What is espionage? “The act of obtaining, delivering, transmitting, communicating, or receiving information about the national defense with an intent, or reason to believe, that the information may be used to the injury of...”
And, what’s a journalist? Someone who publishes information/analysis. Some focus more on information-gathering, and then publish their discoveries. Others focus more on promoting a specific narrative, leaving information-gathering as a secondary concern. But a journalist who happens to obtain or publish information against their nation’s interest is not automatically a spy.
You may choose to count saboteurs and assassins as spies, contrary to the dictionary definition, but consistent with popular usage. If you do, these represent a vanishingly small proportion of the overall number of spies, and are not germane to most discussions of espionage laws (laws against murder, theft, destruction of property, etc are not particularly controversial.)
For the most part, spies gather information and publish to a small audience. They are, essentially, doing journalism for a specific group and refraining from broader publication of their work.
The second most common espionage activity is propaganda—essentially journalism with a bias that is paid for by a foreign power. The audience may again be limited, as in spies dedicated to propagandizing only specific useful targets. But the goal is the transmission of information (false or true) rather than the gathering of information.
What distinguishes espionage from ordinary journalism is that the spy is paid by (or has her loyalty otherwise secured by) a power (nation, corporation, or other conspiracy) that we regard as hostile, and is willing to violate journalistic ethics in support of that employer. Simply limiting the scope of publication does not make one a spy; nor do violations of journalistic ethics; nor does targeted propaganda. It is the motivation that makes one a spy.
For the most part, spies gather information and publish to a small audience. They are, essentially, doing journalism for a specific group and refraining from broader publication of their work.
I cannot remember ever reading the word “journalism” used to refer to the act of providing information to a small, closed audience. Publication is an essential part of journalism, not an afterthought. And nobody says that handing over a report to your superiors constitutes “publishing”.
If I watch a wealthy couple having sex for my enjoyment, I’m a voyeur. If I tell a few friends, I’m a gossip. If I tell it to the absent partner of one of them, I’m a private eye. If I tell it to the readers of the Sun, I’m a journalist.
Wikipedia: “Journalism is the practice of investigation and reporting of events, issues, and trends to a broad audience.”
M-W: (a) : the collection and editing of news for presentation through the media (b) : the public press (c) : an academic study concerned with the collection and editing of news or the management of a news medium
I agree that the practice of espionage and [investigative] journalism are pretty much identical when it comes to acquiring information. But what they then do with that information is very different and is, indeed, the very reason why two separate concepts exist in the first place.
So, if you write for a small local paper, you’re not a journalist?
If there’s a qualitative difference, it may be that anyone can access something published by a journalist, if they pay for it. Whereas you can’t buy the video feed from an Army UAV.
But if a spy sells secrets to anyone who’ll pay for them, is he/she a journalist? :)
So, if you write for a small local paper, you’re not a journalist?
More like if it’s an internal paper that only selected employees are allowed to read. A small local paper can still be read by anybody in the world.
But if a spy sells secrets to anyone who’ll pay for them, is he/she a journalist? :)
If it is broadly known that she’s willing to sell those secrets to anyone, AND if she allows the stories to become widespread i.e. everyone can buy the story, not just the highest bidder, then yes, it seems to me that she’s essentially operating a (probably) very expensive bulletin.
If you go to Washington DC, you will find a variety of newsletters with high prices and limited readership on very specialized topics involving impending government regulation. I’ve never heard it claimed that the people researching and publishing such newsletters are not journalists.
Right, so I think you are getting to the crux of the matter: where the money/motivation comes from. The kind of journalist we like gets his money/cred/etc from the audience. If he writes articles that her audience values, he does better. The audience can be broad or narrow, but the important thing is that he’d like to broaden it if she can do so without lowering prices. This model is the most ethical because it puts the audience’s and journalist’s incentives in alignment.
