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Newspapers Cut Wikileaks Out of Shield Law
An anonymous reader writes "The US press has been pushing for a (much needed) federal shield law, that would allow reporters to protect their sources. It's been something of a political struggle for a few years now, and things were getting close when Wikileaks suddenly got a bunch of attention for leaking all those Afghan war documents. Suddenly, the politicians involved started working on an amendment that would specifically carve out an exception for Wikileaks so that it would not be covered by such a shield law. And, now, The First Amendment Center is condemning the newspaper industry for throwing Wikileaks under the bus, as many in the industry are supporting this new amendment, and saying that Wikileaks doesn't deserve source protection because 'it's not journalism.'"
Wikileaks doesn't deserve source protection because 'it's not journalism.
Did the news industry forget what journalism is?
Anything can be found funny, from a certain point of view.
Wikileaks doesn't deserve source protection because 'it's not journalism.'
Only because they have redefined what journalism is so almost all 'journalists' now work to increase page views/advert sales and so tend to publish whatever gossip their owners tell them.
What does American law have to do with Wikileaks?
No sig today...
If it names someone specifically to be punished, it's clearly unconstitutional.
Journalism used to be about taking risks to bring critical public interest information to everyone, with a strong ethic and moral code. Now it seems that to most of the industry, it's about finding out what trouble Lindsay Lohan will get into next.
...do journalists need special bonus rights over and above the standard package?
What is the problem to which this is the solution?
Wouldn't it be nice if we had politicians who did what's right for once, rather than what's politically expedient?
Yeah, and I want a pet unicorn, too.
Free Martian Whores!
I do believe that this would be unconstitutional since it would be singling out Wikileaks.
If these protections - like being able to film cops at demonstrations - apply only to "accredited journalists" (or whatever you want to call them) then how long will it be before onerous demands are required to gain accreditation?
I understand in some ways why they want to a closed shop and shut out bloggers and other herberts who they perceive as amateurs. But, so the proverb says, be careful what you ask for - you might just get it.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Regardless of whether or not you support wikileaks, the method for taking one's rights is to first make a single exception that has some significant support, then follow it by expanding the law to include more and more exceptions, until finally some politician can say, "Well, how do we nail an *exception* masquerading as part of the general public?" and BAM, you have a new, inclusive restriction on your rights. The stable state of laws is always one of all or nothing. The moment you slip into in between, the law will move towards whichever end the government prefers. I don't get how the journalism doesn't understand that by making one exception, they lay the groundwork for more exceptions to be made, until eventually there is no source protection.
"Going to war without the French is like going deer hunting without your accordion." ~General Norman Schwarzkopf
And what exactly are you doing to make the world a better place? Other than posting anonymous, baseless rants with absolutely nothing to back up your cynical claims, that is.
I don't care why you're posting AC
This is unfuckingbelievable. The so-called journalists offering up Wikileaks as a sacrificial lamb should be ashamed of themselves.
Check out my world simulator thingy.
Which part is news? The fact that people, especially "people of business," tend to act in their self-interest, or that the leadership of gigantic news organizations are amoral "business" men and not idealistic journalists desperately fighting for the love of the first amendment?
The entire professional news industry & every US reporter, investigator & journalist is a gutless fucking coward for supporting this.
I hope they all die in a fire & soon.
There is a war going on for your mind.
to paraphrase, is also known as "reporting", or revealing information to the public that may not have been widely known. So how exactly is Wikileaks (and for that matter, bloggers, which are part of the same maligned group) *not* Journalism? Definitions and semantics seem to be a major part of the legal arguments that seem to be made about this topic. And it sounds awfully familiar to the arguments I hear related to the whole "games/art" debate.
I give up... I'm leaving the country. Europe, here I come. Freedom of speech and the press was really all America had going for it anymore... now we're eroding that as well.
-- Let us endeavor so to live that when we pass even the undertaker shall be sorry. -- M. Twain
Our "friends" at the newspapers like it when they're allowed to keep information from the public and then publish it for the sensationalism. To have someone else horn in on their territory is not to be accepted. In the last 20 years I've seen the "news" business go from fact driven reports to "newstainment". I'd rather read the information that Wikileaks puts on their website and make my own decisions based on the FACTS. Wikileaks is more of a journalist trying to put out the information they get so that we aren't keep in the dark by politicians, TV news monkeys, and the "We'll do whatever our government tells us to do" newspapers.
Apologies for the rant; I just get a little P.O.ed when the big guys are trying to squish the little guys who are willing to show us what's really going on.
If "disco" means "I learn" in Latin, does "discothèque" mean "I learn technology"?
