Saturday 10 May 2014

foia or plenipotentate

RT reports (на панглийском языке) how new policies being instituted at the behest of America's Intelligence Czar are poised to seriously change the journalistic landscape of that country and make reduce the candor and transparency that is already lacking among officials:

it is not only grounds for dismissal with prejudice, to include imprisonment, for intelligence officers to speak to a member of the press, without out prior staffing, vetting—furthermore, under this blanket gag-order bureaucrats are prohibited (and retroactively, too, and ironically the new memo was itself leaked apparently—or at least previewed to focus audiences) to even acknowledge news items already in the public domain that have been not released via those official channels above. Nothing is so terrible to tyrants and their abettors as a free press. Even research meant not for publication but to analyze how current policies and procedures to determine whether they are either robust enough or overkill that cites leaked or cherry-picked (publicly compiled) information would be forbidden. The idea is not lend any credence to potentially damaging intelligence but will result in a chilling effect on meaningful dialogue—albeit that the last time officials (the authors of these new policies) tried to address the white elephant in the lobby, they ended up perpetuating lies to the American executive and legislature, and the rest of the world besides, concerning the scope and intrusiveness of their surveillance engines.