about: fighting Al Qaeda and having our freedom isn't an "either/or" situation. America without constitutionally protected freedom is not America.
The problem is we have conservatives with a dangerous, anti-American ideology running the nation... and nobody is doing anything about it.
Impeachment should have been pursued long ago, but instead we have a weak-willed Speaker of the House who, from her first day in the office, says impeachment is off the table. That's like telling Charles Manson you refuse to bring him in for questioning. It's just as bad as George W Bush telling Al Qaeda that he doesn't really think about capturing Osama Bin Laden anymore: so is it any surprise GWB's buddy OBL has rebuilt AQ bigger and better than it was pre-9/11? But since GWB is the Arabian Candidate, it's hardly any surprise that AQ has blossomed under GWB's watch: it's only because of his good friend OBL that GWB gets to put a sock in his flightsuit and call himself "war preznit".
That's not just crazy conspiracy theories, either. Al Qaeda is an Arab organization, which had been receiving money (along with other terrorist groups) from BCCI... as had the Bush family, as had the Saudis, etc. On 9/11, members of the Bin Laden family were making a half billion dollar investment in The Carlyle Group, a war profiteering conglomerate helmed by none other than George Herbert Walker Bush.
Also... all the 9/11 perpetrators were Arabian, as were all the planners, as were all the financers. Members of the Saudi Royal Family were found, by the FBI, to have personally given money to this cell, as well as having advance knowledge of the attacks.
A group connected to the Bush family also purchased the WTC shortly before it was destroyed... and received two times the value of the WTC despite putting up hardly any money at all for it. Also, nobody connected with the Bush family was anywhere near either the WTC or Washington DC or the Pentagon that day.
The Bush family planned and executed the 9/11 attacks, and diverted attention away from Afghanistan once our military was closing in on Bin Laden. In fact, shortly after the attack on Tora Bora, there were reports of OBL and Mullah Omar being shipped out of there on US transport planes. And it has also been widely reported that the White House personally prevented the CIA, the US Army Rangers, and another Army group from cutting off OBL's avenue of escape. Why? For the same reason Cheney prevented NORAD from shooting down airplanes on 9/11.
Bloggers are not journalists. A journalist is a journalist. Some teen expressing an opinion, no matter how well informed and thought out, is not a journalist. Otherwise, everyone with a net connection is a journalist and the term loses meaning. A journalist is accountable to someone, a boss, an editor. Bloggers can lose their accounts (and then get another), but an unethical journalist can be black balled out of the industry. Journalists are paid. Blogging is a hobby. Some bloggers are really smart and reasonably informed and knowledgeable. But they are not journalists. Blog Entries: - Dude, I totally got the coffee shop girl's phone number! - My parents are fascists! - George W. Bush is a evil meanie! For reasons A, B and C. Journalist: - President Bush signed off on HR XYZ. Pundit/Editorialist: - HR XYZ is the greatest thing since sliced bread. - HR XYZ is the worst thing since hemorrhoids and Howard the Duck. Qualification for Being a Journalist: - A degree in journalism (which includes classes on ethics) - Getting a job after interviewing etc Qualification for Being a Blogger: - Having an email address
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