US spy chief Clapper defends Prism and phone surveillance

[David Guyatt]

For a politician who tried to convince Americans to elect him based on repeated pledges of unprecedented transparency and specific vows to protect "noble" and "patriotic" whistleblowers, is this unparalleled assault on those who enable investigative journalism remotely defensible? Recall that the New Yorker's Jane Mayer said recently that this oppressive climate created by the Obama presidency has brought investigative journalism to a "standstill", while James Goodale, the General Counsel for the New York Times during its battles with the Nixon administration, wrote last month in that paper that "President Obama will surely pass President Richard Nixon as the worst president ever on issues of national security and press freedom." Read what Mayer and Goodale wrote and ask yourself: is the Obama administration's threat to the news-gathering process not a serious crisis at this point?

Let's say what this is. Blaming Obama is a deflection. Obama clearly is an obedient servant of Spookdom, not the other way around. The national intelligence community is the state these days, and different political candidates are selected by them who will do their bidding. This is as true in the UK as it is in the US.