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Nobody got in trouble in the U.S. for reporting on/distributing the Snowden leaks. There weren't any newspaper raids. Nobody was asked to "keep quiet". Anyone w
by ewillbefull 12y ago
Nobody got in trouble in the U.S. for reporting on/distributing the Snowden leaks. There weren't any newspaper raids. Nobody was asked to "keep quiet". Anyone who did censor did so out of mutual interest.
Press freedoms have not been eviscerated here. It's a trendy narrative, but in reality you have enormous freedom to distribute content which was illegally obtained as per the Pentagon Papers cases and others. The worst thing we have here is cozy relationships between the media and the government, but alternative news sources are available everywhere and Americans are relying on them more than ever.
- jacalata 12y agoGreenwald doesn't seem to think so. James Risen probably doesn't agree.
- lisper 12y ago> Nobody was asked to "keep quiet" Given the existence of NSL's (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_security_letter http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_security_letter) there is no way of knowing who has been "asked" to keep quiet. And when Glenn Greenwald visited the U.S. recently it was far from clear that he would not be taken into custody.
- jqm 12y agoRight? If they were asked to "keep quite" maybe we don't know about it huh?
- magicalist 12y agoJust to be clear, NSLs are largely unregulated by the judiciary and are frequently overbroad in the information they demand, but they aren't arbitrary gag orders. They can keep you silent about the fact that you got an NSL (and that therefore there's an investigation going on), but not about the content itself.
- vacri 12y agoPress freedoms and freedom of speech haven't been eviscerated in the US, true, but neither is the US the bastion of freedom of speech or press that it's promoted as. It's reasonably free, and has some weird corner cases like Westboro Baptist Church's activities, but it's not head-and-shoulders above its contemporaries.