These laws are designed to protect sources, and yet they want to exempt a specific organization? If you allow this, you give the government the ability to do it to anyone at anytime. Your shield law becomes a useless piece of paper. All the government would have to do is claim you are threatening national security and what judge in their right mind would not see this as the reason why Wikileaks was exempted and claim precedence? Our government should not be afraid of Wikileaks. Part of why we have a country is because a single person/organization told us we couldn't print things they didn't like, and we will allow it now?
Cancel your subscription, or stop buying the paper.... All seven of you...
Woodward and Bernstein are declared "not journalists", "Deep Throat" is unmasked and secretly prosecuted, the Watergate Hotel remains just another uninteresting building in the District of Columbia, and Richard M. Nixon, after successfully driving to repeal the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution, goes on to third and fourth presidential terms.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
The whole idea is flawed. There should be no special rights for journalists.
Hmm... So does it mean that a website, hosted in the USA, which is serving as a conduit for the mass dissemination of secret documents, such as secret North Korea documents, would not be protected and so some N.Korean dissident who leaked that information could have their identity revealed by the US Govt at the request of the N.Korean Govt?
Nice.
No sig. Move along - nothing to see here.
I show up as anonymous because of a site error I'm currently experiencing, not out of cowardice as the auto-naming system implies.
If you think that most US newspapers are doing a good job just look at those statistics about people thinking Obama is a Muslim.
I thought Wikileaks was pretty cool until it published names of Afgan informants which is certainly not cool for many reasons. SO...both groups are looking pretty crappy these days and it's hard to take a side.
Go ahead and shoot the messenger.
I don't know how many years on this Earth I got left. I'm going to get real weird with it. - Frank Reynolds
...is a very, very bad idea.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Isn’t the easy (and obvious) way to shield your anonymous sources still to just actually not know who they are?
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
From now on, the Comics Code will apply to all accredited news outlets with the force of law. Everybody else will be ordered to shut up.
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Dear Wikileaks:
The spot's getting hot.
Please move to a syndication model.
This.
Wikileaks is not journalism. It has its value, certainly. In some ways it's complimentary to traditional journalism; in other ways it's essentially supplanted or usurped roles held by traditional journalism. But it's not the same thing.
It has freedoms and advantages journalists don't; conversely, it's in our best interest as a society that journalists have some additional protections that the rest of us that aren't journalists don't need. Hell, dictionary.com publishes a lot of information/documents I find useful, but it's not a journalist and doesn't need this shield law either.
Let's also not forget that the greater freedom Wikileaks enjoys also means less checks on its power. Maybe Julian Assange is the second coming of the religious figure of your choice and he'd never allow anything to be published that isn't true or misleading, but that doesn't mean that (insert name of person associated with political group or religious group that you dislike) won't create WhateverLeaks tomorrow and "leak" a bunch of bogus documents with the same freedoms. Our systems of law need to plan for the worst among us as well as the best.
But this is Slashdot, where anything related to Wikileaks mostly qualifies for knee-jerk support or condemnation, as appropriate, rather than any kind of rational analysis.
I can see it now. Wikileaks is no more, however the founders of wikileaks have opened up a new site names wikileaker.
Good luck playing catch up Fed. govt.
In many jurisdictions you require a permit to own a gun. You require additional tax stamps to purchase certain kinds of guns as well in all jurisdictions. This has been ruled to be ok per the second amendment. Regulating isn't restricting according to the court.
Now perhaps you disagree, but then perhaps you disagree only in the case of speech. However you can see where this stuff starts sneaking in. When you start trying to do end runs around the Constitution in one area, it establishes precedent to do so in other areas.
Sort of funny to see someone write about how the "shield law" is "much needed" and complain that it won't apply to everyone in the same paragraph. The whole point of a "shield law" is to provide special rights for a limited set of people.
For regular folks, if the cops have reason to believe that you know something about a crime, you'll get subpoenaed and required to testify, under penalty of perjury, potentially against your will. Journalists seem to think they ought to be exempt from the regular laws.
You can't give everyone an exemption or they'll claim they were "reporting" when they drunkenly bragged that they knew who killed Mr. Body. That's the problem with the shield law idea.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
Shame on the "journalists" for this. They obviously do not understand the principals they rely on.
because 'it's not yellow journalism.'"
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
People do not study their history well, they learn maybe about major events, not about how people actually lived, and so they repeat bullshit over and over. As such a lot of people tend to be Neverwases. They look back to the good old days, where crime was low, people respected their elders, the press was honest and life was grand. You know, a past that never was.
Yellow journalism has been the norm for a long time. There are publications that are better, and periods where things over all improve because of some inspiring people, but yellow journalism is the norm.
But people don't study their history so things are always "getting worse." The press is "worse" now than ever (even though there is more independent journalism), crime is "worse" (though is has been trending down for like 4 decades), kids are lazy, people are stupid, music is bad, etc, etc, etc. All shit that more or less every generation has said and it has always been bullshit.
