
Our spymaster-in-chief wants to deny the media the freedom to report on Big Brother’s surveillance.
In the standard spy thriller, our hero gets captured by agents of a repressive government. They take him into a dark interrogation room, where the sadistic spymaster hisses: “We have ways of making you talk.”
In real life, the director of our National Security Agency hisses at journalists: “We have ways of keeping you from talking.”
Well, not quite in those words. Gen. Keith Alexander, the NSA’s chief spook and head of U.S. Cyber Command, has revealed his chilling disrespect for our constitutional rights to both free speech and a free press.
A Bunch of Subversives, an OtherWords cartoon by Khalil Bendib
In an interview, he called for outlawing any reporting on his agency’s secret program of spying on every American: “I think it’s wrong that newspaper reporters have all these documents…giving them out as if these — you know it just doesn’t make any sense,” he told Politico‘s Josh Gerstein.
Then came his spooky punch line: “We ought to come up with a way of stopping it…It’s wrong to allow this to go on.”
Holy Thomas Paine. Alexander says he thinks it’s OK for the government to spy on us. But he wants to deny the media the freedom to report on Big Brother’s surveillance.
What country does this autocrat represent? Alexander’s secret, indiscriminate, supercomputer scooping-up of data on every phone call, email, and other private business of every American is what “doesn’t make any sense.”
It’s an Orwellian, mass invasion of everyone’s privacy, creating the kind of routine, 24/7 surveillance state our government loudly deplores in China and Russia — and it amounts to stomping on our Fourth Amendment guarantee that we’re to be free of “unreasonable searches and seizures.”
That’s the real outrage we should be stopping. But our constitutionally clueless spymaster is doubling down on his dangerous ignorance by also stomping on the First Amendment.
If this were a movie, people would laugh at it as being too silly, too far-fetched to believe. But there it is, horribly real.
We’re not backing down in the face of Trump’s threats.
As Donald Trump is inaugurated a second time, independent media organizations are faced with urgent mandates: Tell the truth more loudly than ever before. Do that work even as our standard modes of distribution (such as social media platforms) are being manipulated and curtailed by forces of fascist repression and ruthless capitalism. Do that work even as journalism and journalists face targeted attacks, including from the government itself. And do that work in community, never forgetting that we’re not shouting into a faceless void – we’re reaching out to real people amid a life-threatening political climate.
Our task is formidable, and it requires us to ground ourselves in our principles, remind ourselves of our utility, dig in and commit.
As a dizzying number of corporate news organizations – either through need or greed – rush to implement new ways to further monetize their content, and others acquiesce to Trump’s wishes, now is a time for movement media-makers to double down on community-first models.
At Truthout, we are reaffirming our commitments on this front: We won’t run ads or have a paywall because we believe that everyone should have access to information, and that access should exist without barriers and free of distractions from craven corporate interests. We recognize the implications for democracy when information-seekers click a link only to find the article trapped behind a paywall or buried on a page with dozens of invasive ads. The laws of capitalism dictate an unending increase in monetization, and much of the media simply follows those laws. Truthout and many of our peers are dedicating ourselves to following other paths – a commitment which feels vital in a moment when corporations are evermore overtly embedded in government.
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