TIME Magazine's cover story is a journalistic, moral and logical disaster. It pictures hacktivist Aaron Swartz, NSA whistleblowers Edward Snowden & WikiLeaks defendant Bradley Manning under the screaming words, "THE INFORMERS."
It equates whistleblowers to spies, playing into the government's ill-advised, overzealous war on whistleblowers, and information more generally, using the Espionage Act bludgeon (and its cyber counterparts like the Computer Fraud Abuse Act) to prosecute people who reveal things the government doesn't like, or worse, are illegal.
The article starts with the government's narrative, calling the NSA's recently-revealed PRISM a
system that has been approved by Congress and two Presidents, under the close monitoring of federal courts.
It fails to mention that all the uproar is over the fact that PRISM violates both the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and Patriot Act's section 215. The President may approve, but Congress isn't fully in the know (only the Intelligence Committees do), and the federal courts have heard none of the lawsuits over this such dragnet domestic surveillance because the administration shuts them down with the State Secrets act or says the plaintiffs don't have standing.
Whistleblowers are always vilified as out for profit, fame, revenge, or self-aggrandizement. Shoot the messengers rather than listen to the message. While this noxious article paints Manning, Swartz and Snowden as a "new breed of radical technophiles," it should be remembered that "The Whistleblowers" were TIME's Persons of the Year in 2002.
Those whistleblowers included FBI whistleblower Coleen Rowley, who had this to say about the "informer" Snowden:
Isn't it sad that we have to have an American person of conscience truth-teller flee to a foreign country to reveal unconstitutional actions on the part of their government.
Watch the full video here: