>"The Obama administration in my view is conducting a war against whistleblowers and ultimately against independent journalism."
This is spot on. When you use your power to ground another President's flight in the hope of catching a whistleblower from your own country on it, there is something very wrong.
>Yes, it's pretty incredible. And try to imagine if a foreign power forced down air force 1 and boarded the plane. That would be an act of war.
Absolutely. Imagine if Air Force 1 were even prevented from taking off from a foreign country to return to the US or similar, and the host country demanded to search it for X person or object. There would be massive diplomatic implications.
The problem is that American people still don't realize they are living under a regime that, although a lot more sophisticated than most, is really not dissimilar to any other authoritarian regime. We simply use ruse, facade, illusion, etc. to placate and pacify. There is really very little different between our propaganda, a la, "Greatest nation on earth", "rule of law", "one nation", etc. that isn't any less bullshit than all the other bullshit other regimes propagandize their population with.
The very closed in nature of our country is even evidence of that character. We do not want to open our culture and society, because if we realized how other countries lived and how they have solved problems we claim to be working on and how better others have it, we would not be all that pleased. So our regime tries it's darndest to shield the mid to lower classes' eyes with paroles of American exceptionalism.
There is not "a problem." Not even relevant to this issue. Perhaps many Americans don't understand how authoritarian the nation is becoming, but that is a far cry from a defining or singular problem.
Propaganda is propaganda, as you rightly point out, but equating one regime to another based solely on the fact that it uses propaganda is not valid. Degree is important, and there exist now governments both better and worse in more than degree than that of the US. Ignoring that distinction in your rhetoric makes it hard to take you any more seriously than the propagandists you oppose.
You're also a little far off the deep end with your insistence that the US is somehow blinding the middle and lower class to... what, anything outside of the US? They don't have to do that. Americans in those situations don't have the time or resources to spend that much time looking at or caring about those things, nor would it matter to them in any material sense if they could.
So yes, many Americans would be better informed if they better understood the nature of their government. But no, it would not materially matter to them, they would not end up doing anything about it, and your assertions don't actually end up being meaningful in any useful way.
What you may not understand is that because our government and those who control society are significantly more sophisticated than brutish regimes you are most likely thinking of, you don't seem to recognize the ruse and subtle means for propaganda that are used to maintain a certain state, rather than attempt to bruit-force a desirable outcome. We have a long history of brutish and vile actions that led our society to reach the point where a subtle background frequency keeps the system humming. Just because you cannot see something for your inability to step out from the mainstream and get a wider perspective, does not make your attempt at negating valid. It is easy to go with the flow and ride the stream; it is far easier to question yourself and everything you have been taught and think you know. It takes courage and insight not easily gained.
"But the case has also generated concerns among some within the U.S. intelligence community that top Justice Department officials — stung by criticism that they have been overzealous in pursuing leak cases — may now be more reluctant to bring criminal charges involving unauthorized disclosures to the news media, the sources said. One source, who asked not to be identified because of the sensitivity of the matter, said there was concern 'there is no longer an appetite at Justice for these cases.'"
Aren't these comments themselves probably unauthorized disclosures to the news media?
This is probably a trial balloon [1], a tactic of leaking information in order to gauge the reaction.
For a long time in US foreign crime/terrorism policy there has been a sense of "find our enemies, no matter where they are, no matter the cost." Changing that positioning would be a big U-turn in rhetoric.
By floating this change under the guise of "sources close to the matter", they get to gauge the reaction of interested parties while maintaining cover of deniability if it's poorly-received.
is yahoo.com good enough to function as a trial baloon (does this publication have access to effective actors, does it have enough clout), or do you need the New York Times for that?
> Aren't these comments themselves probably unauthorized disclosures to the news media?
Offically, yes. In practice, no. My understanding is that government orgs need some amount of non-official contact with journalists in order to get information out to the public. That is partly so they can make favorable information disclosures without it seeming official.
One could view the comment you quoted as an attempt to slightly improve the image of the Justice Dept and intelligence community without risking those entities appearing to be "soft on crime" (which is what would likely happen if they issued an official statment).
Whoa whoa whoa! Now we're getting deep into what used to be called "Kremlinology". Back in the depths of the Cold War (and even today, from North Korea) the Soviet government would issue "news" that was blatantly untrue manure, and nothing else. So people would try to divine real meaning from arcane aspects of the untrue manure.
If they need to "make favorable information disclosures without it seeming official", and they need to improve their image without appearing to be "soft on crime", they should just say so, rather than making unofficial official statements and jumping through flaming semantics hoops like linguistic circus lions. We know those TLAs are rogue, but if we need to apply Kremlinology to understand them, they've lost their moral and linguistic anchors as well.
2) Not be on the official record of releasing such information.
Maybe Justice Dept. doesn't want to be on the record about not towing the party line or not being "tough" on leakers, but at the same time, it perceives the public is getting a little fed up with these NSA shenanigans. So they don't want to make it official, as it would seem as the executive branch is devided in its public stance.