The American news outlets are simply afraid that the stories resulting from Wikileaks releases might remind the public what actual news is. They can't allow this to happen, not after they already have so much time invested in which political commentator hates who, which contestant was bumped out of America's Got Talent the night before, and coverage of Tiger Woods's love-life. God forbid they have to take the time to dig up information, rather than only reporting on information that wants to be reported on, that's time that can't be afforded in a 24-hour news cycle.
Your first post made reference to "journalists," which is a pretty broad group that includes a lot more that "US newspapers." I don't read US newspapers, since I don't live there, so I can't speak to whether or not you are correct. I suspect the fact that over 50 million US citizens think Obama is a Muslim (and think that is some how relevant) is not so much an indictment of newspapers, but more of a comment on misplaced priorities, and the dirty campaign tactics being employed by certain groups.
I don't buy your claim that either journalists or members of Wikileaks are "mostly about propping up their egos and bank accounts." You may be able to say that about "most US newspapers;" as I said before, I really don't know.
And I don't think I was "shooting the messenger." I was asking if you are doing anything to be part of the solution, or simply taking pot shots from the sidelines.
I don't care why you're posting AC
Traditional investigative journalism wasn't so much about collecting and dumping corporate, government, or other secrets en masse as it was about exposing patterns of behavior and providing analysis.
Back in the last century, if a newspaper blew the lid on a corrupt official or a company with shoddy products, it wasn't "here's the documents, have fun," it was "we did our research and here's an analysis of what we found along with some of the most damaging evidence."
This was partly a concession to the medium - you simply can't print thousands of pages of documents in a newspaper without going bankrupt. It makes boring reading and advertisers aren't likely to buy ads just so you can turn tomorrow's paper into a book.
If Wikileaks or anyone else wants to have the moral right to journalistic protection, it needs to either provide significant first-party commentary on the leaked documents, or rather than leaking them to the public leak them to a news agency that will provide such commentary.
Notwithstanding the lack of a moral right to journalistic protection, Wikileaks and others who spill the beans on secrets may have the same moral right or even obligation that any citizen, journalist or not, has to expose hypocrisy and illegal activities, as long as it doesn't actively encourage others to break the law to obtain the information in the first place. In other words, if Wikileaks encourages people who, as part of their normal job, find out that some government agency is violating the law, Wikileaks is morally in the clear if they merely sanitize the information to prevent injury or death then re-publish this as a citizen and don't claim journalistic rights. However, if Wikileaks encourages people who do NOT have access to that information to try to access that information illegally, such as by encouraging someone to break into a protected database, then they've lost their moral authority and, depending on the degree of "encouragement," may be considered a co-conspirator and charged with the crime of breaking into a protected computer system.
Of course, this is likely moot since they are out of reach of US law, or at least, that's their hope.
Here's a comparison that uses a crime that is so off-the-charts that no Senator would protect a whitleblower on:
[disclaimer: My hope is this would never happen. Most government security contractors are professional and even the less-than-professional ones would not stoop this low.]
Suppose a government security contractor in the middle east actively encouraged its employees to threaten to rape local citizen's children if they didn't cooperate with the security contractor. Suppose there was an unsubstantiated, low-grade rumor going around that some contractors were forcing locals to do things and using threats like this to get their way. Suppose Wikileaks offered a bounty on information with a "wink wink - we don't care how you obtain the information" quid pro quo. Suppose someone illegally broke into the offices of the security contractor, found damning documents, and uploaded them to Wikileaks. Good news all around and the contractor goes to jail. But Wikileaks is morally in the wrong for encouraging breaking and entering. Suppose it's the same scenario but an employee of the security firm stumbles across the documents as part of his job and takes them to Wikileaks. Good news all around and the contractor goes to jail, but this time Wikileaks is morally in the clear.
Again, let me be very clear - the percentage of people in security firms who would threaten to rape children to get their way is probably much much lower than in the general population. Most if not all of them have served honorably in the armed forces and most or all were able to obtain security clearances. As a group, I have nothing but respect for veterans.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Wikileaks doesn't deserve source protection because 'it's not journalism.'"
Considering what "journalism" has become, this is actually a compliment.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Newspaper - just doing their job. Cant be helped.
Nothing to worry about anyway. Just let the normal process of evolution take place, and he newspaper wil be extinct in a few years anyway and have no real voice.
They're right...Wikileaks isn't journalism. But then neither is what passes for "newspapers" these days. Real journalism died in the 90s. Now its just regurgitated AP releases.
I want a new quote. One that won't spill. One that don't cost too much. Or come in a pill.
Equality before the law is basic to our constitution. Every individual and organization is promised complete legal equality. And then there is that other little problem. WikiLeaks publishes outside the US. Do we now claim power to regulate news in Europe? Frankly somebody is sick in the head trying to write laws that do not apply to one organization. Such is the stuff of huge law suits.
