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Comment by WeylandYutani | Hacker News Reader

There was a recent case in the Netherlands were a lawyer used his client privilege to help a drug dealer run his empire. edit: From a maximum security prison. It was hilarious.

If you want to do spying you don't exclude anyone or it's pointless. Journalist is a great cover for spies- ask the CIA.

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Sometimes, you just need to allow those holes to be there, even though it means putting in extra effort to catch the bad actors in a different way.

Otherwise, what's the point of having journalists around that try to uncover corruption of government / military / security services?

Those holes will be exploited by our American and Chinese enemies. Naivety will get the EU killed.

Heh Heh Heh

I guess you're not really considering that allowing or encouraging corruption internally can also kill a government?

Note that China has been through multiple "purges" of corrupt officials. (Strangely, it seems to happen whenever they have a new leader who needs to remove competitors. ;)) So the corruption potential seems to be present everywhere.

It's just that in the west we've (thus far) recognised the problem, and journalists are part of that solution.

Removing that solution due to fear seems to be a bad direction for long term survival as well.

There's no way to prosecute the drug war and maintain civil liberties. I choose civil liberties and the drug war can go to hell.

As far as I knew they have a long standing policy to specifically not use journalists, peace corps or religious figures for non official cover specifically because it was considered pissing in the pool for everyone else.

I’m pretty open to being wrong on this one but do you have any case studies to point to that say otherwise?

Yeah and government agencies do the same all the time to avoid information release through public record laws. Don't want a pesky journalist poking in your emails? Just CC the staff lawyer and all those emails need to be redacted. It gets weirder when the FOIA officer is that lawyer.

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