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The Internet Government The Media United States Politics

US Spy Agencies See Bloggers as Journalists 77

Posted by Zonk from the at-least-somebody-cares dept.
Sniper223 writes with a link to ABC's Blotter blog. That site observes that at least in the realm of US intelligence gathering, the 'are bloggers journalists' question is already decided. "Despite the rap that bloggers simply 'bloviate' and 'don't try to find things out,' as conservative newspaper columnist Robert Novak once sniffed, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National Security Agency (NSA) have altered policies to indicate they're taking blogs seriously, and a growing number of public offices are actively reaching out to the blogosphere. The CIA recently updated its policies on Freedom of Information Act requests to allow bloggers to qualify for special treatment once reserved for old-school reporters. And last August, the NSA issued a directive to its employees to report leaks of classified information to the media — "including blogs," the order said."
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US Spy Agencies See Bloggers as Journalists More

US Spy Agencies See Bloggers as Journalists

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  • ... is that a good thing or a bad thing?

    I do know there are few bloggers worse than the vast majority of Croatian journalists; I can't say much about the rest of the world.

    • there are few bloggers worse than the vast majority of Croatian journalists;

      My experience tells me that journalists are seldom better than the newpaper they work for, so I think you will find that it's the management that is lacking. Taking it futher it's probably the public that doesn't care about good news. But this is true all over, the quality of new papers sinks because there are less people that care about reading a couple of thousand words on a subject.

      Though the quality of blogs just goes up, with

      • Re:With more people there will be more quality stu (Score:1, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Though the quality of blogs just goes up, with more people there will be more quality stuff.

        There will be more people writing quality stuff, sure... but there will be more people writing the same old my-boss-sucks-donkey-cock-why-is-life-unfair-never -buying-from-circuit-city-again-microsoft-equals-s atan-and-RMS-is-great-in-bed-i-hate-commuting-i-ne ed-coffee crap. Both will increase - it'll still be hard to find the good stuff in a sea of crap.

    • ... is that a good thing or a bad thing?
      What, can't bring yourself to believe that something went right for a change?

      Yeah, me neither.
    • Well, there are quality bloggers. But usually for niche topics. They usually have very deep understanding in one, and only one, topic. Especially in topics not covered by mainstream media you have a fair lot of high quality bloggers.
      • And that is one of the things these guys, the CIA and NSA, at least used to be good at, taking in tons of information published and analyzing each journalist's degree of authority and reliability and in what subjects. Some will always be better at seeing little things and connecting dots that seem meaningless to everyone else and others will follow the herd. I like reading Robert X. Cringly over at PBS, once in a while He sees things that everybody elses misses, but when he's wrong he's way wrong.
        • He sees things that everybody elses misses, but when he's wrong he's way wrong.

          Very true, but IMO it's because he likes to think big. Much better than John "Why doesn't everybody capitulate to the MS monopoly already, dammit?" Dvorak.

    • It's good and bad (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Good because maybe they'll finally get the rights and protections everyone so rightly deserves.

      Bad because it only further validates that you can only be a journalist (and thus have those previously mentioned rights and protections) if the federal gov'ment says you are a journalist.

  • Not special (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Ckwop ( 707653 ) * on Sunday August 12, 2007 @06:14AM (#20201929) Homepage

    Despite the rap that bloggers simply 'bloviate' and 'don't try to find things out,' as conservative newspaper columnist Robert Novak once sniffed.

    The greatest strength of the web is that anyone can publish to a worldwide audience. The greatest weakness of the web is that anyone can publish to a worldwide audience. However, this is only a minor weakness. I'm not forced at gun point to read everybody else's blogs, I get to pick and choose what I read and when I read it.

    And this is what the old media don't like about the rise of the blog. They no longer get to control content and the blogs are eating in to what used to be their advertising revenue.

    And last August, the NSA issued a directive to its employees to report leaks of classified information to the media -- "including blogs,"

    A leak, however it happens, is a leak. I don't think the fact they mentioned blogs means much. If people started leaking by carrier pigeon I'm sure that would get included in such a directive as well.