The government has done much, much worse than Wikileaks ever could. Their only interest is money (from corporations, etc) and power. While Wikileaks may not be perfect, at least it isn't the government. Their goals are respected by people who aren't foolish enough to trust the government without question.
Filthy, filthy copyrapists!
You have the right to a free press.
Where did it say you have the right to aid and abet crime to develop your stories?
You didn't. So you can be held in contempt, i.e., jailed while you refuse to reveal your accomplices/sources, for years, if the police think you got the story from a criminal.
In lieu of a shield law we have a mish-mash of case law that may or may not be rational across jurisdictions and may or may not cover a general set of cases that have not yet occurred.
Some people think this is a hole in the right to a free press, and are trying to plug it.
But not too much, because clearly there are criminals, like Assange, who will masquerade as "journalists" to commit their crimes. They should also look at not allowing protection for actual aiding and abetting, so we don't end up with a class of journalists who commit crimes in order to get stories on them (you hear me, Spider-Man!?).
You can't give everyone an exemption
It would be almost like you had to give everyone a set of clearly enumerated rights, and that would take some kind of bill.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
more equal than others
The sources could be considered to be journalist, wikileaks is just another medium
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a wikileaker..
doesn't deserve source protection because 'it IS journalism, with the potential of revealing some very, very dirty laundry and because it interrupts the regular programming that keeps the sheep sleeping"
Here, fixed that for you.
It used to be there were very respectable sources that were clearly identifiable and reported responsibly. These sources did not exist through the entire history of the united states but they did exist (Cronkite is one important example, The Washington post and LA times of the 60s and 70s were others).
Now the mainstream news is consolidated more and more into corporate interests who basically tilt the news ever so slightly and work within a system that is affected more and more by money and less by responsible journalism. Those responsible sources on a mainstream level are going away and being replaced by a sea of bloggers. Some good, many not, but judgement of who is doing journalism and who is whining in their blog and putting a stamp on it is not the domain of you, me, or the government.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
Wikileaks is more about putting the facts out there as it collects them. It is better because it enables people to draw their own conclusions based on the evidence and information presented. It is worse because it will put information out which may be incomplete or lacking proper context.
I am in favor of Wikileaks. Perhaps the U.S. never truly wore a white hat, but for most of my youth, I BELIEVED we did. I am older and wiser now. I see now more than ever before, things are happening for reasons other than those stated or claimed.
We did NOT invade Iraq "for freedom." We did NOT invade Afghanistan to get Osama Bin Laden. And George W. Bush probably couldn't even read a children's book, let alone read books to children on the day of 9-11.
I don't know what the whole truth is. I don't claim to know what it is. But I do know when I am being lied to.
So riddle me this. If what Wikileaks is doing is illegal, and no one should do it, how do we find out about cases where immoral and illegitimate things happen in secret? Trust the government, the same people who are guilty in this scenario? Yeah, right. They might be able to convict Assange based on your approach, but it doesn't change the fact that that makes the government completely unaccountable, save to the rich and powerful.
Is that really how you want things to work? Think carefully.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Journalists seem to think they ought to be exempt from the regular laws.
Duh. Publish a story about some local corruption and the cops can just bring you in and question you about your sources, then go after them, ensuring that there is no next expose. Or you have a shield that precludes that sort of questioning.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
Doesn't anyone learn from history?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
But not too much, because clearly there are criminals, like Assange, who will masquerade as "journalists" to commit their crimes.
Clearly Assange is no criminal, otherwise he would already be in jail or en route to a secret Middle Eastern US torture camp, given all the dogs baying at him. (And riddle me this: What "crime" could you accuse him of??)
And if he is not a criminal, what does that make you, Tony Blair1Q? A libeler? A slanderer? A defiler of the truth? Lower than the scum of the earth?
The real target here is Wikimedia, not Wikileaks. Wikileaks is just a politically correct target. The language being used does _not_ single out Wikileaks, as doing so would be unconstitutional, instead it targets non-profit websites... as far as the industry is concerned thats a big improvement even over the original law.
Chomsky belongs to the same group as Steve Jobs and Rush Limbaugh and RMS. These people are not as common as you make out. Reality distortion fields that work on some (or most) of the people all of the time are a rare achievement.
I was watching Chomsky debates on YouTube the other day. It's hard to figure out what he's actually doing in his debating tactic. He seems to be convinced that human agency is a straight line, and therefore nearly any unknown can be brushed off the table at the first hint of smoking gun.
One tactic he used in the videos I watched boiled down to "some high level government official once wrote in a memo a bald confession of the true motive behind the initiative". He often adds something to the effect that "you can read it yourself". The logical foundation seems to be that high level government officials never colour outside the lines and that a certain type of memo that spills the beans negates 1000 official communications that adhere to the party line. I'm sure there's a grain of truth to that. Chomsky never pauses to assess whether it's a small grain or a large grain. That seems to be the essence of his rhetorical style: all grains of truth contrary to the hegemonic administration are created equal under God.