But it’s not the only model. For instance, many journalists get their money/motivation from the message rather than the audience. In the most extreme form, this is advertising/propaganda. Without getting that extreme, a journalist may be attempting as much to get a certain viewpoint out there (Coke is delicious, trade with China is dangerous, whatever) as to benefit her audience. She may well believe what she is saying; this makes such activities more ethical. But yellow or unethical journalism is still journalism.
A specific form of the above is espionage. If you write lots of articles for the NY Times about how important it is to invade Iran, that’s propaganda. If you do so because the Saudi government is paying you to, you’re conducting espionage. The Nazi regime paid a large number of “pacifist” authors in Europe, for instance. It’s the dissemination of information/analysis on behalf of a foreign government, and it is (and was) considered to be espionage just as information-gathering on behalf of a foreign government is espionage.
I am certainly not promoting the prosecution of Assange as a spy, or the prohibition of unethical journalism. My point is that because espionage is a form of journalism, attempts to prevent espionage are always likely to result in the censorship of articles we’d like to see permitted. Likewise, restrictions on propaganda or advertising always ends up inhibiting free speech. We should be weakening rather than strengthening such laws.
I could be wrong as I have little experience with the category, but I am under the impression that they are expected to maintain confidentiality with their clients, in a similar way to lawyers, doctors, priests and psychotherapists.
So if A hires Mr. Bogart to spy on B, and then C comes to Mr. Bogart and tells him “I’m interested in B, and a little bird told me you spied on B for someone”, basic professional ethics would require Bogart to refuse to discuss anything related to A’s case with a random stranger, potentially costing him his licence should he fail to do so (depending on what regulations apply in Bogart’s country).
With Wikileaks we might soon live in a world where the information that spies gather get read by more people than a small, closed audience.
Does that mean that those spies stop being spies?
It’s still not intended to be broadcast beyond that closed audience. Most information of that nature becomes far less useful when your opponent knows that you know.
Limiting the scope of publication the way that many (most, I think) spies do puts one well beyond what most people think of as journalists.
If, in the days before the Internet, I observe an event and then write a report about it for school, I’m publishing to a very small audience, much as any spy would. (If it’s a good report, someone other than my teacher and my parents might even read it.) But nobody thinks that I (in this fantasy a schoolchild) am a journalist.
These days, I might post my report to my blog and claim to be a citizen journalist; some people will accept this claim, while others will reject it out of hand. Even stuck with this controversy, this puts my audience (at least in the sense of the people who have the report available to them to read) far above most spies’. And even today, if I don’t put it on my blog but only turn it in to school, nobody will think that I’m a journalist.
Spies by definition are agents of foreign powers acting on your soil without proper registration—i.e., like the many representatives in embassies have registered as agents of that country and are allowed to operate on their behalf until/if expelled.
As far as Assange (IIRC) has not been in USA while the communiques were leaked, and it is not even claimed that he is an agent of some other power, then there was no act of espionage. It might be called espionage if and only if Manning was acting on behalf of some power—and even then, Manning would be the ‘spy’, not Assange.
I’m not an expert on relevant US legislative acts, but this is the legal definition in local laws here and I expect that the term of espionage have been defined a few centuries ago and would be mostly matching throughout the world.
A quick look at current US laws (http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/usc_sec_18_00000793----000-.html) does indicate that there is a penalty for such actions with ‘intent or reason to believe … for the injury of United States or advantage of any foreign nation’ - so simply acting to intentionally harm US would be punishable as well, but it’s not calling it espionage. And the Manning issue would depend on his intention/reason to believe about harming US vs. helping US nation, which may be clarified by evidence in his earlier communications with Adrian Lamo and others.
Whether Assange is intent on helping the US nation or damaging depends on how you define “the US nation”.
Assange likes the US constitution but hates the current US government.
If you try to let the government crumble with the goal of regime change to get a regime that honors the US constitution is that damaging the US nation?
Assange wrote in one of the interview that founding Wikileaks was a “forced move”.
Why is it a forced move? Because otherwise the war was lost.