    Simon.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rtb61 ( 674572 )
      By far the worst thing about bloggers as far as 'main stream' mass media is, bloggers directly targeting their advertising as news marketing stream.

      With bloggers routinely tearing down marketing B$ being presented as true news, not only is that source of revenue drying up, the backlash from readers also kills future subscriptions.

      As for 'foreign' to US bloggers, this means the will have to be extremely careful when they choose whether or not to travel to the US. Strip searched, probed, followed by exten

    • If people started leaking by carrier pigeon I'm sure that would get included in such a directive as well.

      I don't have to work in the intelligence community to tell you that a leaking carrier pigeon is never good.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Goaway ( 82658 )

      I'm not forced at gun point to read everybody else's blogs, I get to pick and choose what I read and when I read it.
      And if you're like most people in the "blogosphere", you will pick and choose those who you already agree with, turning the whole thing into one big echo chamber where everybody's prejudices and preconceived notions are only ever reinforced and never challenged.

      No, thanks.
      • Great point, this is the same as people on the right reading right-wing newspapers (and vice versa for the left), they only ever read what they want to read and everyone ends up more entrenched on the right or the left without ever questioning what they think.

        It's difficult but I try to spend some time reading from (decent) news sources on the other side of the spectrum from my own views. Ironically that just reinforces my view that trying to solve everything in the world by being only 'left-wing' or 'righ
  • ...by CIA and NSA. I'm just a harmless jackass. No need to pay any attention. Nor to wiretap me.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by uolamer ( 957159 ) *
      ...by CIA and NSA. I'm just a harmless jackass. No need to pay any attention. Nor to wiretap me. same goes for me. I really dont care much about wiretapping and all the stuff that much since it doesnt effect me and i just blend into the masses. I hope they have a way to filter out all the encrypted bittorrent and other traffic i do tho. It couldnt have been good for them with all torrent and many other p2p programs almost all using encryption.

    • Boo fucking hoo (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Waaaah!!! I'm a foreigner and teh big bad NSA is spying on all the phone calls I've been making to the remote tribal regions of Pakistan! Waaaahhh!!! Who will be soft-headed enough to take up my cause? I know - well-to-do liberals who have a nihilist view of the world! Their overblown sense of self-importance and misplaced self-righteous outrage might be able to be used to make them think that someone actually cares enough about them to listen in on them dictating a grocery list to their gay lover over

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by tmk ( 712144 )
        Incidently my posting was meant to be funny.


        If you want to be serious about it: my government does not feed me or pay for my meds. And it is not the US government. Even though US security agencies have the possibility to wiretap some of my calls [wikipedia.org].

      • The US government feeds you and pays your meds?

  • So there is the real reason (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Opportunist ( 166417 ) on Sunday August 12, 2007 @07:02AM (#20202133)
    They don't want more "free speech" or more information protection. Quite the opposite.

    The reason is simply that they want people to tell when they have inside knowledge. Without protection, people would beat around the bush until someone from law enforcement picks it up and starts looking into it, all without the blogger actually being responsible for it. He just posted hints and allegations.

    With protection, he'll simply state the fact that something's going wrong in a company. This allows more efficiency. To prosecure or to cover up, depending on circumstances...

  • ... for this is something along the lines of: "Hey, if we recognise them as journalists, and give them equal access, maybe they'll regurgitate the same junk we feed the mass media."

    Please excuse my cynicism of an organisation (i.e. the CIA) that relies [educate-yourself.org] on disinformation [csmonitor.com], propaganda [commondreams.org], and psychological warfare [kimsoft.com], and uses the mass media [amazon.co.uk] and journalists [wikipedia.org] to spread it.

    • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      "Please excuse my cynicism of an organisation (i.e. the CIA) that relies on disinformation, propaganda, and psychological warfare, and uses the mass media and journalists to spread it."

      Ummmm......Aren't those the same type of tactics all other countries spook agencies employ?
      Intelligence agencies, regardless of country, regularly employ dirty tricks to get the information or outcome they desire. What makes people think the CIA have to be above these types of things?