I've never been much of a Chomsky fan, but he's worth listening to from time to time.
Speaking of Rush, his debating tactics are certainly worse as noted by an irate movie critic. Put up or shut up
Rush has two primary demographics: the stupid, whom he addles, and the smug, who enjoy watching the former. This simple act never seems to grow stale.
with free speech, you can publish what you want, but you may face consequences
But, is this free speech? If so, when would you NOT have free speech? (You have this kind of freedom to say whatever you want when you're tied to a chair, for example, unless I'm missing something.)
It's not as if the people who run Wikileaks could have considered the USA secure before.
At first this seemed ironic to me; wouldn't they want the likes of Wikileaks helping to feed them good stories?
NYT and The Guardian were right behind the Afghanistan leak for instance.
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
What a joke journalism today is control by the powers that be. If there was real journalism people would know that WTC7 fell. We would understand why on September 11th there were know fighter jets dispatched after the first plane hit the WTC. We would know why the metal from the WTC which is evidence was destroyed. We would know more about genitically modified foods and how bad they are for us and our environment. We would understand better why we are allowing certain powers to control food water. We could understand why large jets are spraying some sort of chemical all over the planet. We would get to the bottom of the H1N1 scare that forced people to inject themselves with a toxic vaccine. We could get to the bottom of if Obama is a true citizen of the US. We would see the true extent of what is going on in the Gulf of Mexico from the BP cluster fuck. We would get the big picture on how bad Cortex that is being sprayed to suppress and sink oil is going to kill and make sick tens of thousands of people. We could get to the bottom of how this economic crissses really happened and who caused it.
Only a few questions that I would like answered
Thats what a real journalism should do.
Were do we have to get this info? From alternative news source on the Web.
So fucking sad don't you think?
Wikileaks has no office in the United States. They won't tell who is a member of Wikileaks. And they say, even they can't tell who is a source and who is not. This leads me to the conclusion: Wikileaks can't possibly profit from any law the US might adopt. Or am I missing something?
On the other side: if you grant source protection without any restrictions, you can rephrase the law: "No one has to talk to the police or judges at any circumstances".
It is disappointing and wrong of the industry to take the cowardly path and sacrifice Wikileaks - the guys who both provide them with documents and publish the stuff they're too scared to - to get protection for themselves that is therefore defanged and without meaning.
However, if Wikileaks were dependent on US legislation for their safety, they would be fucked anyway. Thankfully, they are internationally well-founded and able to enjoy the much more beneficial legal environments of several other countries.
Then we can certainly do without whatever *is* called "journalism".
you had me at #!
Many governments control the press and the means of speech to the point where they can actually keep things from being printed or said, yes.
But apart from that, the cases in which consequences result are generally civil suits, which has nothing to do with Congress. The SCOTUS standard for criminal restrictions tend use words like "clear and present danger", but those seem to be rarer.
So yes, free speech is still free even if there are consequences. No one says you can't get fired for calling your boss an asshole, that you can't get sued for saying that Glenn Beck had sex with and then killed a panda, or that you can't be charged for publishing the identities of covert US intelligence assets. The idea that there wouldn't be repercussions seems absurd.
And that's precisely why it's a stupid law, and should be abolished for everyone, not just Wikileaks.
Journalists who want to take a fearless stand and refuse to identify their sources, should be prepared to go to jail. That's why the profession of "journalist" was, once, a respected one - because they were people who were willing, occasionally, to make sacrifices for their principles. By taking away the necessity to make sacrifices, you have attracted an entirely different kind of "journalist" into the profession - docile, biddable journalists, attracted by nothing more than the prospect of a steady indoor job with no heavy lifting.
Rights should be the same for everyone. At least, every civilian. That includes journalists, lawyers, doctors, priests, police officers (yes, they're civilians, much as they might try to confuse you about the fact), judges, the President - everydamnone. Every special case you make is just an invitation to corrupt those who are included and haggle about who should be excluded.
I can only assume that at least one television news network is being excluded as well, since its relationship to journalism is far more tenuous than Wikileaks...
Don't monkey with US laws, go after the source of the problem.
I will willingly cede that my previous post lacked nuance or detail which is antithetical to a proper comment. I had to run to a dentist appointment.
Most US news journalists don't actually figure out who's telling the truth. All they do is "he said she said" stenography that generally leaves you dumber for having read it. There are certainly exceptions (Frank Rich's NYT Column or Harpers for example) but their true reporting is lost on the massive throngs of paid stenographers.
Here's a brief selection of stories that were reported on by our drop of good reporters but then muddied to death by the ocean of crap reporters and their superiors.
