We bristle at the scent of whistle-blowers for atavistic reasons: They’ve violated the norms that bind the group together and must be scorned and punished, and their only allies are like-minded individuals who’ve deserted the pack—or joined opposing packs—and portions of the press, which occupies a floating niche somewhere between the individual and the group that allows it to thrive on such principled perfidy.

But even the press in aggregate is not a friend to whistle-blowers, as its recent treatment of Snowden attests, what with the deep dives into his teen years (including photos), his education and employment history, his reputation as a loner and a “brainiac,” his pants-down hijinks, his online scribblings, his dancer girlfriend, his predilection for (in his own words) “post-coital Krispy Kremes.” Squeezing every possible query at every known commercial database, journalists worldwide have aped the National Security Agency’s snooping skills to track down Snowden’s friends, associates, neighbors, schoolmates, relatives and colleagues to instapaint his portrait.

No matter how generously you read the team portrait, Snowden comes off as a bit of a cocky know-it-all. And how could he not? He did a bodacious, criminal thing; threatens to commit additional acts of criminal bodaciousness; and maintains the cool-customer persona in his video and print interviews. And he comes off as a little squirrelly and ego-swollen.

But what mortal wouldn’t come off a little squirrelly and ego-swollen after nonstop scrutiny by the press, even if they hadn’t leaked NSA secrets? I guarantee you that if the press ever gets around to vacuuming your every posting, scrapbooking your most dishy teen pix, and interviewing all the people in your past, it will depict a creep of some variety. Not because you’re a creep but because the language and methodology of journalism are ill-equipped to capture normalcy—even when its subjects project normalcy. Journalism is about finding flaws and magnifying them, and surely someone who would spill massive loads of state secrets must contain a few broken parts, right?

Whether Snowden is more psychologically integrated than your average 29-year-old makes for stimulating conversation and fun clicks, but it’s not really germane to the secrecy “debate” that even President Barack Obama claimed to “welcome” last week. Once we (the press and readers) exhaust ourselves on the Snowden, Up Close and Personal, angle, the debate will likely be interrupted, just as the debate about the Pentagon Papers was interrupted by the White House back in 1971, when Daniel Ellsberg dumped them to the press.

About two weeks after the New York Times began publishing the papers in June 1971, President Richard Nixon told National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger and Attorney General John Mitchell that he didn’t want Ellsberg to get a fair trial for leaking. “Let’s get the son-of-a-bitch in jail,” Nixon said. “Don’t worry about his trial. Just get everything out. Try him in the press. Try him in the press. Everything, John, that there is on the investigation, get it out. Leak it out. We want to destroy him in the press. Is that clear?”

As Tom Wells wrote in his 2001 book, Wild Man: The Life and Times of Daniel Ellsberg, “The FBI pursued leads on Ellsberg’s past, personality, and lifestyle.” The White House could easily tag Ellsberg as a sex maniac because he had loads of sex and liked to talk about it; a pervert because he collected pornography; as nuts because he saw a psychiatrist; and a swinger because, as Gay Talese wrote in Thy Neighbor’s Wife, he swung. This, of course, had nothing to do with the substance of the Pentagon Papers, but it was the weapon Nixon—who was bragging to his White House underlings that he had convicted Alger Hiss in the press “before he ever got to the grand jury”—liked to stockpile.

Nixon’s men planted with conservative columnist Victor Lasky the baseless smear that Ellsberg had given the papers to the Soviet Union, as well. In a memo to Nixon aide John Ehrlichman, White House special counsel Charles Colson wrote (pdf) of his disappointment with the response to Lasky’s column, “which got the predictable reaction because of its author,” and of the similar briefings he’d given to Howard K. Smith of ABC News and Jerald terHorst of the Detroit News to “develop the Ellsberg conspiracy.” I suspect we won’t have to wait long for the “Snowden conspiracy” to manifest itself. Just the other day, Bill Gertz of the Washington Free Beacon reported Pentagon “concerns” that Snowden might give intelligence secrets to the Chinese. (He rejects the notion that he’s a Chinese spy.)

Compare Ellsberg’s treatment to early press coverage of Snowden’s personal life, which injured his standing. Not for a moment do I allege that the Obama White House has assigned a Plumbers unit to spread the hype. I allege something much worse—the readiness of some in the press to contort into something bizarre the sort of behaviors and personal history they would shrug off as “normal” if exhibited by a family member. Is Snowden paranoid? Well, yes, they’re after him, aren’t they? Wouldn’t you be? Is Snowden a tad grandiose in his interviews? Well, yes, but if you were the leaker and had never taken media training classes, you’d probably sound grandiose in your interviews. Do his statements seem unsatisfying and inconsistent? Well, wouldn’t yours if you were attempting to describe the entirety of the national security state in such limited space?