      In the spy world there are nasty, dirty t
      • "Please excuse my cynicism of an organisation (i.e. the CIA) that relies on disinformation, propaganda, and psychological warfare, and uses the mass media and journalists to spread it." And I suppose you ask poker players to show their hands before you place a bet? Those dirty games the CIA play are just the thing that keep our enemies guessing about our stregnths and weakness. I'm quite glad to know that there are people still willing to lie to the media, since the medialies to us. I'm trying to figure
  • That this tautology can be considered news is perhaps more interesting.
  • Given what the "intelligence" services think of real journalists, I wouldn't get too excited about them lumping bloggers in with them if I was a blogger.

    • Re:No compliment (Score:4, Insightful)

      by GPL Apostate ( 1138631 ) on Sunday August 12, 2007 @08:47AM (#20202541)
      The concept of the 'real journalist' is just a modern construct, however. Up until the late 20th century, people reported on the news and they rose through the ranks through news organizations. There was no select cadre of 'journalists' who were professionally trained to 'report the news.' Many of the historic classic 'reporters' started out in the news industry as copy boys and clerks.

      These days, you flunk out of calculus, decide you can't be an engineer, and the English department is too snooty (you'd have to READ BOOKS and all that awful stuff), so you transfer to J-School. And become part of the 'News Elite.'

      Thank goodness that whole sheen is melting away.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by bigpat ( 158134 )
        I agree.

        And wouldn't the original meaning of "journalist" be more akin to "blogger" than "reporter" anyway. I could see "reporter" or "investigative reporter" being a label for someone who actually fact checks and takes an unbiased tone in their reporting of stories, but to write in a "journal" which is the word at the root of "journalist" is no different that to write in a log, which is at the root of "blog" (being a contraction of "web log"). Journalism and blogging should contain some personal viewpoin

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Tiro ( 19535 )

        The concept of the 'real journalist' is just a modern construct, however.

        Same as the concept of the "real biologist" or the "real computer scientist"

        These days, you flunk out of calculus, decide you can't be an engineer, and the English department is too snooty (you'd have to READ BOOKS and all that awful stuff), so you transfer to J-School. And become part of the 'News Elite.'

        I know a lot of people at the Medill school of journalism, and I can assure you the vast majority of these people could handle a yea

        • The only difference is that today there is so much competition for jobs that the real full-time copy editors don't usually get a chance to advance until they get more credentialed

          Loud Knocking On Door

          Sir! May we see your credentials??

  • And last August, the NSA issued a directive to its employees to report leaks of classified information to the media -- "including blogs," the order said

    The NSA cares when the information leaks and becomes publicly known. I don't think they really care what credentials the person that published the information has. They don't define bloggers as journalists,but rather define bloggers as another group that might disseminate classified information, and therefore should be watched.

  • Bloviate? (Score:5, Funny)

    by GuldKalle ( 1065310 ) on Sunday August 12, 2007 @09:02AM (#20202609)
    At first i thought it was a blogging-related buzzword run amok, but apparently it is a real word.

    You learn something every day.
  • ... any idiot with a calculator is an engineer and any idiot with a screwdriver is a mechanic.

    "Any idiot with a computer" is NOT a journalist.

    If a blogger is willing to go to jail to protect his sources, he might be a journalist. If a blogger makes sure he has corroboration of a story from more than one independent source before publishing it, he might be a journalist. If a blogger refuses to publish innuendo ("how do we know he's not a child-molester?"), he might be a journalist.
    • I hate to break it do you, but not all "journalists" do those, either.

      Or do you really think that papers like The Sun or the New York Post are fact-checked?
      • I think you meant to say:

        Or do you really think that papers like The Sun or the New [wikipedia.org] York [wikipedia.org] Times [wikipedia.org] are fact-checked?

      • You're perfectly right.

        Journalists are only journalists if they are approved and licensed [slashdot.org] according to state and national registry laws that make them immune from prosecution from certain crimes that would be illegal in us "citizens".

        Hmm... State "ok"ed journalism. Where does that sound like?

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by EWAdams ( 953502 )
        What the Sun and the New York Post do isn't journalism. It's entertainment. So are most blogs. Actually, I'll go farther; most blogs are that form of self-entertainment known as masturbation.

    • When "fake but accurate" is OK for the top end... (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      When "fake but accurate" is acceptable to the highest, most successful journalists, you better believe that there are some real idiots in the dregs of the profession.

