Steve Schear wrote:
This may not be as much a blow to free speech as an opportunity to promote the civic virtue of psuedo-anonymous speech. Cypherpunks should focus on how whistle-blowers can use available technology to authenticate themselves to reporters and secretly correspond to help the press investigate and corroborate the story without having to come forward and expose themselves to presecution.
Agreed. What has evolved in recent years is a watering-down of whistleblower information by media eager to show it is responsible if not intimidated by administration threats and bluffs. Witness the NSA spying self-censorship by the NY Times and others while touting brave challenges to authority. Whistleblowers are being whipsawed by allurements to tell all with identity protected and then betrayed by editorial (advertising, investment) policy to not go too far in alarming the populace (spooking advertisers and investors). An underground (black) press is more trustworthy providing you can tell which are honeypots and fake pederasts and which are willing to take extreme measures rather than reveal sources. Willingness to go to jail is no longer a reliable test of journalistic reliability, it has become a promotional gimmick not to be believed. The fashion to "grant anonymity" by the media to whistleblowers presumes to grant too much authority to the media without it having demonstrated it is willing to risk as much as the whistleblower -- protect thine own ass or better: run your own medium.