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<font face="Verdana">Somewhat tangentially, the following para in
this news item struck me as a good example of what we at IT for
Change call as anti-institutional </font>'openness'. Such a kind
of 'openness' is promoted by the powerful because it is so much
easier to control and manipulate than institutions with
countervailing power (in this case, the press).<br>
<br>
<br>
<blockquote>"Continuing what worked so successfully during two
presidential election campaigns, Obama and his administration have
instead engaged citizens directly through social media, friendly
bloggers, radio and video. It amounts to the White House reporting
on itself, presenting an appearance of greater openness while
avoiding penetrating questions from journalists who have the
knowledge and experience to do meaningful accountability
reporting. The administration’s media manipulation extends even to
photography: Professional photojournalists are banned from many
White House events and presidential activities; only approved
images of Obama taken by a White House photographer are supplied
to the news media."<br>
</blockquote>
A certain kind of multistakeholderism as 'openness' (does everyone
not just love that word!) is similarily promoted against
institutional democracy by the dominant forces in global IG, and
civil society has become the main 'carrier' of this political
strategy and weapon of 'openness' for the dominant powers. <br>
<br>
parminder <br>
<br>
<br>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On Monday 27 May 2013 02:24 AM, Riaz K
Tayob wrote:<br>
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<h1 property="dc.title">Leonard Downie: Obama’s war on leaks
undermines investigative journalism</h1>
<h3 property="dc.creator"> By Leonard Downie Jr., <span
class="timestamp updated processed"
epochtime="1369352102000" datetitle="published"
pagetype="leaf" contenttype="article">Published: May 24</span>
</h3>
<p> Leonard Downie Jr. is a vice president at large of The
Washington Post, where he served as executive editor from
1991 to 2008. He is the Weil family professor of journalism
at the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State
University and a board member of the nonprofit Investigative
Reporters and Editors. </p>
<p>For the past five years, beginning with his first
presidential campaign, Barack Obama has promised that his
government would be the most open and transparent in
American history. Recently, while stating that he makes<a
moz-do-not-send="true" data-xslt="_http"
href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2013/05/16/obama-no-apologies-for-leaks-investigation/">
“no apologies”</a> for his Justice Department’s
investigations into suspected leaks of classified
information, the president added that “a free press, free
expression and the open flow of information helps hold me
accountable, helps hold our government accountable and helps
our democracy function.” Then, in his National Defense
University speech Thursday, <a moz-do-not-send="true"
data-xslt="_http"
href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/president-obamas-may-23-speech-on-national-security-as-prepared-for-delivery/2013/05/23/02c35e30-c3b8-11e2-9fe2-6ee52d0eb7c1_print.html">Obama
said</a> he was “troubled by the possibility that leak
investigations may chill the investigative journalism that
holds government accountable.”</p>
<p>But the Obama administration’s steadily escalating war on
leaks, the most militant I have seen since the Nixon
administration, has disregarded the First Amendment and
intimidated a growing number of government sources of
information — most of which would not be classified — that
is vital for journalists to hold leaders accountable. The
White House has tightened its control over officials’
contacts with the news media, and federal agencies have
increasingly denied <a moz-do-not-send="true"
data-xslt="_http"
href="http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-03-14/politics/37714147_1_federal-agencies-government-transparency-foia">Freedom
of Information Act requests</a> on the grounds of national
security or protection of internal deliberations.</p>
<p>The secret and far-reaching subpoena and seizure of two
months of records for 20 <a moz-do-not-send="true"
data-xslt="_http"
