Three stories in this morning's paper caught my eye: the National Security Agency and AT&T failed to get EFF's lawsuit quashed, a recent study indicates that most bloggers don't think of themselves as journalists, and Barry Bonds is not going to be indicted just now. And it occurs to me there is actually a rather strong connection among those three stories, at least if you think about them in terms of the public's right to know. Or, as seems to be what our government and its corporate masters are really pushing in the legal sphere, the right to keep the public ignorant.
Of course, the NSA case's connection to the public's right to know is obvious. the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a class action of behalf of all AT&T customers over allegations that first appeared in USA Today that the former-portion-of-the-former-AT&T-formerly-known-as-SBC gave the NSA access to customer records it should not have. EFF scored a big win in fighting off the federal government's motion to dismiss the case because just trying the case would supposedly reveal something the terrorists didn't already know. Not only does it mean that many other similar cases concerning the government's alleged spying on us have a chance to go forward, but perhaps we can hope it will discourage those in the Administration and Congress who have been picking on the media for stories that at least let us know that there are issues to be debated.
The blog story about a recent survey of bloggers was primarily interesting because much of the coverage focused on the fact that fewer than 40 percent of bloggers think of themselves as journalists, many eschew fact-checking or publishing corrections, etc. This harkens back to the attempts by Apple to force some Mac gossip blogs to reveal their sources, which, in another important win for EFF a few weeks ago, were mostly thwarted by an appeals court decision. (One Apple lawsuit against Thinksecret.com is technically still alive, but it never figured to get very far under California's ant-SLAPP law.) Whether or not bloggers identify themselves as journalists, somehow I have to believe that 100 percent of them want to be able to say whatever they and their anonymous contributors want to say without fear of big companies throwing lawyers at them.
And then there's the Barry Bonds case. Well, actually I'm rather indifferent about what happens to Barry Bonds (I'm an A's fan), but the case I do think important is the one against the San Francisco Chronicle reporters who have been exposing the depth of the steroid problem all along. Federal prosecutors are trying to force them to reveal the source or sources who gave them the grand jury transcripts that originally revealed the confessions of a number of athletes to using steroids. Imagine how far the Congressional inquiries into steroid abuse would have gone had it not been for the pressure generated by those revelations -- the fact that Bonds wasn't called to testify before Congress is itself clear evidence that he was going to be given an intentional pass. If the source who gave the reporters the grand jury transcripts had feared the reporters could be made to reveal his or her identity, what is the likelihood that steroids would have become the issue it now deservedly is in American sports?
Whether you're a blogger, a baseball fan, an Apple aficionado, an optionless customer of the re-emerging former-portion-of-the-former-AT&T-formerly-known-as-SBC monopoly, or all the above, aren't you actually glad that we now know as much as we do -- as limited as that may be -- about what's going on? And don't you wish we knew more? The news these days is a constant stream of stories about big corporations and big government fighting for their right to keep secrets from all of us. So I would only ask that you give those of us who do identify ourselves as journalists a fighting chance to reveal what they don't want us to know.
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11:01:34 AM 
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