When I look back over the sea of boots that have stomped the sea of necks over the past year, I'm not really overwhelmed by all the IP lawyers I see doing the neck stomping.
Maybe in next month's issue of Wired:
2011: The Year a Campus Police Officer's Desire to Pepper Spray a Kid in the Fucking Face Trumped Civil Liberties
2011: Another Year a Federal Government's Tantrum Over Thwarted Desire to Hide Information from Its Citizenry Trumped Bradley Manning's Civil Liberties
2011: The Year Cops Shot Some More Family Dogs in the Process of Systematically Violating Large Swaths of the Population's Civil Liberties
2011: The Year the U.S. Military Finally Sort of Withdrew from Iraq After Losing Hundreds of Thousands of Iraqi Civilians in the Process of Nominally Protecting Their Civil LIberties (and Mine!)
While I appreciate the debate over the article's thesis, as the editor of that piece and of Wired's Threat Level blog, I'm going to quibble with you about Wired's coverage.
Threat Level has been all over Occupy:
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/tag/occupy from Scott Olsen in Oakland, to Boston to D.C., to the NYPD refusing press passes to reporters. Quinn Norton and Sean Captain have done great work.
As for Bradley Manning, Threat Level's Kim Zetter did an outstanding job covering the Manning hearings. It was so good she was accused by a commenter of having insider sources at the open hearing.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/tag/bradley-manning
Cops shooting dogs. Well, we didn't really cover this.
Military leaving Iraq - Well, Threat Level didn't cover this, but our excellent sister blog Danger Room was, when it wasn't documenting the FBI's anti-muslim training program.
And finally, the essay you take issue with was written by David Kravets, whose beats are civil liberties and copyright issues. I think his end of the year piece is really strong, juxtaposing two bills from Sen. Patrick Leahy as a way to talk about a year full of security/privacy/protest/copyright news.
The tone of my comment probably did not deserve such a gentlemanly response, and to the extent that I unfairly dug at Wired's coverage priorities in my effort to be a funny bastard, I apologize.
Nevertheless, the construction "YYYY: The Year That X" is a prelude to almost certain under-delivery, and (worse) sounds like a claim that X is The Thing About YYYY we should care the most about.
Ah, no problem. Plus you gave me the opportunity to give a shout-out to my writers.
And, I'll cop to your criticism. I assigned the story to Kravets, saying I didn't want a typical year end in review story and instead wanted to pick one theme. (That said, the Verge did a very nice year end wrap-up with a cool design).
It's inevitable in the world of journalism and blogging to overpromise in headlines and we'll always get heat for it -- probably rightly so. But I do promise that while I'm running Threat Level, we won't stoop to Business Insider's tactic of turning on the CAPS lock key.
Well, Wired is kind of a technology-related publication so it makes some sense that they would focus on that. But it would be nice to have some kind of comprehensive write-up somewhere that goes something like
2011: Another Year of Civil Liberties Getting Pummeled By The "War" on Drugs, The "War" on Piracy, and The "War" on Terrorism
(Civil liberties are quickly becoming my most important political issue, more than jobs, the economy, the deficit, etc...)
Maybe in next month's issue of Wired:
2011: The Year a Campus Police Officer's Desire to Pepper Spray a Kid in the Fucking Face Trumped Civil Liberties
2011: Another Year a Federal Government's Tantrum Over Thwarted Desire to Hide Information from Its Citizenry Trumped Bradley Manning's Civil Liberties
2011: The Year Cops Shot Some More Family Dogs in the Process of Systematically Violating Large Swaths of the Population's Civil Liberties
2011: The Year the U.S. Military Finally Sort of Withdrew from Iraq After Losing Hundreds of Thousands of Iraqi Civilians in the Process of Nominally Protecting Their Civil LIberties (and Mine!)