Exposing Public Wickedness Is More American Than Apple Pie by Robert Scheer

[xchrom]

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2014/01/07-3


A demonstrator in Sau Paulo, Brazil shows discontent against his government’s rejection of National Security Agency leaker Edward Snowden’s asylum application in this July photo. (Photo: AP/Andre Penner)

t’s the revolt of the geeks. Edward Snowden is John Peter Zenger digitized, a post-Internet free-press hero soaring above the security obsessions of the past decade to assert the inalienable requirements of individual sovereignty in a wired world.

It was Zenger whose journalistic efforts to expose the wrongdoing of a colonial governor appointed by the crown landed him in jail facing the charge of “seditious libel,” quite similar to that brought against Snowden for exposing the NSA’s illegal spying.

Their defense is the same: True patriotism demands a vigilant confrontation with government infamy. “I know not what reason is,” Zenger published in his defense back in 1734, “if sapping and betraying the liberties of a people be not treason.” After Zenger spent more than eight months in jail, a jury of his peers exonerated him and his cry for an unfettered free press came to be enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.

The patriotic ideology that drives Snowden is a throwback to that innate American sense of personal liberty in the face of government excess for which Zenger stood. In every interview Snowden has relied on the simple notion that informed the founders of our nation regarding the primacy of truth in public discourse.

[Triana]

1. Nowdays, the media is "free" to lie/cover up, distort or ignore stories, and corporate excess

is as big or a bigger problem as gov't excess is (in regards to NSA spying - in other ways, we could use more gov't).

[L0oniX]

2. You measure a democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom

it gives its assimilated conformists.- Abbie Hoffman

Become an internationalist and learn to respect all life. Make war on machines. And in particular the sterile machines of corporate death and the robots that guard them. - Abbie Hoffman

The guy that wrote "Steal This Book".

[progressoid]

3. Scheer rocks.