Press Fails To Ask Any NSA Questions At President Obama’s NSA Press Conference | Hacker News Reader

Press Fails To Ask Any NSA Questions At President Obama’s NSA Press Conference

techcrunch.com

33 pointsapplecore19 comments

Let's not whine about this. We all know the press, politicians, military and corporations are all in cahoots with each other. Let's figure out a way to solve the problem, the same way SOPA was defeated, by swaying public opinion with creative campaigns.

We need to be forcing the issues, equipping people to ask the right questions at every opportunity.

Techs need to get into the political arena and fight the same way the NRA does, with votes in the booth and dollars in the coffers. Otherwise we're going to have our careers sidelined by suits who still think the Internet can be controlled and censored.

I for one am ready to get behind someone we as techs all trust, who can lead the debate and rally the troops. Who are some names? Shirkey? Lessig? Notch? :)

MSM is a branch of government. Understanding this simplifies quite a bit.

Well, Fox News isn't entirely, e.g. I saw them reporting on I think Silent Circle and Lavabit while my father was cooking today. See e.g. https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Afoxnews.com+lavabit+s...

I don't know who works for who, were any of their reporters called on in the press conference?

Is there a YC for startups changing politics? I know there are startups for creating products for incumbent politicians to have better reach. However many of those are just chasing the money thrown around by the candidates with the biggest pockets during elections. I'm more curious about those trying to change the level of discourse entirely like reddit has been doing with AMAs.

We need funding so our best and brightest can afford to dedicate themselves to these endeavors.

Good question! I was once about to do something about it, but gave up, because I feared that more powerful tools in the hand of bad people who represent us could eventually backfire and discredit any future work I could do. Things like this have to be released open-source, transparent and anonymously.

I don't want to hear, 5y from now: "Hey this guy made politics efficient and turned our pseudo global government into a semi global government. Thank you for that, *hole."

TBH what I want to see is a politician whose platform is using technology to record and publish everything he does in office and use technology to more effectively interact with his constituents. All the tools built to run his/her office would be open sourced. It's honestly probably easiest to do something like this at the San Francisco city level first as a proof of concept. The scale is right for a first pilot and the number of potential contributors is high enough for it to be self-sustaining.

Setting a precedent by going into office and running that office with the intent of disrupting how a politician interacts with his/her constituents via technology would be a gamechanger.

Would YC or another VC consider funding a "token" political candidate and a group of smart engineers? Obviously a single individual would have to be the one elected into office, but he/she could establish early on that the decision process is going to be led by interactions gathered from constituents via technology that the engineering team would build.

If you believe in it, would you share your wishes with me? Because I don't know how they could use it to make our lives better. It's like a gun in the wrong hand, in my humble opinion. I just have that fear, because I lost all trust and all respect on Governments and their minions.

I want to know when politicians are finally going to start holding crowdsourced press conferences where the questions asked are determined by the audience tuning in to listen to the politician talk. I want a reddit/HN/digg style platform where all the questions are submitted, voted on and then only revealed to the politician at the last minute so they don't have time to carefully prepare an answer.

Richard Nixon was caught off guard by the impact of television when he debated live on TV against John F Kennedy. We need that same moment but for Internet journalism and social audience interaction like the audience voting for what it collectively cares about.

This old media bullshit is quite frankly getting old. Maybe Bezos can shake up things by using the WaPo as the old guard avenue for letting democratic internet processes in to the party.

Someone is terribly mad at sane suggestions and commentary today. Yet another seemingly reasonable comment down-voted.

"seemingly reasonable" is the key, I down voted it because it wasted my time.

What could possibly motivate politicians in the current system to engage in such a forum??? Look at what happened after the cited example of Nixon in the 1960 debate, such as what didn't happen in this press conference.

Echoing my other comment, I'll bet there was a Fox reporter in the group (I think I would have heard if the Obama had totally shut them out). Was he called?

How did it waste your time? How is that a reason to attempt to moderate the comment from others by actively down-voting it?

What.

    What could possibly motivate politicians in the current 
    system to engage in such a forum???

Excellent question. You should have just posted that instead of doling out a downvote. I'm sure a set of circumstances could exist that force politicians at least at some level of government to participate. Maybe we can precipitate the change that would allow such fora to become part of the status quo.

To both current replies: because a detailed answer would have wasted even more of my time. But not so much after others wondered.

There are far too many items where the author simply isn't thinking through to give detailed answers to (http://xkcd.com/386/), and downvotes are explicitly OK for this, last time I checked the rules.

Right, it is called disengaging, but that is not what you did. You yourself choose to waste your time and energy on this.

Loud silence of largest(?) factor why Obama/Putin summit canceled, is a critical topic inversely proportional at 189 decibels, sycophants awkwardly ignoring the big elephant crowding everyone into the corner, cordially with deference exchanging pleasantries.

A better suited title would be: 'Press Paid To Fail To Ask Any NSA Questions At President Obama’s NSA Press Conference'

This fits entirely into the US government putting a noose on what journalists are and how they must act:

"The person also must intend to report on the news at the start of obtaining any protected information and must plan to publish that news."

"Feinstein suggested that the definition comprise only journalists who make salaries, saying it should be applied just to "real reporters."[1]"

[1] http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20130807/13153224102/sen-fe...

edit: Amused myself by imaging a panicked Glenn Greenwald clutching a bunch of print-outs, shouting to a camera that he doesn't know what these are but by god they are SOMETHING.

Well he does plan on publishing that protected information as soon as it becomes newsworthy by virtue of demonstrating that some politician or bureaucrat is lying to the American people. The politicians are just holding things up by not lying sooner.

Naturally my mind went to how investigations need to brew after data acquisition, but withholding bits of an investigation for those reasons is entirely proper as well.

In an era of journalism changing to be more distributed and less structured there is a multitude of ways the US government's revising seems foul. This is of course completely aside from what you said above, letting officials and others lie themselves into a box.

It seems rather dire that dissemination of information is being attacked on several fronts by what seems to be a wounded beast of a government lashing out at those around it, persons/careers/activists/even methods themselves.

Yes, the people that covered this press conference are a shining example of the "real reporters" that Feinstein was talking about.

It's a good thing they didn't allow any of those unpaid journalists to talk to the president. They might have actually asked some real questions, and that might have been, uh, embarrassing.

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