href="http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-05-13/world/39226618_1_classified-information-obama-administration-justice-department">Associated
Press phone lines</a> and switchboards — used by more than
100 AP reporters in three news bureaus and the House of
Representatives — is especially chilling for journalists and
their sources. The effort was reportedly part of a Justice
Department and federal grand jury investigation of an AP
story from May 7, 2012, revealing the CIA’s success in
penetrating a Yemen-based al-Qaeda group that had developed
<a moz-do-not-send="true" data-xslt="_http"
href="http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2012-05-07/world/35455296_1_underwear-bomb-aqap-explosive-device">an
“underwear bomb”</a> to detonate aboard U.S.-bound
aircraft.</p>
<p>At the request of the White House and the CIA, the AP held
the story for five days to protect an ongoing intelligence
operation. The AP’s discussions with government officials
were similar to many I participated in with several
administrations during my years as executive editor of The
Washington Post, when I was weighing how to publish
significant stories about national security without causing
unnecessary harm.</p>
<p>After the AP story appeared, Obama administration officials
spoke freely about the operation. But when Republicans
accused the administration of leaking classified information
to boost the president’s counterterrorism resume in an
election year, the Justice Department began its wide-ranging
investigation to find the story’s unnamed sources —
including secretly subpoenaing and seizing the AP’s call
logs earlier this year. Only after Justice finally notified
the news agency of the seizure this month and the
controversy exploded did Attorney General Eric Holder say
that the AP story resulted from <a moz-do-not-send="true"
data-xslt="_http"
href="http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-05-14/world/39248139_1_phone-records-justice-department-holder">“a
very, very serious leak”</a> that “put the American people
at risk.” But the administration has not explained how.</p>
<p>Such investigations are not unusual, especially in national
security cases, but they have proliferated in the Obama
administration. Six government officials have been
prosecuted since 2009 under the 1917 Espionage Actfor
unauthorized disclosures of classified information, twice as
many as in all previous U.S. administrations combined. One
case involved a classic whistleblower: a senior executive of
the National Security Agency who had told the Baltimore Sun
about expensive government waste on digital data-gathering
technology.</p>
<p>In another, investigators seized the phone records of Fox
News reporter <a moz-do-not-send="true" data-xslt="_http"
href="http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-05-19/local/39376688_1_press-freedom-justice-department-records">James
Rosen</a>, searched his personal e-mails, tracked his
visits to the State Department and traced the timing of his
phone conversations with Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, a State
Department security adviser. Kim was charged in 2010 as the
suspected source of a Fox News report about North Korean
nuclear weapon testing. Perhaps most disturbing, documents
related to the secret search warrant for Rosen’s phone and
e-mail records cited him as a co-conspirator in the
espionage case.</p>
<p>This appeared to journalists to put Rosen in unprecedented
jeopardy for doing his job. Although the president said in
his speech Thursday that “journalists should not be at legal
risk for doing their jobs,” he was nevertheless adamant
about pursuing government officials who he said “break the
law,” presumably by discussing national security matters and
other classified information with reporters, even if that
scares off officials from becoming whistle-blowers or even
having any contact with reporters.</p>
<p>In addition to these investigations and others believed to
be underway, countless government officials have been
subjected to accusatory interviews and lie-detector tests to
ferret out leakers. And contacts with journalists have been
routinely monitored. Not surprisingly, reporters tell me
that more and more administration officials are afraid to
talk to them.</p>
<p>Decades-old Justice Department guidelines restrict federal
subpoenas for reporters or their phone records, saying they
should be used only as a last resort in an investigation.
