[Clips] Court rules no whistle-blower free-speech right

[John Young]

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.