Which war? http://events.ccc.de/congress/2005/fahrplan/events/920.en.html gives you the talk in the year before the founding of Wikileaks that resembles the admission that the war is lost.
It’s not really an accident that the CCC congress that happened in the last week had a keynote by a person who’s involved in Wikileaks and gave the “We lost the war”-talk I mentioned above was titled “We come in peace”: http://rop.gonggri.jp/?p=438
Then groups that challenge the status quo get generally misunderstood and the mainstream media pretends the idea that Wikileaks is simply Julian Assange and therefore ignores the intellectual environment that produced Wikileaks.
Yesterday Daniel Domscheit-Berg said that Wikileaks got 600 applications as volunteers after their talk at the CCC in 2009. A CCC foundation manges Wikileaks donations.
Even the the CCC distanced itself a bit from Wikileaks in the last year it’s still the intellectual basis from which Wikileaks rose.
A good soundbite from the keynote of the CCC:
“People ask me “Anonymous… That is the hackers striking back, right?” And then I have to explain that unlike Anonymous, people in this community would probably not issue press release with our real names in the PDF metadata. And that if this community were to get involved, the targets would probably be offline more often.”
1) There is quite a bit of journalism that has nothing to do with exposing other peoples secrets. This would include reporting on natural events (storms, snow, earthquakes, politicians lying or accepting bribes), human activities (that a murder happened, who the police claim to be interested in etc., business information (stock prices, sales, etc.)) all of which and more require no subterfuge, burglary, or other morally or legally questionable activities to learn about and create a report of.
2) Almost no espionage (as a percentage of the total amount created) is intended for eventual exposure via “the press”, be that a real press, the internets, or various video outlets. I’ve been (tangentially) in the espionage industry (providing non-espionage (and non-interesting) support to people doing electronic intelligence gathering) and I have some feel for the amount of data gathered this way. I’ve also been (at a different time) in the Media Industry (providing similar non-interesting support to a much more interesting set of artists) and there really is NO similarity between the two, other than some journalists also providing some humint to military and civilian intelligence sources. (Note, I’ve never been on the humint side and know nothing of this that isn’t already out there. It could be disinformation, it could be real.)
Very few journalists are aware and disciplined enough to be intelligence assets. Most who are are egotistical f’wits (like the aforementioned Assange) who just want more money and fame and don’t care who they kill to get it.
What Assange did was neither espionage, nor journalism. He simply accepted material someone else had stolen (Manning was the one committing espionage with the Iraq documents.) and then published it (as far as I know) unedited.
The big fallacy being committed here is that Assange is not, or at least shouldn’t be subject to US law, and as such is not covered by the Constitution. I believe our constitution to be the least-bad construction of a government yet implemented in a pluralistic society, and that in general our government is at least as transparent (given it’s size and scope) as there is.
But we do not (yet) own the world and trying to try an Australian citizen for something that isn’t clearly a crime in America (vis the pentagon papers case) and didn’t actually happen in America (unless I missed something Assange isn’t here in the states and didn’t receive the materiel here) is really a fucking stretch folks.
A US citizen cannot be tried and convicted in an Australian court for the crime of owning a handgun IN THE US, even though it would be a crime in Australia (handwaving some legal details here, the point is jurisdiction). Now, if there is a statute in Australia that makes what Assange did illegal, then THEY need to try him, and I can tell you for certain that there ain’t no constitutional protections there.
I believe our constitution to be the least-bad construction of a government yet implemented in a pluralistic society, and that in general our government is at least as transparent (given it’s size and scope) as there is.
That is… interesting. Is that a commonly held belief among citizens of your country, personal patriotism or something that non-Americans can be expected to agree with? As an outside observer I’ve been given the impression that the construction of your government is a mixture of comical, quaint and scary. It isn’t terrible but ‘best’ is a big claim to make.
Is that a commonly held belief among citizens of your country,
It’s complicated.
