Witness, if you will, a perfect example of the fourth estate performing its function. The article that brought about this result was a modern masterpiece of journalism.
Now ask yourself what would have happened if those in power had a bunch of warrantless "dirt" on these particular journalists and decided that they'd really rather just keep the gravy train rolling.
We all have something to hide and something to fear.
Can we please not bring the NSA into every single comment thread on HN? It is completely unrelated to this story. Let's just agree that the journalism is great.
We kind of have to. Journalism is under siege(1). The rise of the unashamed surveillance state makes it much worse. There's been a sort of "journalism is dead, who cares" kind of attitude floating around. It isn't. I do.
Perfect... bring up the NSA every thirty seconds, until everyone is utterly sick of hearing it and automatically ignores anything related to the NSA... we can't thank you enough noonespecial, you are doing God's work.
What a shit attitude. Try taking into consideration that people feel helpless. People are desperate to try and change things. People may be acting - not in concert mind you - to affect some change. Try to respect that these people you lament are at least fucking trying.
"helpless", seriously? The guy had his privacy invaded and it is EXTREMELY unlikely that he was negatively affected by it. People drowning in debt or dying of disease feel helpless. This guy is just another person with an axe to grind. Imagine if someone tried to turn every thread about tax law into a debate about abortion. That is what has been happening lately.
Though I should not be surprised, you misrepresent me. There's nothing wrong with covering the issue. It's just not helpful at best, and actively harmful at worst, to try to inject the issue into every possible place. We are intelligent adults; we are more than capable of thinking about more than just one issue.
It isn't like there are many people left who haven't heard about it, and even if there were, the front page of HN has consistently contained several articles covering the NSA specifically for a number of weeks now.
As I'm not surprised you condescend me by insulting my ability to interpret your post, I guess.
My point is: why inhibit it no matter the context? Perhaps this is a new user who isn't privy to the daily dealings of hn? Maybe they aren't aware that their effort might be better spent on a less-informed forum? Why immediately dismiss and discourage their input?
Helpless? I can't vote and have only a fraction of the rights that you do (assuming you're a US citizen) but I feel far from helpless about my standing relative to the government. Discussing the issue is healthy, obsessing about it so that nobody else is allowed to hold a conversation on a different subject without paying lip service to the NSA issue is not.
I didn't mention the NSA specifically, just the surveillance state. My example was actually a British journalist, being intimidated by the detainment of his Brazilian SO, in London, traveling from Berlin, to Rio de Janeiro, abusing Section 7 of the British Terrorism Act.
Its a lot deeper than "the NSA". Something's bad wrong. And yeah, I'm going to preach about it until it gets fixed or I end up a crazy man on the corner wearing a sandwich board. (I believe that's what usually happens to those doing "God's work").
It's not the NSA doing this intimidation, though they may well be facilitating it. I do agree that journalism is under siege in the US, however. I feel like the Obama administration would really like to put a stop to even the possibility of another major leak by stopping it before it starts. I thought this was a much bigger deal than Greenwald's SO being detained:
Lets be honest, the press for the most part vacated the fourth estate in 2008 and still far too many of them like their new home.
We need to not only protect those who report the news, whether they are traditional news people or new style, bloggers, from the government but at the same time we may need to find ways to prevent political parties from co-opting the media. Far too many are way to cozy with political groups and fail to realize when they voluntarily give up their freedoms.
Reasonable expectations of privacy underpin a huge number of functions of modern free society including journalism as noted above. NSA actions have called all of them into question. We need more comments an analysis on that front, not less.
No it doesn't. Tax liens in the DC city government have fuck all to do with surveillance carried out by the federal government, notwithstanding Congressional authority over the DC government. Would it be appropriate for me to bring up the failings of Union Carbide or TEPCO in any thread mentioning a corporation? After they're business corporations too, and all business corporations are engaged in trying to increase their capital value...
...the point being that 'government' is not a unitary entity.
Furthermore, I don't think you're the arbiter of how HN discussions need to go down - so while you're entitled to talk about why you personally find a topic worthy of repeated discussion, trying to frame your individual opinion as a matter of objective fact is a rather cheap rhetorical trick unless you're speaking on pg's behalf.
It is literally a story that changed everything. Everything we knew about journalism now has to be done with the confirmation that certain things some fringe groups suspected the government could be doing are actually being done. Hence everything to debate about journalism has to be updated.
Personally I didn't think the article was particularly clear, informative or well-written.
It was emotive and brought attention to a terrible situation. But on objective measures of quality journalism, I see better articles daily in tabloid newspapers.
If the article wasn't so emotionally effective (and we didn't agree with its point of view) it might be more obvious that it was full of half-truths, weasel words and confusing narration.
You forget, emotional effectiveness IS effectiveness. Not the only kind, but in this world it's probably the more important kind. Certainly the easiest to achieve.
Oh I totally agree - the article was effective. But I think there is a distinction between objectively high-quality journalism and convincing writing.
Most writing intended to be convincing (see marketing copy, political rhetoric etc) steers well clear of the facts or twists them so as to be unreliable. That doesn't make it any less convincing.
It is easy to notice when you disagree with the writer's point, but I don't think having a noble purpose automatically makes a piece of writing a "masterpiece".
Now ask yourself what would have happened if those in power had a bunch of warrantless "dirt" on these particular journalists and decided that they'd really rather just keep the gravy train rolling.
We all have something to hide and something to fear.