Dan Gillmor: Blog

In this Dow Jones story –FISA Deal Will End Court Cases Vs Phone Cos - GOP Lawmakers — Missouri’s Republican senator, Christopher Bond, is quoted as follows:

“I’m not here to say that the government is always right, but when the government tells you to do something, I’m sure you would all agree that I think you all recognize that is something you need to do.”

If I ran the St. Louis Post Dispatch or Kansas City Star, the two biggest newspapers in Missouri, I’d assign my Washington reporters to ask Bond, at every opportunity, the following questions:

If the government tells you to murder someone, is that “something you need to do?” If not, what crimes are in the permitted zone? What illegal acts can the government order a private citizen or company to commit?

Amazingly, or perhaps not, there’s no sign that anyone is asking Bond these questions. Another example of journalistic non-feasance.

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NY Times: Congress Reaches Deal on Wiretapping Bill: After months of wrangling, Democratic and Republican leaders reached a deal Thursday that would re-write the rules for the government’s wiretapping powers, and would provide what amounts to limited immunity to the telephone companies that took part in President Bush’s warrantless eavesdropping program after the Sept. 11 attacks.

This “deal” — which the reporter stenographically reports, quoting others, as a compromise — is an absolute capitulation by the Democrats, who have shown themselves conclusively to be pure quislings. Fearful of looking “soft on terrorism,” they are bowing to Bush and Republican demands that they encourage companies to break the law — and break it so that government can have all the help it needs in spying on American citizens who have done absolutely nothing to justify the surveillance.

We may as well redact the Fourth Amendment when we publish the Constitution. It’s completely meaningless at this point.

McCain supports this travesty, of course. He believes in absolute, dictatorial power for the president.

Where the hell is Obama, who claims to believe in the rule of law? He’s in hiding.

UPDATE: No, it’s worse. He supports this, too, after being a leader in the fight against it before. What a raging hypocrite he has become.

A new kind of politician? Not one who’d sell out the Constitution to get elected.

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Wall Street Journal: Taxpayers May Face Hurricane Tab. As hurricane season begins, Democrats in Congress want to nationalize a chunk of the insurance business that covers major storm-damage claims. The proposal — backed by giant insurers Allstate Corp. and State Farm Mutual Automobile Insurance Co., as well as Florida lawmakers — focuses on “reinsurance,” the policies bought by insurers themselves to protect against catastrophic losses. The proposal envisions a taxpayer-financed reinsurance program covering all 50 states, which would essentially backstop the giant insurers in case of disaster.

This is a fiscal disaster in the making if it passes. It will encourage even more reckless coastal development that would be uneconomic if the people who benefit had to bear the real costs of what they’re doing.

Republican presidential candidate John McCain opposes it. Democrat Barak Obama is for it. McCain is on the right side of this issue, and I don’t mean the right wing.

Obama has been presenting himself as a candidate who wants to tell the truth to the American people — to run a government that recognizes reality and doesn’t continue the lies of the past. His support of this legislation is a giant blind spot in his vision.

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NY Daily News: Obama: ‘Assassination’ flap over-rated. “I have learned that when you are campaigning for as many months as Sen. Clinton and I have been campaigning, sometimes you get careless in terms of the statements that you make,” Obama told Radio Isla in Puerto Rico, where he and Clinton stumped in advance of the June 1 primary. “And I think that is what happened here.

This really should be the final word. Sadly it won’t be.

Look, we all say stupid things from time to time, even super-smart people like Clinton. Some of the criticism of her remarks, which were kind of weird, is so far over the top that it’s crazy. Yet journalists continue to flog it mercilessly.

Let it go.

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The “Publius Project” — essays and conversations about constitutional moments on the Net collected by the Berkman Center — has launched. I have an essay there, along with the writings of many other folks.

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Guardian: White House tells court of missing emails from beginning of Iraq war. The White House has admitted in court that it has lost three months of email backups from the initial days of the Iraq war, raising questions about the possible deletion of politically sensitive records.