Justice officials have contended that this was the case with
the Associated Press leak. But while claiming that it first
conducted hundreds of interviews and reviewed tens of
thousands of documents, Justice has not explained why it
needed to undertake what appears to be a menacing and
unjustified fishing expedition.</p>
<p> <a moz-do-not-send="true" data-xslt="_http"
target="_blank"
href="http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CFR-2011-title28-vol2/pdf/CFR-2011-title28-vol2-sec50-10.pdf">The
Justice guidelines</a> require that “the subpoena should
be as narrowly drawn as possible,” that the targeted news
organization “shall be given reasonable and timely notice”
to negotiate the subpoena with Justice or to fight it in
court, and that “the approach in every case must be to
strike the proper balance between the public’s interest in
the free dissemination of ideas and information and the
public’s interest in effective law enforcement and the fair
administration of justice.”</p>
<p>Only half a dozen AP journalists reported, wrote and edited
the May 7, 2012, story, but “thousands upon thousands of
news-gathering calls” by more than 100 AP journalists using
newsroom, home and mobile phones are included in the records
seized by Justice investigators, AP President Gary B. Pruitt
said in an <a moz-do-not-send="true" data-xslt="_http"
href="http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-3460_162-57585213/ap-president-blasts-unconstitutional-phone-records-probe/">interview</a>
with CBS’s “Face the Nation.” In a <a
moz-do-not-send="true" data-xslt="_http"
href="http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2013/05/13/doj-seizes-ap-phone-records/2156819/">letter
of protest</a> to Holder, Pruitt said that “these records
potentially reveal communications with confidential sources
across all of the newsgathering activities undertaken by the
AP during a two-month period, provide a road map to AP’s
newsgathering operations and disclose information about AP’s
activities and operations that the government has no
conceivable right to know.”</p>
<p>Without any official justification, such an indiscriminate
intrusion into one of the most important American news
organizations appears to be a deliberate attempt to
intimidate journalists and their sources — or at least
indicates a willingness to tolerate such intimidation as
collateral damage of an investigation.</p>
<p>“I really don’t know what their motive is,” Pruitt said on
“Face the Nation.” But, he added, “I know what the message
being sent is: If you talk to the press, we’re going to go
after you.”</p>
<p>By secretly serving the subpoena directly on phone
companies without notifying the AP, the Justice Department
avoided negotiations with the news agency or a court
challenge over its scope. This is permitted as an exception
to the Justice guidelines if prior notification and
negotiations would “pose a substantial threat to the
integrity of the investigation.” But there has been no
explanation of what threat might have been posed in this
case, when the preservation of the records by the phone
companies was never in question and the news leak under
investigation had occurred long before.</p>
<p>I can remember only one similar incident during my 17 years
as executive editor of The Post. In 2008, FBI Director
Robert S. Mueller <a moz-do-not-send="true"
data-xslt="_http"
href="http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2008-08-09/news/36836633_1_phone-records-michael-p-kortan-fbi-agents">formally
apologized</a> to me and the executive editor of the New
York Times for the secret seizure four years earlier of the
phone records of our foreign correspondents working in
Jakarta, Indonesia — because the Justice guidelines had been
violated and no subpoena had been issued. But I recall a
number of instances in which other federal investigative
requests were successfully negotiated in ways that fully
protected our news-gathering independence in accordance with
the guidelines.</p>
<p>In Thursday’s speech, Obama said he has raised the impact
of federal leaks investigations on accountability journalism
with Holder. The president said the attorney general “agreed
to review existing Department of Justice guidelines
governing investigations that involve reporters, and he’ll
convene a group of media organizations to hear their
concerns as part of that review.”</p>
<p>The president also called on Congress to revive and pass a
federal <a moz-do-not-send="true" data-xslt="_http"
href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-politics/wp/2013/05/15/white-house-pushing-new-federal-shield-law/">“shield
law”</a> — similar to those in 40 states and the District
— that would increase defenses, including judicial appeals,
for journalists who face legal attempts to force them to
reveal confidential sources and reporting contacts. It is
unclear whether the legislation, which stalled in the last
Congress after negotiations with the news media, would have
prevented the Justice Department’s sneak attack against the
AP. Nevertheless, its passage would provide significant new
protection for accountability journalism and government
whistleblowing. White House support of the legislation had
been lukewarm, so the timing and ardor of Obama’s new
embrace remains suspect, depending on the administration’s
future actions.</p>
<p>I can only speculate about the politics at play here. If
2012 had not been a presidential election year, would
Republicans have characterized news reports and Obama
administration announcements about successful