A similar team-affiliation notion (e.g., “America is the greatest country in the world,” etc.) is pretty common, even among people who would never actually say that out loud, but is not specifically associated with the U.S. constitution… indeed, is strongly held among many Americans who don’t have a clear grasp of the difference between our constitution and various other elements of our government.
I suspect this is equally true for a great many countries. Team affiliation is something humans are good at.
OTOH, there’s a kind of fetishism that ensues around the Constitution as a document, wherein all endorsed things and no rejected things are attributed to it, even by people who have never read the document itself. So it’s not always easy to tell what people believe about the country, what they believe about the government, and what they believe about the constitution, or when they are even drawing a distinction.
There’s also a more narrowly targeted belief that the U.S. constitution is exceptionally least-bad as national constitutions go. My unreliable sense is that this is believed by many people who would not describe U.S. political institutions the same way (and indeed, many Americans will at the same time defend “America” and criticize “the government” in the strongest possible terms).
Wikileaks has published less than 1% of the diplomatic cables[1]. It goes thorough and removes sensitive and personal information before posting them online[2]. Except for a handful of exceptions, they only publish information that one of their newspaper partners has already published[2].
In the US we don’t say people are guilty until proven so—Manning has made no public confession, and has not been tried. He’s being held solely as the result of one man’s (Adrian Lamo’s) testimony, to the best of our knowledge[3]. That man was forcibly checked into a mental institution 3 weeks before said informing, and has made several inconsistent statements about his relationship with Manning, and what Manning told him to the press[4].
1) There is quite a bit of journalism that has nothing to do with exposing other peoples secrets. This would include reporting on natural events (storms, snow, earthquakes, politicians lying or accepting bribes).
Are you under the impression that a politician wouldn’t consider his accepting bribes to be a secret?
It’s particularly interesting because journalism and espionage are being set up as a dichotomy here even though espionage is a subset of journalism.
Spies are journalists? I think you can at most say there is a non-empty intersection of the activities of journalists and spies.
What is espionage? “The act of obtaining, delivering, transmitting, communicating, or receiving information about the national defense with an intent, or reason to believe, that the information may be used to the injury of...”
And, what’s a journalist? Someone who publishes information/analysis. Some focus more on information-gathering, and then publish their discoveries. Others focus more on promoting a specific narrative, leaving information-gathering as a secondary concern. But a journalist who happens to obtain or publish information against their nation’s interest is not automatically a spy.
You may choose to count saboteurs and assassins as spies, contrary to the dictionary definition, but consistent with popular usage. If you do, these represent a vanishingly small proportion of the overall number of spies, and are not germane to most discussions of espionage laws (laws against murder, theft, destruction of property, etc are not particularly controversial.)
For the most part, spies gather information and publish to a small audience. They are, essentially, doing journalism for a specific group and refraining from broader publication of their work.
The second most common espionage activity is propaganda—essentially journalism with a bias that is paid for by a foreign power. The audience may again be limited, as in spies dedicated to propagandizing only specific useful targets. But the goal is the transmission of information (false or true) rather than the gathering of information.
What distinguishes espionage from ordinary journalism is that the spy is paid by (or has her loyalty otherwise secured by) a power (nation, corporation, or other conspiracy) that we regard as hostile, and is willing to violate journalistic ethics in support of that employer. Simply limiting the scope of publication does not make one a spy; nor do violations of journalistic ethics; nor does targeted propaganda. It is the motivation that makes one a spy.
For the most part, spies gather information and publish to a small audience. They are, essentially, doing journalism for a specific group and refraining from broader publication of their work.
I cannot remember ever reading the word “journalism” used to refer to the act of providing information to a small, closed audience. Publication is an essential part of journalism, not an afterthought. And nobody says that handing over a report to your superiors constitutes “publishing”.
If I watch a wealthy couple having sex for my enjoyment, I’m a voyeur. If I tell a few friends, I’m a gossip. If I tell it to the absent partner of one of them, I’m a private eye. If I tell it to the readers of the Sun, I’m a journalist.
