"Palpatine is the Sith Lord we've been looking for."
Near the end of the third installment of the Star Wars trilogy, Master Windu comes to the realization that emperor Palpatine was in fact the Dark Lord they had been seeking. That he was sitting under their noses the entire time while they could sense all kinds of "suffering" millions of miles away is a question for another time. The Jedi council was so invested in the idea of the senate being so incorruptible that they couldn't conceive that it was being undermined and that the "defenders of freedom" were being betrayed.
So it is with the reactions of those in power today in the US. WikiLeaks has exposed the dark lord for what it is and the organization, like the Jedi who posed an "existential" risk to the new Galactic Empire, must be wiped out. An "order 66" if you may.
It was reported that the justice [sic] department was looking to impanel a grand jury to see if they could charge Assange with espionage. You would think that such "defenders of the constitution" which specifically protects the "press", wouldn't do such a thing.
Forget for a minute that Assange didn't spy on anyone. Forget for a minute that as an Australian citizen cries of treason make no sense. Unless of course you believe in American empire in which case everyone owes the US some sort of allegiance. No the biggest issue here is the blatant assault on the First Amendment to the US Constitution.
The First Amendment states that congress shall make no law "abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press...and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
Let me touch on thee items separately:
It is pretty important to see that speech and press are specifically noted in different clauses. This is important. The founders could have easily said that you, the individual have the right to free speech, but that the press could be restricted. If you think about it, individual speech is amplified and made stronger by the press. The press is a mechanism whereby speech is duplicated and therefore disseminable in it's true form (as opposed to paraphrased) to any number of people.
Recall that in Europe it was the printing press that allowed the Bible to be had in any home where it could be read and interpreted by persons other than the established church leadership. This eroded the power of the clergy and lead to the rise of Protestantism. To this day, modern Christianity has arguments about who has interpreted the Bible correctly all thanks to the fact that every and anyone could read it for themselves and make up their own minds as to what it says and means.The US founders were well aware of the power of the ability to disseminate speech, which is why I believe they made sure to specify it in the amendment.
The internet is beyond a doubt the modern printing press. The usual prohibitive costs of physically printing a book, pamphlet or flyer, do not exist. Therefore the ability to disseminate "speech" is easier than ever before. That increased ability does not imply somehow it is less "press".
The First Amendment also specifically states that the citizen is protected from any law that would abridge their ability to petition the government.
That should also mean that laws created to deal with one set of crimes ( such as espionage) ought not be used to abridge the freedom of press which is exactly what the current proposed federal espionage charges are for. As is being discovered, the still not filed rape charges are but a pretense to hold Assange for a show trial. In which the government will attempt to say that Assange had essentially directed Pvt. manning to get and transmit the information, rather than Pvt. manning seeking a " press" to use to expose the information that he believed represented illegal behavior by the government.
Whether Joe Lieberman and others like it or not, WikiLeaks is a "press" just like this blog you're reading. The "press" mentioned in the First Amendment does not just cover "big" and so called "credentialed" organizations such as the NY Times and Washington Post. These outfits did not exist at the time of the founding. No, the freedom of press applied not only to "newspapers" but also to pamphlets, leaflets and books written with pseudonyms. In other words WikiLeaks is just as much "press" as anyone else and to treat it any differently because it is not a paper press or deemed "credible" by those in the halls of power is a bare faced violation of the First Amendment. That also means that the publishers are also afforded those protections.
At the worst, Pvt. Manning who actually contracted with the military, who forwarded the material to WikiLeaks is the one who ought to face any kind of disciplinary action. This assumes that he is not covered under whistleblower laws which this author believes he is.
What is also laid bare here is the extent to which corporations are quite willing to be agents of the state. We saw this under the Bush regime where they "requested" and were granted access to telco data and hardware despite not having the legal authority to do so. I wrote about this in my American Big Man seriesThere I warned that the blatant violation of the 4th amendment by the Bush regime would pose a clear danger to the rest of the constitutional guarantees [sic]. Furthermore; that private corporations "trusted" by the public to safeguard the privacy of their varied private data from the government has been shown that such a trust is misplaced. There is a clearly a need for the courts and the congress to codify the owner-steward relationship between the public and organizations such as Google and Amazon.
It should be quite disturbing that MasterCard, Visa and Paypal decided to disregard their customer's right to give funds to a legal entity that does not appear on any state terror list and deny WikiLeaks access to fund the public freely gave. These organizations hid behind "terms of service" in order to hide the fact that they acted as an arm of the US government without so much as a court order. These corporations who pay members of congress to lower their taxes and reduce regulations and generally "get government off our backs" apparently had no problem being government shills. But those of us who have been paying attention already knew the deal.
After 9-11 a common refrain heard was "they hate us for our freedoms." of course the "they" were " those muslims" over there. But The reality is that the people who most "hate our freedoms" are sitting in various levels of government.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
(17 years of informed commentary)