Obama's efforts to control leaks 'most aggressive since Nixon', report finds | Hacker News Reader

Obama's efforts to control leaks 'most aggressive since Nixon', report finds

theguardian.com

42 points1337biz11 comments

> The report said that White House officials "strongly objected" to accusations that they did not favour disclosure, and cited statistics showing that Obama gave more interviews in news, entertainment and digital media in the first four plus years iin office than President George W Bush and Bill Clinton did in their respective first terms, combined.

What a bunch of crap. Cherry-picked QA sessions are wholly irrelevant to policy transparency and accountability.

This is a very interesting quote from the article:

> The CPJ has made several recommendations to the administration, including [...] to guarantee that journalists will not be at risk from prosecution for receiving confidential and/or classified information.

Recently there has been a lot of rustling about redefining who are journalists and restricting/eliminating protections of "illegitimate" journalists.

Surely this quote will run directly contrary to who can be considered a journalist, especially since Senator Feinstein (of pro-surveillance notoriety) has come out against the notion that anybody with blog should be afforded the same legal protections as "legitimate" journalists.

Or, more to the point, anybody with a blog could be provided legal immunity after having been recipient of classified information for the purposes of journalistic publication.

Might it be that they need to keep things secret with greater effort than ever before because it's harder than ever to keep things secret?

Furthermore, Obama is a very image-conscious guy, so it's difficult to determine if he's sacrificing transparency in some regards for public image reasons or something else.

image conscious, control-freak, say what you will. There are many ways to view this issue. We are in a time where there are so many sources of information it is hard for governments to hide it from their people, the more unpopular one gets the more likely there will be people to uncover stuff.

plus, we really didn't have this level of investigative ability before, whose to say Johnson, or even a war time President like Roosevelt didn't put more effort into it?

Perhaps as a people we have finally grown up and realized its not all what we were lead to believe. All those off hand jokes about the "man" have some basis in truth.

We're from the government, we're here to help. Funny how they know when and what.

This isn't just Obama. This is the new form of management. It is control-the-message-at-all-costs and treat-the-plebes-like-the-animals-they-are.

It's happening in corporations, politics, colleges/universities, etc. It has been in place for some time, but not to the extent that it is now. It's continued pervasiveness into our culture is likely one of the root cause of so much that is problematic in these institutions today.

I would be interested in reading about this if you're referring to any articles in particular, especially if they offer advice on how to personally escape that trend in order to not get caught up in it all

But..but.. he's all hopey-changey! How can this be? /sarcasm

Transparency!

The DARPA ADAMS project is doing a lot of research in this domain. Many of the papers being published by the researchers are public if anyone wants more info on how this detection is done.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anomaly_Detection_at_Multiple_S...

And here I was thinking that I had left /r/politics behind on reddit.

Considering /r/politics typically sides with Obama or the left I'd say the conversation is quite different here on HN. Seems to be pretty level headed arguments/points being made on the majority of political posts here.

The point is that this type of stuff doesn't belong here regardless of the political ideology of the article and regardless of what political ideology the majority of users here hold. This thread appears to have been flagged into oblivion, so the system worked. I complained prematurely.

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