2000 Recount, Pre-9/11 Terrorist Threats, NYC Financial District Air Quality, WMDs, Judith Miller, Jeff Gannon (check that one out if nothing else), Abu Ghraib, Does Torture Work?, Death Panels, Sub-Prime Lending, US Attorney Firings, Frank Luntz (the real Luntz method, not puff-pieces about his "wordsmithing"), & Valarie Plame
...and that's just a few.
I don't know how many years on this Earth I got left. I'm going to get real weird with it. - Frank Reynolds
I thought Wikileaks was pretty cool until it published names of Afgan informants which is certainly not cool for many reasons.
Nevermind that he asked the Pentagon to assist in redacting any such information. Nevermind that the Pentagon can't point to a single person being harmed because of the leaked documents.
I used to support it extremely strongly; however, this new "amendment" to the bill, has opened my eyes very widely.
I thought the shield law was a great improvement, until they decided to start making exceptions, such as Wikileaks.
The problem is, that as an ordinary law, instead of being part of the constitution, it can easily be amended with a simple majority, and presidential signature.
It is now clear that, whenever the media does something that popular opinion is against, or that the government is against, they'll just amend the shield law again to carve out a new exception, until nobody is covered.
By having no 'shield law', implicit constitutional protections apply, due to fundamental rights expressed by the constitution and not weakened or regulated down by act of congress.
With explicit laws in place, with carved out exceptions that remove some journalists from protection, the courts may interpret the intent of congress to not protect some freedom of the press.
And somehow find it acceptable under the 1st amendment, even though with no 'shield law', the press would still be protected thanks to the 1st amendment and understood intent of congress stemming from the constitutional protection of the press and free speech.
The courts have long held that congress can carve out certain exceptions to the 1st amendment. It would not be too surprising for them to uphold the exceptions, even against what would be otherwise protected by the constitution. Even where they might have determined they have protection (otherwise), due to the 1st amendment.
There is a huge risk, that having this law in place with exceptions to not protect Wikileaks does sites that would fall into that exception a lot of harm --- more harm than if the law did not exist.
And depending on how they do this: the exception, of course, will not apply just to Wikileaks. But to other bloggers/sites that reveal leaked information as well.
Meanwhile, once passed into law, the govenrment, and the courts, will press judges to interpret those exceptions as broadly as possible, maybe even causing the newspapers themselves to fall into this exception they are trying to carve out to exclude Wikileaks from protection.
I remember when Harry Thornton of WDEF-TV in Chattanooga got in hot water over something like this in the 1970s. Here's some info on it: http://www.wdef.com/video/about_us_2/01/2008_6
Do we really still need the shield law? What would/could happen without it? People would be afraid to be a source for a "journalist" because the journalist might eventually be legally obligated to reveal the source's identity? Okay, I believe that. But a question I have is, today, why would someone with a big secret to share go to a journalist? To get the information revealed to a mass audience via the newspaper, the radio, or TV? Why wouldn't he/she just post it on a website (or numerous websites if they're worried about it being censored)? With the Internet, sources now have a cheap, easy, and relatively anonymous medium for reaching a mass audience. Maybe the shield law made more sense back when reaching a mass audience was only possible via a relatively few entities with the resources necessary to publish and distribute stuff on a mass scale.
They are politicians, so of course they are going to cut out one of the few information sources that shows you how corrupt the system is.
I fully expect Julian Assange to experience "sudden accident" or just disappear.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
Journalism used to be about taking risks to bring critical public interest information to everyone, with a strong ethic and moral code.
Yeah! Remember the Maine!
-- QED
I realize that most of slashdot hates 'journalists' these days, understandable, many of them (journalists) are just paid by various companies to report favorable things or whatever promotes their political agenda. You're right, thats not good journalism.
However, how the fuck you can think Wikileaks can be considered journalism is beyond my imagination. Assange is a worthless attention whore who doesn't give a flying fuck about anything other than how much attention he can get for himself. He uses sensationalism to garner attention from idiots who are too stupid to bother to look at what he's actually done rather than read the headline on some fucking blog. Wikileaks is nothing more than Assange's pulpit for pushing his agenda, and you're too fucking stupid to realize it.
Be pissed off about crappy news outlet quality these days, you're right, it sucks, but if you think Wikileaks is 'journalism' or 'news' or 'reporting' then you have absolutely no fucking clue what journalism and reporting is supposed to be. He is EXACTLY, 100%, like the very people you're bitching about and you're too fucking stupid to realize it because your hormones and angst rule your life.
Wikileaks is not a good thing, the idea is, the implementation and the man behind it are fucking trash. By workshiping Wikileaks and Assange like some super hero, you are infact, just another one of the idiot dulls worshiping mass consumer journalism. You fell for the exact thing you rant about and think Wikileaks is protecting you from.
