Comment by mcphilip | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mcphilip | Hacker News Reader

It's not just "US Journalists Against Transparency” up in arms about this release, apparently popular opinion is mixed too, as evidenced by the reddit comment section on the NYT article submission [1]. This firstlook.org article is important in that it highlights how journalists and editorial boards are deciding what to publish.

However, this safeguard is made more problematic by the fact that journalists outside of the US have access to the same set of documents and don't have the same degree of concern over exposing US national security interests.

I can't decide whether or not I think this info should have been published. I liked the irony of the NSA deeming it necessary to compromise telecom equipment while simultaneously declaring said equipment unsuitable for use in the US since it may have back doors. On the other hand, this does seem like an expected function of the NSA best left implicit instead of explicitly exposed.

[1]http://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/2139b3/snowden_do...

Many of us over here in Europe lost a lot of respect for the NYT when it failed to denounce the complete garbageness of the Saddam-WMD connection, which was widely reported on over here.

Personally, I was also disappointed when Cablegate happened. I still own all five newspapers that collaborated in the dissemination and back in the day I read through the reporting of every single one of them.

Only one did not apologize for reporing on the cables (El País). The NYT, on the other hand, was the most apologetic by far.

A free press should report on all the secret shenanigans. Clearly, in the past, most major newspapers in most countries were not free in that sense, as they have refrained from reporting certain things on the intelligence agencies of their home countries.

This includes the Western World. In my home country, Germany, we recently were made aware of the fact that the West German intelligence agencies had opened and read all correspondence between citizens of East and West. Best detail: If they couldn't re-seal the letter in such a manner that you wouldn't know it had been read, they would just throw it away!

Somehow, this was kept a secret for decades, even though a massive amount of people were involved. So much for free press.

I guess the Americans have to decide. Do you want to be West Germany? Or do you want to be the United States of fucking America?

> I can't decide whether or not I think this info should have been published

It's easy: the information would have been available (the book, the article by Der Spiegel) no matter what the actions of the NYT had been, see my other comment here.

I consider it definitely newsworthy.

I'm looking forward to the revelation that the NSA was providing US companies with knowledge to aid their international competitiveness, you know, exactly what they state that the PLA are doing. What better payment for all the backdoor access they have?

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