Wow... George Orwell Would Be Proud... The "Free Flow" Of Information Act...

[JDPriestly]

174. Those parts that would limit in any way the freedom of the press are unconstitutional

Abridge means limit among other things.

So if the shield laws protect the freedom of the press, they are constitutional. If not, they are not. It's quite simple really.

If my 10-year-old wants to get her friends together in the summer and create a neighborhood newspaper in which they write the truth about what is going on, they enjoy freedom of the press.

If I write on the internet about some scandal in town that I know about, I am exercising free speech and freedom of the press. We should all be free to obtain information about almost anything. And the almost should be narrowly defined so as to promote freedom, not censorship.

In the days of Wilhelm Reich (at worst, kind of a crazy guy -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Reich), back in the days when Lady Chatterley's lover could not be published because it was considered to be pornography (under Controversy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lady_Chatterley%27s_Lover), the freedom of speech was narrowly defined. We grew up in this country. We realized that we could not censor speech in that way.

At this time, the Congress and the executive and national security parts of our government want to use the secrecy laws to silence criticism of our government and its overbearing policies around the world. We are not allowed to know about the NSA surveillance and collection of our metadata because it is reminiscent if not the expression of a police state, far worse than even the police states of Stalin or of East Germany. Far more intrusive, far more inclusive of information about so many Americans.

The First Amendment in its many protections was written and adopted precisely in order to prevent a US government from censoring us and attempting to control us politically in the very ways that our government now is doing it.

The interpretation of the First Amendment depends of course on the Supreme Court doing the interpreting. I do not expect much of our current bunch on that Court, but I hope that in the future we will get some less rigid ideologues who will be able to see what is going on, how we are facing a power grab more aggressive than any we have yet seen in the US.

I think that the internet will be instrumental in awakening Americans to the loss of their political liberty. And of course, that is why the NSA has the internet under surveillance.

My political views are not all that radical, but I do understand the risks to the First Amendment because of my life experiences and my academic work. It is the bulwark of our personal freedom. We cannot allow it to be narrowed to meaningless.