Word: leakings
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...specific facts of this saga have not been friendly to the press's arguments. Far from keeping the government honest, the leaks or intended leaks in this tale were all part of a dizzy spin campaign in the Vice President's office. What's more, everyone involved seems to have overlooked the fact that a leak of the identity of an undercover officer can be against the law. This is a law that even most journalists think is reasonable. This law cannot be enforced if one of the parties to an illegal conversation is protected by the Fifth Amendment...
There is no holier icon in the church of the first Amendment than the anonymous leak. Ever since columnist Robert Novak published the identity of a cia officer nearly four years ago, voices of journalism have delivered sermon after sermon about the centrality of leaks not just to journalism but to democracy itself: We need leaks to keep the government honest...
...even Bob Woodward can't create a leak all by himself. It takes two. You need someone else with inside knowledge of the evildoing in question. And here is what's strange: the gospel of the leak has nothing to say about sources except that the reporter won't blab about who they are. If the boss finds out who the leakers are in some other way and fires them, or if they find themselves the subject of a gargantuan federal prosecution, they should not look to the press for sympathy...
...Even if Wikileaks is successful in posting 1.2 million documents online and protecting the identities of its leakers, a fundamental challenge remains: how to prove the documents' authenticity. Says Aftergood: "Anyone who's been in the business for any length of time knows leakers leak because they are trying to advance an agenda of their own, or because they have some personality or psychological quirk that leads them to disclose information out of official channels." Documents could easily be planted on the site by the same "corrupt" governments and corporations Wikileaks seeks to expose...
...SECOND REASON THAT INFORMATION MAY BE SEALED OFF FROM consciousness is strategic. Evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers has noted that people have a motive to sell themselves as beneficent, rational, competent agents. The best propagandist is the one who believes his own lies, ensuring that he can't leak his deceit through nervous twitches or self-contradictions. So the brain might have been shaped to keep compromising data away from the conscious processes that govern our interaction with other people. At the same time, it keeps the data around in unconscious processes to prevent the person from getting...