{"id":63423,"date":"2013-08-27T23:50:04","date_gmt":"2013-08-27T22:50:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/the-accelerating-assault-on-journalism\/63423\/"},"modified":"2013-08-28T00:19:25","modified_gmt":"2013-08-27T23:19:25","slug":"the-accelerating-assault-on-journalism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/latest-news\/the-accelerating-assault-on-journalism\/","title":{"rendered":"The Accelerating Assault on Journalism"},"content":{"rendered":"

U.S. soldier Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning\u2019s 35-year sentence represents the harshest punishment issued to date for providing media with evidence of government wrongdoing (Forbes<\/strong>,\u00a08\/21\/13<\/a>). She is the first whistleblower to be convicted under the Espionage Act, ratifying the new reality that those who give the press information that the government wants to keep secret will henceforth be treated as spies.<\/p>\n

Manning\u2019s sentence is only the latest example of the criminalization of investigative journalism that has greatly intensified in the Obama era (Extra!<\/strong>,9\/11<\/a>). While whistleblowers have been the chief targets of the harsh crackdown on media challenges to official secrecy, journalists themselves are increasingly in the government sights.<\/p>\n

Fox News\u2019 James Rosen<\/span><\/p>\n

Fox News<\/strong>\u2018 James Rosen, for example, was declared a \u201cco-conspirator\u201d under the Espionage Act in the case of State Department contractor Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, accused of leaking information about North Korea; this allowed the Justice Department to read Rosen\u2019s emails, an intrusion on freedom of the press that is forbidden under the Privacy Protection Act unless a journalist is considered to have committed a crime (WashingtonPost.com<\/strong>,\u00a06\/20\/13<\/a>).<\/p>\n

The Justice Department subpoenaed records for more than 30 phone and fax lines used by scores of\u00a0Associated Press<\/strong>\u00a0journalists in an attempt to find the source of a story about a thwarted attack by militants in Yemen (NBCNews.com<\/strong>,\u00a05\/20\/13<\/a>).\u00a0AP<\/strong>\u00a0president Gary Pruitt (Face the Nation<\/strong>, 5\/19\/13) said the secret subpoenas were carried out \u201cso sweeping[ly], so secretively, so abusively and harassingly and overbroad, that\u2026it is an unconstitutional act.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Photo (right) Barrett Brown<\/span><\/p>\n

Barrett Brown, a freelance journalist who has written for\u00a0Vanity Fair<\/strong>\u00a0and the\u00a0Guardian<\/strong>, is in jail facing charges\u2014stemming from his association with the hacker activist group Anonymous\u2014that carry a potential sentence of more than a century in jail. The allegations mainly revolve around Brown posting a link to data hacked from private intelligence agencies, some of which turned out to be encrypted credit card information.<\/p>\n

But as Peter Ludlow argued in the\u00a0Nation<\/strong>(6\/18\/13<\/a>), what attracted the government\u2019s attention to Brown in the first place was his journalism, which used information derived from hacking to expose private intelligence operations\u2014like<\/p>\n

a plan to neutralize Glenn Greenwald\u2019s defense of\u00a0WikiLeaks<\/strong>\u00a0by undermining them both\u2026. The plan called for \u201cdisinformation,\u201d exploiting strife within the organization and fomenting external rivalries\u2014\u201dcreating messages around actions to sabotage or discredit the opposing organization,\u201d as well as a plan to submit fake documents and then call out the error.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Journalists who find out too much about U.S. intelligence operations risk becoming targeted by allied security forces\u2014as can their loved ones, as David Miranda, partner of\u00a0Guardian<\/strong>\u00a0columnist Glenn Greenwald, found out on August 18 when he was detained and interrogated at London\u2019s Heathrow Airport for nine hours under Schedule 7 of Britain\u2019s Terrorism Act of 2000. Greenwald (8\/18\/13<\/a>) wrote:<\/p>\n

The stated purpose of this law, as the name suggests, is to question people about terrorism. The detention power, claims the UK government, is used \u201cto determine whether that person is or has been involved in the commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism.\u201d<\/p>\n

But they obviously had zero suspicion that David was associated with a terrorist organization or involved in any terrorist plot. Instead, they spent their time interrogating him about the NSA reporting which Laura Poitras, the\u00a0Guardian<\/strong>and I are doing, as well [as] the content of the electronic products he was carrying. They completely abused their own terrorism law for reasons having nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism: a potent reminder of how often governments lie when they claim that they need powers to stop \u201cthe terrorists,\u201d and how dangerous it is to vest unchecked power with political officials in its name.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Guardian<\/strong>\u00a0editor Alan Rusbridger (8\/19\/13<\/a>) revealed that the GCHQ, the British counterpart of the NSA, destroyed computers at the newspaper\u2019s office in a futile attempt to impede Greenwald\u2019s NSA reporting:<\/p>\n