As I said, if you think Wikileaks is a good thing, you are a fucking idiot. Yes, the word fucking is required to get the point across. You won't get it I'm sure, but thats because you have mental defects. Learn to think for yourself instead of being a tool, your so worried about being a tool for the man, that you just end up being a tool of the other man. Again, LEARN TO THINK FOR YOURSELF, NOT BECAUSE SOMEONE ELSE TELLS YOU TO THINK THAT WAY. Slashdot is supposed to be a place visited by educated people, every time one of these idiotic Assange cock sucking fest posts come I can't help but think ignorant the slashdot crowd really is.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Well, you named a couple of exceptions. I suspect there are probably more.
The "market" I live in is dominated by two dailies, both owned by the same company (which also owns the TV station that has dominated the six o'clock news since the 70s).
I don't read either of them regularly, but find plenty of good journalism in the one remaining independently-owned weekly, various blogs and a half decent national paper. I listen to public radio, as well as another talk station that isn't what it used to be, but is better than nothing.
I financially support a couple of "listener supported" stations - one Internet, the other an FM station in New York you may have heard of. That's money I would have spent on a newspaper subscription ten years ago.
I think there are people out there doing journalism, but you have to seek them out, and you have to vet their stories yourself, since on the Internet nobody knows you're a dog etc ...
I think Wikileaks has a role to play in the "New Journalism." It has problems, and who knows what their motives are, but they are making "the establishment" awfully nervous, and I think that's a good thing. The status quo isn't working any more. Bloggers are eating the dead tree journalist's lunch. And where I live, that's a damn good thing.
I don't care why you're posting AC
While most of these posts have been snide remarks of the state of mainstream journalism, the question of Wikileaks being journalism is an interesting one. After all, does Wikileaks really do much with the information they get other than show it verbatim to people? Journalism seems more about investigating events, or just reporting about events, but it is never just about reprinting the press releases verbatim. I'd put Wikileaks less into the journalism category and more into, for most intents and purposes, a link aggregator for sensitive issues(I realize that actually hosting the information makes the legalities a different ball game)
...and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.
(I guess you know the rest, don't you?)
Captcha was "executor". Creepy.
I mean, Wikileaks shakes up the social order by publishing things the people in power don't want to be known, and offend people by espousing opinions they don't already have. How could that possibly be confused with real journalism?
But not too much, because clearly there are criminals, like Assange, who will masquerade as "journalists" to commit their crimes.
When I read things like this, I have to remind myself that not all Americans are as ignorant.
For the millionth time: Julian Assange has not broken any laws. He is an Australisan citizen, and there is no Australian law that forbids him to expose the military secrets of other nations. What he has done is no more, and no less, than ordinary journalism. A lot of Americans may not like his journalism, but that doesn't change what it is.
You can't give everyone an exemption or they'll claim they were "reporting" when they drunkenly bragged that they knew who killed Mr. Body. That's the problem with the shield law idea.
This may come as a surprise to you, but other civilised nations have had source protection for journalists for decades, and it's worked perfectly well. No drunken braggarts have been able to avoid the law by claiming they were "reporting", since talking to people in private falls outside the definition of "reporting".
In fact, the United States is unusual for not protecting the sources of journalists.
Majority built and maintaned by nonUSA countries. Most of it in toto is corporations with no government affiliation. And HTML was invented in Europe, so if you want to get all pissy about who made what, try without HTML, asshole.
... to the anti-WikiLeaks hysteria : they must be doing something right to get such sustained vitriol. So I must convert from an occasional donor to a steady repeat donor.
What's that thing called? Oh yes, "Law of Unintended Consequences".
Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
right now is that there is no singular definition on a "journalist". The public image is someone with a "press" tag in his hat, and a wiriting or recording implement in hand. And by extension working for a newspaper or tv/radio channel. But with the growth data transfer capacity online, anyone can be such a person, without the need to be backed by a large pocket legal entity. Anyone with a mobile phone can potentially declare himself a journalist and transmit some event to a global audience. Question is, will such a declaration be accepted by the powers that be?
This have really been the big hole in the "freedom of the press" mantra. Just like with copyright, this freedom worked for the government as long as the "press" was hard to acquire and maintain. This means that the people involved would be few, would be easy to track, and, if making to much noise, ultimately have their equipment destroyed covertly. But wikileaks is now demonstrating that this is no longer the case. I suspect that even with certain spokespeople becoming tainted socially, wikileaks can continue to operate.
comment first, facts later. http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm
Blaming Wikileaks for publishing the names of Afghan informants is like blaming the noticeboard when someone pins a compromising picture of you on it. Instead of shooting the messenger, why doesn't the American military look over its grossly inadequate information security protocols and try to reform those so that future disclosures of this sort are prevented? The fact that its easier for the government to sue Wikileaks than it is for them to actually find the person leaking the information speaks ill about our government's ability to secure classified information.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
Wikileaks didn't have to publish their names clear and simple. There were many different ways of exposing that kind information without putting the informants and their families at risk.
