CNN is plain vanilla mainstream journalism, as is Breitbart, and government invasion of reporter privacy - expectations of privacy and need to protect sources - is a danger to the public being informed of excesses of government officials. As such, it is an evil.
Link. This linked item is where the headlined text leads to the balance of the author's analysis. Following that early text:
None of us should forget: America's armed forces take a vow to uphold the Constitution, and that includes the First Amendment protections for a free press.
Simply put, America's armed forces are willing to die to protect all of our rights, including freedom of the press. The Justice Department must find a way to absolutely protect a free, functioning press as well.
Covering wars and threats to national security often means uncovering what the government doesn't want us to know to find out essential truth.
[...] I had absolutely no knowledge that there were secret court proceedings against me in 2020 until late May 2021, when CNN's most senior attorney, David Vigilante, was cleared to tell me there was a letter from the Justice Department waiting for me at CNN's Washington bureau.
The letter was just a few lines long, from the now Biden Justice Department, notifying me they had my records but apparently no actual content. I also learned that CNN had successfully narrowed the scope from the original demand for more than 30,000 emails which included a huge amount of emails that clearly were unrelated to their investigation.
All of the material finally given to the Justice Department on a judge's orders involved communications over a two-month period in 2017. But it was not until 2020 that the Justice Department argued they needed to see my 2017 communications as what we believe was part of a national security leak investigation. We do not know why it took years for this to even unfold.
All of this is a sheer abuse of power in my view-- first against CNN and myself, since our work is and should always be protected by the First Amendment. But more importantly and more significantly, it is an abuse against the free press in this country, whether you are a television network correspondent or a reporter at a small town newspaper uncovering wrongdoing. [or a blogger]
I started my career at a small town community newspaper, and looking back, it may well have been the best job I ever had. The desk chief gave me free rein to talk to anyone and everyone, and soon I had people calling me up to offer tips and information. My beat largely focused on the big developers that had come to town.
I wonder now, more than ever, what happens if those with power try to intimidate reporters whose small newsrooms, like mine in those days, can't afford legal teams to fight back. How then will the people in that small town even know about potential wrongdoing?
Even if you don't like the news media, take notice: Secret Justice Department proceedings against the free press affect everyone in this country. That is what I would hope Merrick Garland takes away from this entire sorry affair.
[italics added to headline and quoted text] The FBI can go to your local library, after in a secret court having attained a secret court order, and review your book borrowing history? Why? Because they can. Because Congress wrote that as law.
Raw law: Unless and until the entire secret court system is disbanded - where in secret pliant and/or lazy judges rubber stamp requests, this is NOT a free country. It is a surveillance state, instead. Temporary secret status may in very rare cases be needed until shortly thereafter the surveilled person gets notice, but that is not what we have. We have abusive use of secret proceedings. That is wrong, leads to abuse and evil, and needs to be disappeared by legislation fixing the earlier legislation allowing such pure horseshit to happen in the U.S. of A.
There are no two ways about it. More may be published in succeeding posts, but this is all for now. If CNN, a major mainstreamer, can be subject to such horseshit, what about the rest of us?
That is what the editorial writer asks; and you know the answer. The boot of the State on the throat of the citizenry is not a good way to run a nation. Yet there it is poised over the throat of each of us, particularly so for impecunious web posting individuals who might write something a "sensitive" official might dislike.
So - Joe's AG says, "Not on my watch." What right to a remedy do you have if Joe's AG is lying in public?
Again, you know the answer.
Sue the government? Piss your life savings and much time down that rathole? Get real. It seems "The Patriot Act" needs renaming, "The Screw the Patriot Act," coming to mind as a simple correction giving notice of what too large a part of the purpose of that statute being precisely what the rename suggestion says.
"Silence is golden" is an old saying with too many loose strings attached.
But we all know that. And each of us is doing so much to fix things?
Happy Thanksgiving to all.
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