Several months ago I wrote about a speech Christiane Amanpour gave to The Committee to Protect Journalism. Today I received an email from a person who'd found that post, requesting that I connect to an article written for journalists, instructing them how to protect themselves and their sources from government spying.
I read it. It's really a primer for serious investigative journalists, and way above my pay grade, but it's chilling on many levels. Especially now, when journalism is under direct attack by Trump and his enablers, and when there's an ever-increasing accumulation of evidence of high crimes and misdemeanors, rampant in the Offal Office and Congress, we depend on reporters brave enough to continue to do their work.
And, of course, people on the inside who believe in preserving our democracy enough to take great risk in providing information. The arrest of the woman who leaked documentation of Russian efforts directly to hack polling devices reminds us of the importance. (She may not be the perfect poster child: among other things, she was pretty clumsy. She should have read the article. And it's complicated: defending leakers is problematic. But in this specific case, as Trump and Trumpists across the land pretend the Russia connections are fake news, I'm glad to have had confirmation of what I've always suspected, something deadly serious. To the Trumpophiles, of course, the leaker will be the story, not the leakage.)
Anyhow, here's a link to the article. It's pretty interesting. How frightening is it that it's now an act of extreme courage to do a job considered so essential to freedom that our founders enshrined it in the Constitution!
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