A disclosure like this punishes the informants, not the actual people in both the US and Afgan governments who deserve punishment for these ill-managed conflicts.
I hope that Wikileaks goes on publishing documents and embarrassing governments, politicians, and corrupt members of the international media. I also hope they stop screwing with the little guy as they did with those Afgan informants.
I don't know how many years on this Earth I got left. I'm going to get real weird with it. - Frank Reynolds
Doing opinion pieces is orthogonal to journalism; doing more of them does not somehow make your group more jouranlistic.
They're not "just" a repository for leaked documents. Any damn fool can set up a repository for leaked documents. Where WL differs is that they have done it in just the right way so that they get relevant documents that matter, and perform some level of filtering so that abusive stuff isn't posted, nor is the site cluttered with random bitstreams.
Lots of "real" journalists have leaked stuff fall right into their laps -- do we trivialize that the same way? No, we recognize that *being* the one people trust with the leaked documents takes work -- the work of a journalist.
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.
Wikileaks didn't have to publish their names clear and simple.
Y'know, people keep saying wikileaks published names of informants. I'm willing to bet that none of the people who've said that here can point to a particular page on wikileaks that provides sufficient information to identify one.
Maybe there is, maybe there isn't. But do you know for sure? Failing that, can you name someone particular who DOES know for sure? Or are you just taking it as a given, and forming your opinion based on that?
Check your assumptions.
I checked my assumptions and dug deeper. I have to admit that I cannot find a definitive answer on whether or not anyone was actually harmed by the disclosures. I'm not sure what a comment mea culpa is supposed to look like but this is my attempt. I was wrong.
I don't know how many years on this Earth I got left. I'm going to get real weird with it. - Frank Reynolds
As far as Bush's competence goes, was he competent at smearing McCain in South Carolina in 2000, or designing Florida's ballot, or getting Ralph Nader to run, or getting the Swift Boat group to attack Kerry? However competent Bush was at getting elected or having Congress approve his proposals, does that say anything about how competent he was at running the war? Carter was competent enough to get elected in 1976, but his everyone-gets-a-participation-trophy approach to rescuing our diplomatic personnel in Iran was disastrous.
As for NCLB, I'll blame/credit both parties, as it had bipartisan support and the Obama administration isn't trying to repeal it. Do you belive that the Wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Child_Left_Behind_Act is a reasonable treatment of the subject? I would ask if the tests can measure what their proponents claim they can measure to a sufficient degree of accuracy/precision.
As far as President Obama's approach to the Middle East, I don't know if his policy in Afghanistan is any better than Bush's.
If you could have only one news source and that was it, the BBC's news would be the one to have.
BBC Britcoms (Dad's Army, Some Mothers Do Have 'Em, The Goodies, The Young Ones, and so on), crafts shows (Vision On, Why Don't You...?) and intellectual game shows (Mastermind, The Adventure Game, The Great Egg Race, Now Get Out Of That) are/were brilliant. Some of their radio presenters (John Peel, for example) are also legends for good reason.
It is a gestalt, the apparent product of genetic engineers combining the Good Twin with the Evil Twin, or some monstrous Dr Jeckyl and Mr Hyde experiment. How else to explain the impossibly conflicting and self-destructive behaviours?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
As for New Who - where it is good (eg: Blink, Girl in the Fireplace) it has been brilliant. Where it has been bad, it has been worse than Silver Nemesis. There's not been much in the middle.
They also need to sort out if this is a reboot or a continuation. Trying to eliminate continuity except for specials is just confusing.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
*poke*, let me try this again: "Do you like the new seasons of Doctor Who?" xD
People willing to trade their freedom of expression for temporary entertainment deserve neither and will lose both.
There we go. Damned. Slashdot threaded views didn't show this reply when I got the email for the first one.
Bad shows being bad, and continuity issues, I haven't seen a whole lot of Who before the haitus but IIRC what we are seeing is precisely on par for how we started. The whole series has been full of retcon from the start and every other episode has always been made out of spam, but that's the price you pay for the really good ones that stick in your mind.
That's why the nation fears a left turn sign with a plunger stuck in, amirite? :3
People willing to trade their freedom of expression for temporary entertainment deserve neither and will lose both.
A previous generation feared boxes with plungers. (See KLM/The Time Lords spoof video "Doctorin' The TARDIS".)
I'd point to any of the so-called Golden Eras of Doctor Who. What they have in common is a good writing team, a script editor who is more passionate about a job well done than any award, and a producer who believes that a good tale is worth the telling.
The same is true of any series, of course, but it is most visible in a show that has been around long enough that you can make the comparison.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)