counterterrorism operations as “leaks” endangering national
security? Would the administration have decided that it was
necessary to react by aggressively investigating leaks for
which there is not yet public evidence that national
security was seriously compromised? If not for the 2014
congressional elections, would Republicans now be
hypocritically condemning the Justice Department’s seizure
of phone records in the AP case?</p>
<p>Hardly anything seems immune from constitutionally
dangerous politicking in a polarized Washington. But that’s
no excuse for playing games with the First Amendment and the
right and responsibility of the news media to keep Americans
informed about what their government is doing in their name
and for their protection.</p>
<p>After the 2001 terrorist attacks, the George W. Bush
administration increased government secrecy in a variety of
ways that Obama, as candidate and president, vowed to
reverse. Soon after taking office, Obama and Holder issued <a
moz-do-not-send="true" data-xslt="_http"
href="http://voices.washingtonpost.com/federal-eye/2009/01/_in_a_move_that.html">memos
and directives</a> instructing government agencies to be
more responsive to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA)
requests and to make more government information public
through Web sites and social media.</p>
<p>On the plus side, more government information is now
available online, much of it “big data” collected and
generated by federal agencies. Some of it is potentially
useful for consumers and businesses, such as student loan
and grant information, resources for seniors, ways to do
business with the government, federal jobs, volunteer
opportunities, diet and medical information, assistance for
farming and solar energy development, and much more. Some of
the data about government spending and regulations also are
useful for the news media and accountability reporting.</p>
<p>But there’s not nearly enough of what journalists and
citizens need to hold the government truly accountable —
whether information on national security, government
surveillance and immigration policies, or specifics about
stimulus spending and officials’ travel and other perks.</p>
<p>After some initial improvement by the Obama administration
in fulfilling FOIA requests, delays and denials are growing
again, according to journalists and studies by news
organizations. An <a moz-do-not-send="true"
data-xslt="_http"
href="http://bigstory.ap.org/article/us-citing-security-censor-more-public-records">AP
analysis</a> published in March found that “more often
than it ever has, [the Obama administration] cited legal
exceptions to censor or withhold the material” and
“frequently cited the need to protect national security and
internal deliberations.” Some of the administration’s new
open-information policies also contain broad and vague
exceptions that could be used to hide records crucial to
accountability reporting about such subjects as health-care
payments, government subsidies, workplace accidents or
detentions of terrorism suspects.</p>
<p>Every administration I remember has tried to control its
message and manage contacts with the media. As a senior
editor for more than a quarter-century, I frequently
received complaints from administrations of both parties
about coverage they considered unfavorable, along with
occasional and mostly empty threats to cut off access.
Journalists who covered the George W. Bush administration
said they encountered arrogant attitudes toward the press
but were usually able to engage knowledgeable officials in
productive dialogue.</p>
<p>But reporters covering the Obama administration say more
and more officials will no longer talk at all and refer them
to uncommunicative or even hostile and bullying press aides.
“The White House doesn’t want anyone leaking,” said one
senior Washington correspondent who, like others, described
a tight, difficult-to-penetrate inner circle that controls
the administration’s decisions and micromanages its message.
“There are few windows on decision-making and governing
philosophy. There is a perception that Obama himself has
little regard for the news media.”</p>
<p>Continuing what worked so successfully during two
presidential election campaigns, Obama and his
administration have instead engaged citizens directly
through social media, friendly bloggers, radio and video. It
amounts to the White House reporting on itself, presenting
an appearance of greater openness while avoiding penetrating
questions from journalists who have the knowledge and
experience to do meaningful accountability reporting. The
administration’s media manipulation extends even to
photography: Professional photojournalists are banned from
many White House events and presidential activities; only
approved images of Obama taken by a White House photographer
are supplied to the news media.</p>
<p>Most Americans may not care much about the Obama
administration’s openness to the news media or the potential
damage to the First Amendment and government accountability
resulting from its aggressive war on leaks. But as the
administration copes with second-term governing challenges,
real national security threats and <a
moz-do-not-send="true" data-xslt="_http"
href="http://articles.washingtonpost.com/2013-05-17/opinions/39324662_1_watergate-comparisons-house-republicans">darkening
clouds of scandal</a>, its credibility will become
increasingly important to the president’s legacy. It is not
too late for Obama’s actions to match his rhetoric.</p>
<p> <strong> </strong> </p>
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