I know a journalist when I see one. |
I think this has an absolute chilling effect. |
I'd be very loath to be critical of what Judith did, |
I'm not aware of any previous government attempt to retrieve such material. Librarians and historians are having a fit, and I can't imagine a bigger chill to journalists. |
It's certainly not dead. It's just been put on the back-burner. We know they're still interested. ... They've just become preoccupied. |
It's really ridiculous, |
It's really ridiculous. I'm just waiting for the first search of a newsroom to come down and for someone to say, 'You can't report we just searched you. |
Journalists who cover national security and defense receive classified information all the time. It's virtually routine. If that were the standard for bringing an espionage case, we'd be locking up a lot of people in this town and there would be fewer sources of information. |
More reporters should consider doing that. |
Once you turn your hard drives over to a government entity and they have your computers, they essentially have access to the newsroom. |
People clearly think that their federal government is more secretive than state or local governments. And they are probably right. It has become more difficult to get information out of the federal government. |
That's exactly where we're headed. We're going to see a situation where to report to the public what's going on is ultimately going to lead to leaks investigations. . . . That's enormously troublesome. |
The government appears to be going very aggressively after these types of leak cases, ... and when reporters are involved, I'm just gritting my teeth. |
The Supreme Court has said that criminal proceedings are public. In this country, we don't prosecute and lock up convicts and have no public track record of how we got there. That violates the defendants' rights not to mention the public's right to know what it's court system is doing. |
There is no question that there are more restrictions coming down. There is rampant secrecy in both federal and state courtrooms. |