The Accelerating Assault on Journalism

[G_j]

http://fair.org/take-action/media-advisories/the-accelerating-assault-on-journalism/

The Accelerating Assault on Journalism

Some media figures applaud the criminalization of investigative reporting

August 27, 2013

U.S. soldier Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning's 35-year sentence represents the harshest punishment issued to date for providing media with evidence of government wrongdoing (Forbes, 8/21/13). 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 henceforth be treated as spies.

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

Fox News' James Rosen, for example, was declared a "co-conspirator" 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's 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, 6/20/13).

The Justice Department subpoenaed records for more than 30 phone and fax lines used by scores of Associated Press journalists in an attempt to find the source of a story about a thwarted attack by militants in Yemen (NBCNews.com, 5/20/13). AP president Gary Pruitt (Face the Nation, 5/19/13) said the secret subpoenas were carried out "so sweeping[ly], so secretively, so abusively and harassingly and overbroad, that...it is an unconstitutional act."

Barrett Brown, a freelance journalist who has written for Vanity Fair and the Guardian, is in jail facing charges--stemming from his association with the hacker activist group Anonymous--that 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. But as Peter Ludlow argued in the Nation (6/18/13), what attracted the government's attention to Brown in the first place was his journalism, which used information derived from hacking to expose private intelligence operations--like

a plan to neutralize Glenn Greenwald's defense of WikiLeaks by undermining them both.... The plan called for "disinformation," exploiting strife within the organization and fomenting external rivalries--"creating messages around actions to sabotage or discredit the opposing organization," as well as a plan to submit fake documents and then call out the error.

..more..

[blkmusclmachine]

1. .

[democrank]

2. K & R

[Heidi]

3. Kick!

[struggle4progress]

4. Claiming Barrett Brown as a victim of political persecution tells me the article is bullshizz

The dude seems to have threatened a Federal agent in a long, very public ,and rather disturbingly incoherent youtube post

He is additionally charged with possession of stolen credit card information; and his heroin addiction, that he's bragged about, might provide an entirely plausible motive for the credit card information theft. Beyond merely possessing the credit card info, Brown may have helped distribute it -- and some of the stolen credit card info was used, too, resulting in substantial unauthorized charges

Maybe there are innocent explanations for everything. But the prosecution isn't ridiculous on its face: it makes sense. The shrieking, that Brown is being persecuted for journalistic activities, OTOH, makes very little sense