Freedom of the Press in an Alien World

Dear Mr. President,

Back in the day, it was only totalitarian dictatorships that arrested people without cause and shut down newspapers. The U.S. and its allies, we were taught, permitted free speech, dissent and newspapers critical of their government. Those days seem far away, wrapped in a mist of idealistic mythology, for it turns out we and our allies are not that different from the old communist regimes of Eastern Europe or the banana republics of Latin America or the repressive totalitarianism of China and North Korea. We may be subtler but the intent and end result is much the same. It was revealed today in several articles in the Guardian, that our close partners, the British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), which is funded by, and takes orders from the NSA, showed up at Guardian office in London a few weeks after publishing the first reports from the Snowden files and demanded the files. They were stolen property, they claimed and the paper had no right to them. (Never mind that the files were taken from American intelligence data bases, not British.) The Guardian refused. GCHQ showed up a week after that and again demanded the files, claiming this time that the paper’s computer network could be hacked by Russian or Chinese intelligence to access valuable secrets. Again the Guardian refused. A week later they threatened to take the paper to court and freeze further reporting. After much back and forth, the Guardian agreed to destroy the hard drive and memory of the computer the files were stored on and on Saturday, July 20, 3 Guardian people used grinders and drills to demolish the MacBook Pro the files were stored on as 2 GCHQ people took notes and photographed the event. Not exactly sledgehammers and chainsaws, but this, after all, is the digital age. It made no difference that copies of the files are also kept in the U.S., Brazil and elsewhere, or that the reports will continue, it was, like the detention of David Miranda, an act of intimidation—not just to the Guardian but to all Western newspapers. The Guardian’s editor looks wistfully at the protection afforded journalists in America by the 1^st Amendment, but after the recent federal appeals court decision that the 1^st Amendment no longer applies to journalists, that seems in doubt. One by one the safeguards of democracy fall and we find ourselves in a strange new land. As Dorothy famously said to her dog after landing in Oz, “Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas anymore.”