The disclosure came in a lawsuit filed by the National Security Archive, a non-profit group that specialises in uncovering classified documents.

The archive was told it could not receive emails relating to Iraq, despite a 30-year-old law requiring the preservation of presidential records, because a system upgrade had deleted up to 5m emails.

Given the record of the Bush White House, a better bet is that these folks deliberated deleted the material to prevent anyone from knowing what was going on inside the administration. Naturally, Congress won’t even try to find out the truth beyond the normal handwringing.

But the alternative is that the administration deliberately violated the law requiring retention. Who’s going to prosecute? You already know: nobody, because these folks don’t do that sort of thing when they’re the lawbreakers.

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Glenn Greenwald (Salon) writes:

The most interesting part of the controversy over Obama advisor Samantha Power’s referring to Hillary Clinton as a “monster” — one might say the only interesting part — is that immediately after Power said it, she tried to proclaim that it was “off the record.” Here was Power’s exact quote:

“She is a monster, too –- that is off the record –- she is stooping to anything.”

But the reporter who was interviewing her, Britain’s Gerri Peev of The Scotsman, printed the comment anyway — as she should have, because Peev had never agreed that any parts of the interview would be “off the record,” and nobody has the right to demand unilaterally, and after the fact, that journalists keep their embarrassing remarks a secret.

Read the whole piece for a solid, if repetitive, analysis of U.S. journalists often-pathetic deference to power.

When I was a reporter and then a columnist, I had a rule that no public figure — that is, anyone who’d had experience with being interviewed — had the right to declare anything off the record after the fact. Now I might agree not to publish something if it wasn’t relevant, but if something was to be off the record it would be decided ahead of time.

I didn’t have the same policy with people who weren’t media-savvy. Sometimes I’d actually say to someone, “Do you realize that I what you’re telling me might go into the newspaper?” I’d let them reconsider their words.

In the past several days I’ve had a brief email correspondence with a journalism student (not from my own school) who is determined to conflate citizen journalism with the deliberate and unfair maligning of people for political reasons. He knows what he is going to say and only wants a quote or two from me to reinforce it. I declined to be part of his broad slam on a genre that is much more nuanced than he’s apparently trying to portray.

I will be publishing the emails in another post, with my commentary. My current intention is not to publish his name or institution, because I suspect he — despite his course of study — is not savvy about the media in any serious way.

Sadly, savvy in media for U.S. journalists tends to mean doing what powerful people want you to do. That’s the more serious problem, far more so than Powers’ unfortunate remark.

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The NYT has the text of President Bush’s radio speech in which he announces his veto of legislation that would have banned the CIA from torturing suspects. See: Text: Bush on Veto of Intelligence Bill for the sickening reality that Bush aims to go down in history as the president who proudly and unapologetically endorsed torture as America’s state policy.

He has shamed himself so many times now that it’s commonplace. But he shames us all — and Congress in particular, unless the lawmakers recover enough of their honor to override this travesty.

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Telegraph: Heathrow airport first to fingerprint. All four million domestic passengers who will pass through Terminal 5 annually after it opens on March 27 will have four fingerprints taken, as well as being photographed, when they check in.

The culture that created the Magna Carta is utterly turning its back on liberty. The current American government merely wishes it could do stuff like this, but there’s still just enough left of the Bill of Rights to prevent it — for the time being, anyway.

I avoid Heathrow for many other reasons. This attitude on the part of the authorities there provides one more.

Saddest of all: The British people are happily letting their government turn the nation into a police state. They will rue their inaction, but probably not until it’s too late.

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Boing Boing: Remixing the London police’s anti-photographer terrror posters.
Responding to the London Metropolitan Police’s new anti-photographer snitch campaign, wherein posters urge Londoners to turn in people who might be taking pictures of CCTV cameras, many people have taken a crack at redesigning the posters to point out the absurdity of them.

This is how people, creating their own media, can help expose government (and other) overreaching. Another way in this case would be to encourage everyone to take photos everywhere.

The speed with which the U.K. is turning into a police state is just amazing, and frightening.

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