      Because your standards for a blogger to be a journalist are higher than Dan Rather could meet, are higher than the the reporters who caved and revealed their sources in the Plame affair, and they're higher than those "journalists" at The New Republic who swallowed Scott Thomas Beauchamp's fantasies hook, line, and sinker, never bothering to cor
    • So you're saying that, when Robert Novak was alive, he wouldn't have qualified as a journalist?

  • Men in Black all over again (Score:3, Funny)

    by notnAP ( 846325 ) on Sunday August 12, 2007 @09:10AM (#20202659)
    KAY: Let's check the hot sheets.

    Grabs a tabloid

    JAY: These are the hot sheets?
    KAY:Best damn investigative reporting on the planet.

  • Wow. Opinion being treated as fact. That's a new one for this administration. But there's certainly some opportunities here. How about a blog describing Alberto Gonzales homosexual adventures with a known Al-Queda operative living in his basement, complete with photoshopped pix? How about blogging the truth behind Dick Cheney's rumored drug addiction and child molestation tendencies? And Condoleezza Rice's three abortions and stem-cell derived facial treatments (funded by Ansar al-Islam)? All these accusations can be proven via anonymous sources whispering pseudo-facts. Truth is in the eye of the beholder, or so it seems.
    • What?! You mean that DailyKos news article isnt true?!?

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by cbacba ( 944071 )
      Nothing new about that. Half the journalists around on the national scene are nothing but leftist democrat political operatives AND have worked full time in that capacity on and off for years - from bill moyers, ace dirty campaigner for lbj in the 60s, to georgie step-on-all-of-us of the former clinton regime there are few if any unbiased ones out there. As for the supposed equal and balanced flip side, Novak and Buchanan may be the intelectual balance of the rest of the other side, but they are most cert
  • DOD, CIA, NSA ... all should now know (by 2000 a/o now) that there are many kinds of filters on the internet.

    Keeping track of journalists' content is (I suspect) legal under the USA Constitution, but I wounder if some agencies will try to recruit/track or spy on some individuals under this new "journalists" ploy.

    Some blogs, wikis, portals ... have more reliable (even by guesses) actionable information then others, some users/aliases that prove to be of consistent intelligence analyst value, will be of inter
  • So does that mean bloggers will have to apply for a "journalist's visa" or face deportation on enterting the US?
    (The US being one of a handful of countries requiring it, the others being Iran, North Korea, Zimbabwe, and Cube)
    Source: Guardian [guardian.co.uk]
  • My blog was visited by wallwhale-pub.fda.gov earlier this year, shortly after I first started it and began making "dissident" remarks. I learned soon after that I wasn't the only one.

    • That would be a pretty dumb thing to do for a federal agency. Normally, they'd use IPs mapped to innocuous .com addresses. If they're using their "real" (as in: official) DNS PTRs, it's probably NOT meant as surveillance, but as random noise like we get from everywhere... unlikely something targetted.

      If you have detailed logs (not just summaries), you may be able to analyze where this bot came from, and what pages it started crawling.

  • US Spy Agencies See Bloggers as Journalists

    I'd say "US Spy Agencies See Bloggers as Occasionally-Useful Sources of Intel(ligence.)"
    • The following is a standard preface. Forget about that parchment stored in helium gas. Forget about that bronze bitch in the harbor. These were only to lure people in to chase their dreams. In that process the security infrastructure was built. Now it is complete and operational, therefore the lures have become obsolete.

      Let them use the word 'journalist' for to them it is a code word. Slashdotters know better. This sort of thing involves first principles of civic order. To any government, a person who speak

  • No. (Score:1)

    by AP31R0N ( 723649 )
    Bloggers are not journalists. A journalist is a journalist. Some teen expressing an opinion, no matter how well informed and thought out, is not a journalist. Otherwise, everyone with a net connection is a journalist and the term loses meaning. A journalist is accountable to someone, a boss, an editor. Bloggers can lose their accounts (and then get another), but an unethical journalist can be black balled out of the industry. Journalists are paid. Blogging is a hobby. Some bloggers are really smart

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