Wikipedia: “Journalism is the practice of investigation and reporting of events, issues, and trends to a broad audience.”
M-W: (a) : the collection and editing of news for presentation through the media (b) : the public press (c) : an academic study concerned with the collection and editing of news or the management of a news medium
I agree that the practice of espionage and [investigative] journalism are pretty much identical when it comes to acquiring information. But what they then do with that information is very different and is, indeed, the very reason why two separate concepts exist in the first place.
So, if you write for a small local paper, you’re not a journalist?
If there’s a qualitative difference, it may be that anyone can access something published by a journalist, if they pay for it. Whereas you can’t buy the video feed from an Army UAV.
But if a spy sells secrets to anyone who’ll pay for them, is he/she a journalist? :)
Actually the Army UAV’s publish their video steams unencrypted and make them accessible to a broad public who has a video receiver.
So they’re not spy planes; they’re journalist planes!
More like if it’s an internal paper that only selected employees are allowed to read. A small local paper can still be read by anybody in the world.
If it is broadly known that she’s willing to sell those secrets to anyone, AND if she allows the stories to become widespread i.e. everyone can buy the story, not just the highest bidder, then yes, it seems to me that she’s essentially operating a (probably) very expensive bulletin.
If you go to Washington DC, you will find a variety of newsletters with high prices and limited readership on very specialized topics involving impending government regulation. I’ve never heard it claimed that the people researching and publishing such newsletters are not journalists.
Do you need to fulfill certain requirements, other than money and interest, to be allowed to buy one?
Right, so I think you are getting to the crux of the matter: where the money/motivation comes from. The kind of journalist we like gets his money/cred/etc from the audience. If he writes articles that her audience values, he does better. The audience can be broad or narrow, but the important thing is that he’d like to broaden it if she can do so without lowering prices. This model is the most ethical because it puts the audience’s and journalist’s incentives in alignment.
But it’s not the only model. For instance, many journalists get their money/motivation from the message rather than the audience. In the most extreme form, this is advertising/propaganda. Without getting that extreme, a journalist may be attempting as much to get a certain viewpoint out there (Coke is delicious, trade with China is dangerous, whatever) as to benefit her audience. She may well believe what she is saying; this makes such activities more ethical. But yellow or unethical journalism is still journalism.
A specific form of the above is espionage. If you write lots of articles for the NY Times about how important it is to invade Iran, that’s propaganda. If you do so because the Saudi government is paying you to, you’re conducting espionage. The Nazi regime paid a large number of “pacifist” authors in Europe, for instance. It’s the dissemination of information/analysis on behalf of a foreign government, and it is (and was) considered to be espionage just as information-gathering on behalf of a foreign government is espionage.
I am certainly not promoting the prosecution of Assange as a spy, or the prohibition of unethical journalism. My point is that because espionage is a form of journalism, attempts to prevent espionage are always likely to result in the censorship of articles we’d like to see permitted. Likewise, restrictions on propaganda or advertising always ends up inhibiting free speech. We should be weakening rather than strengthening such laws.
Well, to be pedantic, doesn’t that then include your example above of private eyes?
I could be wrong as I have little experience with the category, but I am under the impression that they are expected to maintain confidentiality with their clients, in a similar way to lawyers, doctors, priests and psychotherapists.
So if A hires Mr. Bogart to spy on B, and then C comes to Mr. Bogart and tells him “I’m interested in B, and a little bird told me you spied on B for someone”, basic professional ethics would require Bogart to refuse to discuss anything related to A’s case with a random stranger, potentially costing him his licence should he fail to do so (depending on what regulations apply in Bogart’s country).
With Wikileaks we might soon live in a world where the information that spies gather get read by more people than a small, closed audience. Does that mean that those spies stop being spies?
If I send a secret report to my boss, and Mr. Smith manages to read it and publishes it on the Times, the journalist is Mr. Smith, not me,
It’s still not intended to be broadcast beyond that closed audience. Most information of that nature becomes far less useful when your opponent knows that you know.
