Should a journalist be taken as an unbiased source when reporting or commenting on their spouse? Apparently we're all supposed to t think so when it's Glenn Greenwald reporting on the detention at Heathrow Airport of David Miranda, effectively his husband, while en route from spending a week with Laura Poitras in Berlin. Poitras was another of the people to whom Edward Snowden leaked material he stole from the NSA. So far, at the time of this writing, everything I've been able to read seems to have come from Greenwald, other details are pretty sketchy. While I've got no problem with Greenwald announcing what's happened, in so far as he knows it, he's not an unbiased source of information and he has every reason to be suspected of bias.
Perhaps the authorities in Britain* had already read the New York Times story on Laura Poitras that appeared yesterday when they detained David Miranda, but in it she says
After being detained repeatedly, Poitras began taking steps to protect her data, asking a traveling companion to carry her laptop, leaving her notebooks overseas with friends or in safe deposit boxes. She would wipe her computers and cellphones clean so that there would be nothing for the authorities to see. Or she encrypted her data, so that law enforcement could not read any files they might get hold of. These security preparations could take a day or more before her travels.
Passing by the naive faith she places in her encryption as compared to that available to governments, by her statement IN THE NEW YORK TIMES that she's using traveling companions to act as couriers of her laptop SHE HAS NOW MADE THEM THE TARGET OF INTELLIGENCE OFFICIALS AROUND THE WORLD. I was avoiding calling anyone in this story narcissistic but with her and Greenwald's ridiculous assumption of permission to do what they've been doing on the basis of them declaring themselves journalists and that this blanket of immunity covers their spouses, friends and traveling companions, they are a danger to them and to the effort to make intelligence services compatible with democracy.
Greenwald and Poitras seem to mistake someone deciding to call themselves a journalist or being employed as a journalist as providing them a grant of diplomatic immunity. Apparently they're joined by that delusion by millions around the world. Perhaps anyone so ignorant of the laws and rules under which the profession of journalism operates should be excluded from those who get to be considered journalists.
Intelligence services of some kind are an intrinsic part of governments, every single one of them has them and has had them from the beginning of governments. Just as with armies and police forces, they are not going to go away. The problem for a democracy is in making and keeping their intelligence services, the military and police compatible with democracy, something that the increasing travel and shipping industries have done so much to make so much more difficult. Modern life has made that effort many times more difficult, computers and the internet have made it even harder.
If all governments, everywhere were always forced to have complete transparency the world would be far better, dictatorships would not form nearly as often. But that world is not here in 2013, it will not be for the lifetime of any of us, it's an effective fact of life that governments will have secrets. Many of those secrets will be truly needed and will not only protect lives but the conditions under which democracy is possible. The down side of that is that other secrets endanger lives and attack democracy. So it's a question of which secrets must be exposed and which must not be exposed. I don't trust Edward Snowden - who admitted he took the job with an NSA contractor** in order to steal information - and self declared journalists to make those decisions. Greenwald and, now Poitras have given me serious doubts about their maturity to handle secrets by their juvenile revelations of things like their use of friends as guardians of secret information and as donkeys to get them past security officials at borders. We don't get to elect employees of contractors, we don't get to vote for journalists, we get to vote for politicians and on that thin reed the protection of democracy from the necessary evils of intelligence services depends. They are the ones who are going to have to come up with a solution to the problem that Snowden, Greenwald and Poitras have contributed to making far more difficult and, as these headline grabbing incidents continue, will make even worse.
It's only a matter of time before antics like Snowden's, Greenwalds, and Poitras' will blow up in the face of their supporters. These people are too immature to be trusted with such important things as civilian control of intelligence services.
I was entirely in favor of jailing Judith Miller when she was covering up for the Bush II thugs who leaked the identity of Valerie Plame Wilson to get back at her husband for reporting information of the greatest importance to democracy and an evaluation of some of the worst decisions an American Government has ever taken, selling that on the basis of lies. The Bush II thugs exposed her and her contacts in other countries to danger. Judith Miller was a witness to a crime, she covered up for some of the more ruthless criminals in the United States in the last decade.
We don't have a complete list of what Snowden took and who he has given what but we have it on his word and that of the two journalists he's leaked to that he took a lot. I've written about his complete irresponsibility in taking it with him to China and the Russia, who would certainly get it from him one way or another, including any encryption keys he believed protected it. Anyone who doesn't believe that those governments have whatever he was carrying with him is hopelessly naive. I would expect that any of that information such as, for example, contacts of their dissidents with Americans could endanger their lives. And who knows what other material he brought with him. Certainly not Greenwald and Poitras. But it's certainly more than was leaked to Judith Miller and Robert Novak. I don't think either of them should have been immune to investigation either.
* Apparently that small point that it was BRITISH AUTHORITIES ACTING UNDER BRITISH LAW and not under the United States Constitution has been lost on a large percentage of the vent-o-sphere going on like an out of control copying machine on this story.
** End the contracting of things like this now. That entities such as the Bush Crime Family have their hands all over these contracters should scare us all a lot more than that the intelligence services are making life hard for leakers and the recipients of leaks. If you trust companies to handle this information, not skimming off some of that for their own profits you are too naive to be discussing this. The intelligence services should be entirely in the hands of civil servants who have the highest level of civilian control exercised over them and effective oversight. The system of contracting that the Bush II regime put into place, continuing a trend that was increased in the Bush I administration should be entirely unacceptable as an attack on democracy and the national security that democracy depends on.
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