Hooray! The UK still loves us and resumes sharing intelligence.
So… he… and everyone at 1600… they’re too stupid to have made that happen?
It may also not surprise you that all of your suspicions are completely wrong.
As a Brit living in the US it always amazes the amount of detail that is released by the press during high profile criminal cases. This is not normal in the UK. In fact the kind of really detailed revelations about on going court cases that seem to the the bread and butter of US TV news, would be sub judice in the UK (and eligible for prosecution for contempt of court).
So it’s possible that the US officials involved were just doing what they usually do if this was a US case and keeping the press up to date on the case. That said whoever leaked this was fairly high up in the US intelligence community, not a small town sheriff, so should have known better.
That seems to be a likely explanation. The news media cultivate relationships with people like this, and it may not have seemed all that significant to them. Hopefully a few wrists have been slapped and they will be a little more sensitive to the needs of their allies in future.
In the UK the government can issue a D-Notice, which is an official request to news editors to not publish information with national security implications.
Of course they can — and for that matter back in the day they closed down an Alternative magazine called OZ for indecency ( I think ) — that doesn’t mean a D-Notice shuts down the entire newspaper or even inconveniences it’s operations.
And editors were free to risk imprisonment by ignoring the notices, which they sometimes did.
Where Oh where have the Great Spy Scandals of the past gone ? Even the pallid and unlikely present Russian Trump Affair seems feeble compared to the great days of the Cheka/OGPU/NKVD/GRU/KGB, the Abwehr/Gestapo, MI5/MI6/SIS, FBI/CIA and a cast of thousands. The most fervent of such attackers seem flaccid and dilettante compared to the great accusers of the 20th century.
Actually, I was wrong: editors cannot even be punished for ignoring D-Notices, they are voluntary.
It has been my experience that the exact opposite is true. They (the media) are very good about anything that may jeopardize security, or needs to be close-hold.
This is pretty typical of the relationship between the government and media in the UK. Basically a bunch of “gentleman’s agreements” about what should and should not be published, compliance was helped by the fact that historically the UK press was run by a small group of literal “press barons”, who ran in the same social circles (went to the same gentleman’s clubs, etc) as the political leadership.
There may not be legal repercussions of ignoring a D-Notice, but Lord Whathisname-Smythe who owns the paper in question would suffer a far worse fate, the disapprobation of the chaps at the Aethenaum Club. So it is not going to happen very often.
How the system is holding up in these days of multi-national media conglomerates I am not sure.
The press everywhere depend on ‘sources’. If they betray confidences or refuse to cooperate with the authorities there is a serious risk that their sources would dry up. If the government asks; they usually comply out of self interest.
(Hence what I posted prior. One poisoned apple that brings a Credible government down on the press.
One bad apple with just enough poison to start some anti-press legislation from some smirking Beltway Think Tank scum.)
But No… the GOP is too Stupid to think of this… :dubious:
There are several basic reasons why important things get leaked. There’s purposeful skulduggery (misdirection and political scheming, such as the Hillary sabotage leaks ), revenge (the Plame incident), and then there’s human character defects.
A lot of what’s getting leaked these days, is due to the last thing. These include the egotism-mixed-with-thoughtlessness of Trumps mega-leaks, there’s competition between “news” outlets for “scoops,” and there’s the ego’s of the secret leakers themselves.
A lot of the time, people in the know will leak things just because they are so excited that they can. This is probably the cause of more headaches for security-minded people than any other cause for leaks, because that’s where the least predictable and preventable leaks occur.
Oh, and then there is the “I didn’t realize that I shouldn’t tell anyone” leaks. There are lots of those, too.
Have you listened to the NY Times editor being interviewed by the BBC? He was completely unapologetic and said that:
a) the photos had been classified at a low level (lets assume Secret, he didn’t say) and so they were available to literally thousands of people in the US.
b) he never assumes the police are telling the truth when they tell him the information has to remain confidential. He demands proof. He will withhold if he is satisfied with the proof, but he doesn’t take the government’s word for it
c) the NY Times does this regularly, after 9/11 and after the Boston Marathon bombings were two examples he gave.
d) he would do it again in a heartbeat.
I suspect that a) above has been fixed and that is why the Brits are willing to share. Of course the whole point of sharing is to get lots of eyes on the evidence to collect ideas. Which is somewhat constricted by making the evidence TS, but even if TS gets circulated, I suspect people take it seriously enough not to share with their friendly neighborhood reporter, unlike Secret or Confidential.
There is a problem with levels of secrecy. If you are not careful, everything the government does, gets labelled ‘secret’. Then anything that is *really *secret has to be labelled ‘top secret’ and so on. If everything is secret, it loses meaning, so those with access see it as not important.
yeah. This whole incident, as I’ve said, has really got me spinning. My default opinion is that information is good; secrets are bad. And, like the NYT editor, I dont trust that the police are looking out for the welfare of the public in matters like these. They’re trying to do their jobs with the least amount of hassle, and I really don’t care how much hassle the police have to endure…
On the other hand, even though secrets are bad, not all information is good. And it seems that, more and more, news outlets are not taking the time to actually and accurately assess whether or not the information they hold should be disseminated and if so, when.
I do not work at a newspaper or broadcast or cable news station, so I dont know how much information they hold onto on a daily basis. But, as a consumer of their product, I see, with seemingly greater frequency, information that is sensational, fake, and sometimes flat out wrong. I get the impression that these outlets feel its more important to be first and sensational than to be accurate and not reckless.
mc
You might if it enabled a bomb-maker to keep one jump ahead of them.
that’s my whole point! I dont care how hard the police’s job is, but in this particular case, I can see that ceding to the police could be in the best interests of the general population.
Sometimes it’s a fine line between fighting the power and jeopardizing public safety.
mc
I am also generally of the opinion that the US has a more health attitude towards freedom of speech than the UK (I think the US constitution is objectively better than the European equivalents).
But I really don’t think the way US news paws over every last salacious detail of horrible high profiles crimes (details that would not be released publicly outside a courtroom, or at all, in the UK) is good for society. I think it hurts both the press (releasing the latest awful tidbit your law enforcement source just fed you replaces actual journalism) and the courts (the court of public opinion inevitably adversely effects the operation of the actual courts)
Certainly the latter makes us much more cautious about what’s published about ongoing investigations and upcoming cases - “trial by media” and the risk of someone arguing they couldn’t get a fair trial because of prejudicial prior reporting. It would be hard to argue that that does much, if anything, to elevate the standards of the lower levels of British journalism*, but on the whole we are accustomed to assume trials will be untainted by prior publicity.
**You cannot hope
to bribe or twist,
thank God! the
British journalist.
But, seeing what
the man will do
unbribed, there’s
no occasion to.*." (Humbert Wolfe).