Limiting the scope of publication the way that many (most, I think) spies do puts one well beyond what most people think of as journalists.
If, in the days before the Internet, I observe an event and then write a report about it for school, I’m publishing to a very small audience, much as any spy would. (If it’s a good report, someone other than my teacher and my parents might even read it.) But nobody thinks that I (in this fantasy a schoolchild) am a journalist.
These days, I might post my report to my blog and claim to be a citizen journalist; some people will accept this claim, while others will reject it out of hand. Even stuck with this controversy, this puts my audience (at least in the sense of the people who have the report available to them to read) far above most spies’. And even today, if I don’t put it on my blog but only turn it in to school, nobody will think that I’m a journalist.
So I don’t agree that spies are journalists.
Spies by definition are agents of foreign powers acting on your soil without proper registration—i.e., like the many representatives in embassies have registered as agents of that country and are allowed to operate on their behalf until/if expelled.
As far as Assange (IIRC) has not been in USA while the communiques were leaked, and it is not even claimed that he is an agent of some other power, then there was no act of espionage. It might be called espionage if and only if Manning was acting on behalf of some power—and even then, Manning would be the ‘spy’, not Assange.
Do you know whether that’s the definition used by the espionage act?
I’m not an expert on relevant US legislative acts, but this is the legal definition in local laws here and I expect that the term of espionage have been defined a few centuries ago and would be mostly matching throughout the world.
A quick look at current US laws (http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/18/usc_sec_18_00000793----000-.html) does indicate that there is a penalty for such actions with ‘intent or reason to believe … for the injury of United States or advantage of any foreign nation’ - so simply acting to intentionally harm US would be punishable as well, but it’s not calling it espionage. And the Manning issue would depend on his intention/reason to believe about harming US vs. helping US nation, which may be clarified by evidence in his earlier communications with Adrian Lamo and others.
Whether Assange is intent on helping the US nation or damaging depends on how you define “the US nation”. Assange likes the US constitution but hates the current US government.
If you try to let the government crumble with the goal of regime change to get a regime that honors the US constitution is that damaging the US nation?
Assange wrote in one of the interview that founding Wikileaks was a “forced move”. Why is it a forced move? Because otherwise the war was lost. Which war? http://events.ccc.de/congress/2005/fahrplan/events/920.en.html gives you the talk in the year before the founding of Wikileaks that resembles the admission that the war is lost.
It’s not really an accident that the CCC congress that happened in the last week had a keynote by a person who’s involved in Wikileaks and gave the “We lost the war”-talk I mentioned above was titled “We come in peace”: http://rop.gonggri.jp/?p=438
Then groups that challenge the status quo get generally misunderstood and the mainstream media pretends the idea that Wikileaks is simply Julian Assange and therefore ignores the intellectual environment that produced Wikileaks. Yesterday Daniel Domscheit-Berg said that Wikileaks got 600 applications as volunteers after their talk at the CCC in 2009. A CCC foundation manges Wikileaks donations.
Even the the CCC distanced itself a bit from Wikileaks in the last year it’s still the intellectual basis from which Wikileaks rose.
A good soundbite from the keynote of the CCC: “People ask me “Anonymous… That is the hackers striking back, right?” And then I have to explain that unlike Anonymous, people in this community would probably not issue press release with our real names in the PDF metadata. And that if this community were to get involved, the targets would probably be offline more often.”
That’s nonsense.
1) There is quite a bit of journalism that has nothing to do with exposing other peoples secrets. This would include reporting on natural events (storms, snow, earthquakes, politicians lying or accepting bribes), human activities (that a murder happened, who the police claim to be interested in etc., business information (stock prices, sales, etc.)) all of which and more require no subterfuge, burglary, or other morally or legally questionable activities to learn about and create a report of.