The mood toughened just over a month ago, when I received a phone call from the center of government telling me: \u201cYou\u2019ve had your fun. Now we want the stuff back.\u201d There followed further meetings with shadowy Whitehall figures. The demand was the same: Hand the Snowden material back or destroy it. I explained that we could not research and report on this subject if we complied with this request. The man from Whitehall looked mystified. \u201cYou\u2019ve had your debate. There\u2019s no need to write any more.\u201d\u2026<\/p>\n

And so one of the more bizarre moments in the\u00a0Guardian<\/strong>\u2018s long history occurred\u2014with two GCHQ security experts overseeing the destruction of hard drives in the\u00a0Guardian<\/strong>\u2018s basement just to make sure there was nothing in the mangled bits of metal which could possibly be of any interest to passing Chinese agents.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

As Rusbridger pointed out, the destruction of the\u00a0Guardian<\/strong>\u2018s property won\u2019t stop the newspaper from reporting on the documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, copies of which are cached all over the world. The vandalism did succeed, however, in\u00a0sending a message<\/a>: If journalists dare to report information that the U.S. government wants to keep secret, they will be treated as criminals, spies and terrorists.<\/p>\n

A troubling number of prominent U.S. journalists seem to have no problem with this.\u00a0Time<\/strong>\u00a0senior national correspondent Michael Grunwald wrote onTwitter<\/strong>\u00a0(8\/17\/13): \u201cI can\u2019t wait to write a defense of the drone strike that takes out Julian Assange,\u201d referring to the\u00a0WikiLeaks<\/strong>\u00a0editor-in-chief. Grunwald later deleted the tweet, citing the argument that \u201cit gives Assange supporters a nice safe persecution complex to hide in\u201d (NewYorker.com<\/strong>,\u00a08\/19\/13<\/a>).<\/p>\n

\"Jeffrey<\/a><\/p>\n

Jeffrey Toobin (cc photo: UMKC)<\/span><\/p>\n

The\u00a0New Yorker<\/strong>\u2018s Jeffrey Toobin (8\/20\/13<\/a>) compared the release of classified information about government spying to the assassination of political leaders like Martin Luther King: Just as it would be \u201clunatic\u201d to be grateful for the deaths of King and Robert Kennedy because they led to gun control legislation, Snowden\u2019s supporters are crazy to argue that he \u201cmay have violated the law, but the outcome has been so worthwhile.\u201d<\/p>\n

Toobin went on to defend Miranda\u2019s detention on\u00a0CNN<\/strong>\u00a0(Anderson Cooper 360<\/strong>,\u00a08\/20\/13<\/a>), saying, \u201cOur prisons are full of drug mules\u201d and \u201cHe wasn\u2019t sent to the gulag.\u201d<\/p>\n

That would be more reassuring if the notion of the U.S. government sending journalists to prison\u2014or even killing them by long-distance\u2014were a preposterous hypothetical that would never happen in real life (FAIR Blog<\/strong>,6\/30\/13<\/a>):<\/p>\n

The U.S. military has repeatedly\u00a0targeted and killed<\/a>\u00a0journalists, claiming that reporters are\u00a0legitimate targets<\/a>. Washington imprisoned\u00a0Al-Jazeera<\/strong>\u00a0camera operator\u00a0Sami al-Hajj<\/a>\u00a0for six years without a trial at Guantanamo; documents released through\u00a0WikiLeaks<\/strong>\u00a0later revealed<\/a>\u00a0that a primary reason for holding al-Hajj was to try to extract information from him about\u00a0Al-Jazeera<\/strong>\u2018s newsgathering operations. When Yemen was about to release Abdulelah Haider Shaye, a journalist who had reported on the U.S.\u2019s secret drone war in that country, Barack Obama\u00a0personally intervened<\/a>\u00a0to make sure Shaye stayed in prison.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Republished from: Global Research<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

U.S. soldier Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning\u2019s 35-year sentence represents the harshest punishment issued to date for providing media with evidence of government wrongdoing (Forbes,\u00a08\/21\/13). She is the first whistleblower to be convicted under the Espionage Act, ratifying the new reality that those who give the press information that the government wants to keep secret will […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":63424,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487,18],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-63423","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-breaking-news","8":"category-latest-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63423","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63423"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63423\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/63424"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63423"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63423"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63423"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}