So they test the waters by releaseing an "anonymous" hint like that and then see what happens.
This also, interestingly, can serve as a hint-hint to the NSA management to tone it down a bit, as Obama is getting some bad rap about this and so on. Sometimes the most direct message is not a direct message but through an anonymous hint like this. (Directed both at media, people but also government agencies as well).
This is nothing new and is tried and true PR technique.
Are there any ongoing efforts to disrupt PR schemes like this? I'd like to see the public less easily manipulated but I'm not sure where to start. (And, technically, not sure that I'm not also being manipulated.)
I don't think this amounts to manipulation of the public, since it's an attempt to get truthful information out into the public. Rather it's politics--like getting your friend to ask someone else's friend if she likes you.
People on HN tend to frown on this sort of politics. I'd posit that such attitudes are counter-productive. If you forced Americans to choose between two black or white options: security or liberty, you might very well not like the outcome. Sympathy towards people who leak national security information is not such a popular position that an agency can shout it from the rooftops. If you make more subtle disclosures untenable, the outcome might not work out in your favor.
There's also a problem with hardline Conservatives who see Snowden as a out-and-out traitor, don't see a major problem with a heavily police-friendly state, and are generally looking for any means to bash the President for not being "tough enough" with "the bad guys".
This can be a good way of saying what lot of people need and want to hear without giving the poo-flinging trolls a clear target for their displeasure.
Except that leaks to the press as a way of trying to control a story (or to simply play bureaucratic knife fights) is a DC art as old as time. Such things happen in other countries including Russia, though the Kremlin promulgating "blatantly untrue" material isn't quite the same as leaking stories to the press...
Except that these unofficial official leaks are now in the Sacred Homeland Security arena! Think of the children! Terrorist must not triumph! If you give them an inch they'll abuse a mile of it right into the ground!
Seriously, off the record stuff about unemployment statistics is one thing. Leaking stuff about drones and TSA and so forth is entirely another, or so we're told. Isn't James Risen in the doghouse over exactly that sort of thing?
I was not justifying their method (or even saying that the unofficial/unauthorized leaks were truthful), merely offering a possible explanation of why they are allowed to happen (or, likely, encouraged).
When I said "favorable information disclosures", I meant favorable to the agency involved, not necessarily to anybody else.
assuming that the comments are those that the directors of the nsa or cia like, then it's an authorized disclosure. Only the delusional would view either org as soft on leakers.
"Unnamed sources" can usually be considered officially floated statements when coming from any major media outlet. If major news organizations printed anonymous sources in the administration saying things both that 1) didn't have any component that can be factually verified and 2) were not something that the administration wanted to release, they'd find themselves in enough trouble enough of the time that it would become difficult to do their jobs or stay profitable.
edit: they're really not anything that actual journalists should be including in their stories. Sadly, these quotes from unnamed sources are often the entire story.
I guess there are different types. Telling journalists water-cooler rumors and generics is one thing, leaking them classified docs is another. The latter probably is pursued much more vigorously than the first, even though technically the first may be policy violation too.
Yes, but the classification laws were always known to apply to pawns. The rules don't matter higher up, they never have. Use of force trickles down, not up.
If you were in power, would you really limit your propaganda to what's publicly known? What could possibly be the repercussion of selectively leaking to your advantage?
After reading enough of these unchallenged self-serving not-responsible-for-deliberate-lies voice-of-pretend-authority that's-not-piss-in-your-ear-it's-rain official-unofficial off-the-record comments, one concludes that they never have an ounce of truth to them, so the parties that theoretically would care about unauthorized disclosures are right to ignore them completely.
[EDIT] Wow, there must be a bunch of "journalists" on HN! Never mind me, just go back to parroting exactly what TPTB tell you, but not for attribution, so that none of the lies you tell on their behalf can be challenged.
Besides the content of your post, you are being downvoted because your comment is nearly impossible to parse and comes off as pretentious. Grammatically standard English would serve better to get your point across.
I'm curious why Greenwald and Schneier seem so keen to publicly conjecture that there are multiple whistleblowers. It seems rather counterproductive to me. Is there a good reason?
After someone published Aug 2013 material, it was clear that Snowden isn't the only one. There's no harm in talking about two whistleblowers at that point.
Emphasizing that there's more than one might encourage even more whistleblowers.
Talking about a certain number might also hide that there are even _more_ out there.
Knowing the exact number of sources might help the agencies assign publications to sources, and thus, support in locating them. If you try to assign material that is actually from five sources to just two, you'll have a hard time seeing a clear picture.
Interesting that you would ask that because as I was reading the article I kept thinking that it's beneficial to the US government to stop prosecuting these things due to two reasons.
1) Maintaining a facade of complete denial. 2) Not giving credence to the idea that there were two people willing to rat out their government due to what they had seen, so as to maintain the possibility that it was just a lone rogue.
But this is just my external perspective, as a european who never set foot on US soil.
This is spot on. When you use your power to ground another President's flight in the hope of catching a whistleblower from your own country on it, there is something very wrong.