( – promoted by ek hornbeck)
On the UK’s Equating of Journalism With Terrorism
By Glenn Greenwald, The Intercept
19 Feb 2014, 5:24 AM EST
It is not difficult to apprehend the reason the UK government is so desperate to criminalize this reporting. The GCHQ itself made the reason clear in a once-secret memo previously reported by the Guardian. The British agency “has repeatedly warned it fears a ‘damaging public debate’ on the scale of its activities because it could lead to legal challenges against its mass-surveillance programmes.” Among other things, “GCHQ feared a legal challenge under the right to privacy in the Human Rights Act if evidence of its surveillance methods became admissible in court.” In particular, the spying agency feared that disclosures “could lead to damaging public debate which might lead to legal challenges against the current regime.” Privacy groups have now commenced such lawsuits against the GCHQ.
In sum, the UK Government wants to stop disclosure of its mass surveillance activities not because it fears terrorism or harm to national security but because it fears public debate, legal challenges and accountability. That is why the U.K. government considers this journalism to be “terrorism”: because it undermines the interests and power of British political officials, not the safety of the citizenry. I’ve spent years arguing that the word “terrorism” in the hands of western governments has been deprived of all consistent meaning other than “that which challenges our interests”, and I never imagined that we would be gifted with such a perfectly compelling example of this proposition.
1 comments
Author