2) Almost no espionage (as a percentage of the total amount created) is intended for eventual exposure via “the press”, be that a real press, the internets, or various video outlets. I’ve been (tangentially) in the espionage industry (providing non-espionage (and non-interesting) support to people doing electronic intelligence gathering) and I have some feel for the amount of data gathered this way. I’ve also been (at a different time) in the Media Industry (providing similar non-interesting support to a much more interesting set of artists) and there really is NO similarity between the two, other than some journalists also providing some humint to military and civilian intelligence sources. (Note, I’ve never been on the humint side and know nothing of this that isn’t already out there. It could be disinformation, it could be real.)
Very few journalists are aware and disciplined enough to be intelligence assets. Most who are are egotistical f’wits (like the aforementioned Assange) who just want more money and fame and don’t care who they kill to get it.
What Assange did was neither espionage, nor journalism. He simply accepted material someone else had stolen (Manning was the one committing espionage with the Iraq documents.) and then published it (as far as I know) unedited.
The big fallacy being committed here is that Assange is not, or at least shouldn’t be subject to US law, and as such is not covered by the Constitution. I believe our constitution to be the least-bad construction of a government yet implemented in a pluralistic society, and that in general our government is at least as transparent (given it’s size and scope) as there is.
But we do not (yet) own the world and trying to try an Australian citizen for something that isn’t clearly a crime in America (vis the pentagon papers case) and didn’t actually happen in America (unless I missed something Assange isn’t here in the states and didn’t receive the materiel here) is really a fucking stretch folks.
A US citizen cannot be tried and convicted in an Australian court for the crime of owning a handgun IN THE US, even though it would be a crime in Australia (handwaving some legal details here, the point is jurisdiction). Now, if there is a statute in Australia that makes what Assange did illegal, then THEY need to try him, and I can tell you for certain that there ain’t no constitutional protections there.
That is… interesting. Is that a commonly held belief among citizens of your country, personal patriotism or something that non-Americans can be expected to agree with? As an outside observer I’ve been given the impression that the construction of your government is a mixture of comical, quaint and scary. It isn’t terrible but ‘best’ is a big claim to make.
This belief is very common among Americans.
It’s complicated.
A similar team-affiliation notion (e.g., “America is the greatest country in the world,” etc.) is pretty common, even among people who would never actually say that out loud, but is not specifically associated with the U.S. constitution… indeed, is strongly held among many Americans who don’t have a clear grasp of the difference between our constitution and various other elements of our government.
I suspect this is equally true for a great many countries. Team affiliation is something humans are good at.
OTOH, there’s a kind of fetishism that ensues around the Constitution as a document, wherein all endorsed things and no rejected things are attributed to it, even by people who have never read the document itself. So it’s not always easy to tell what people believe about the country, what they believe about the government, and what they believe about the constitution, or when they are even drawing a distinction.
There’s also a more narrowly targeted belief that the U.S. constitution is exceptionally least-bad as national constitutions go. My unreliable sense is that this is believed by many people who would not describe U.S. political institutions the same way (and indeed, many Americans will at the same time defend “America” and criticize “the government” in the strongest possible terms).
In the national religion of the United States, the Constitution is like the Bible. Everyone reveres it, few read it, and none follow it.
Wikileaks has published less than 1% of the diplomatic cables[1]. It goes thorough and removes sensitive and personal information before posting them online[2]. Except for a handful of exceptions, they only publish information that one of their newspaper partners has already published[2].
In the US we don’t say people are guilty until proven so—Manning has made no public confession, and has not been tried. He’s being held solely as the result of one man’s (Adrian Lamo’s) testimony, to the best of our knowledge[3]. That man was forcibly checked into a mental institution 3 weeks before said informing, and has made several inconsistent statements about his relationship with Manning, and what Manning told him to the press[4].
LOL, how did I miss this:
Are you under the impression that a politician wouldn’t consider his accepting bribes to be a secret?
I think it was being classed as a “natural event”.
He says that natural events are included in the category of journalism that’s not about exposing other peoples secrets....