Although Snowden has been exiled for breaking the compact he made with his employers and his government, his rebellion rings too many notes from heroic literature for us to automatically dismiss him. How many times have we read the story (or played the video game) about the brilliant and brave young man who hears the call; defies the established order; goes on a sacrificial quest to a magical place where he defeats evil monsters that menace mankind; battles madness; and after many, many tests (and at some personal loss) finally returns with a boon for all mankind? The rebel in this version even has a pole-dancing princess that he’s been separated from! Snowden combines elements of Luke Skywalker, King Arthur, Frodo Baggins, Harry Potter, Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, Jesus Christ, and Neo from The Matrix into one modern tale. Being an egomaniac and a narcissist are just part of the job description.

As a student of anime and a cultural child of the Star Wars saga, Snowden can’t help but notice that by stealing the NSA documents and flying off to Hong Kong to share them, he’s living our most enduring myths, following the instructions laid down in church, in books, at the cinema, on television, in comic books and in video games. And unlike earlier whistle-blowers, who ordinarily suffer for decades for their transgressions, Snowden appears to be working from a complete script in which he’s the ultimate victor.

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Right now I think we’re still in the “battle monsters and madness” phase. I’ll update when Edward Snowden action figures are released. Send ideas for future quests to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com. I wear a toga and sandals on my Twitter feed. Sign up for email notifications of new Shafer columns (and other occasional announcements). Subscribe to this RSS feed for new Shafer columns.

PHOTO: A bus passes by a poster of Edward Snowden, a former contractor at the National Security Agency (NSA), displayed by his supporters at Hong Kong’s financial Central district during the midnight hours of June 18, 2013, while Snowden is engaged in a live chat online believed to be in Hong Kong. REUTERS/Bobby Yip

Edward Snowden’s expansive disclosures to the Guardian and the Washington Post about various National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance programs have only two corollaries in contemporary history—the classified cache Bradley Manning allegedly released to WikiLeaks a few years ago and Daniel Ellsberg’s dissemination of the voluminous Pentagon Papers to the New York Times and other newspapers in 1971.

Leakers like Snowden, Manning and Ellsberg don’t merely risk being called narcissists, traitors or mental cases for having liberated state secrets for public scrutiny. They absolutely guarantee it. In the last two days, the New York Times’s David Brooks, Politico’s Roger Simon, the Washington Post‘s Richard Cohen and others have vilified Snowden for revealing the government’s aggressive spying on its own citizens, calling him self-indulgent, a loser and a narcissist.

Yet even as the insults pile up and the amateur psychoanalysis intensifies, keep in mind that Snowden’s leak has more in common with the standard Washington leak than should make the likes of Brooks, Simon and Cohen comfortable. Without defending Snowden for breaking his vow to safeguard secrets, he’s only done in the macro what the national security establishment does in the micro every day of the week to manage, manipulate and influence ongoing policy debates. Keeping the policy leak separate from the heretic leak is crucial to understanding how these stories play out in the press.

Secrets are sacrosanct in Washington until officials find political expediency in either declassifying them or leaking them selectively. It doesn’t really matter which modern presidential administration you decide to scrutinize for this behavior, as all of them are guilty. For instance, President George W. Bush’s administration declassified or leaked whole barrels of intelligence, raw and otherwise, to convince the public and Congress making war on Iraq was a good idea. Bush himself ordered the release of classified prewar intelligence about Iraq through Vice President Dick Cheney and Chief of Staff I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby to New York Times reporter Judith Miller in July 2003.

Sometimes the index finger of government has no idea of what the thumb is up to. In 2007, Vice President Cheney went directly to Bush with his complaint about what he considered to be a damaging national security leak in a column by the Washington Post’s David Ignatius. “Whoever is leaking information like this to the press is doing a real disservice, Mr. President,” Cheney said. Later, Bush’s national security adviser paid a visit to Cheney to explain that Bush, um, had authorized him to make the leak to Ignatius.

In 2010, NBC News reporter Michael Isikoff detailed similar secrecy machinations by the Obama administration, which leaked to Bob Woodward “a wealth of eye-popping details from a highly classified briefing” to President-elect Barack Obama two days after the November 2008 election. Among the disclosures to appear in Woodward’s book “Obama’s Wars” were, Isikoff wrote, “the code names of previously unknown NSA programs, the existence of a clandestine paramilitary army run by the CIA in Afghanistan, and details of a secret Chinese cyberpenetration of Obama and John McCain campaign computers.”

The secrets shared with Woodward were so delicate Obama transition chief John Podesta was barred from attendance at the briefing, which was conducted inside a windowless, secure room known as a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, or “SCIF.”

Isikoff asked, quite logically, how the Obama administration could pursue a double standard in which it prosecuted mid-level bureaucrats and military officers for their leaks to the press but allowed administration officials to dispense bigger secrets to Woodward. The best answer Isikoff could find came from John Rizzo, a former CIA general counsel, who surmised that prosecuting leaks to Woodward would be damn-near impossible to prosecute if the president or the CIA director authorized them.

The political uses of official leaks never goes unnoticed by the opposing party. In 2012, as the presidential campaigns gathered speed, after the New York Times published stories about classified programs, including the “kill list,” the drone program, details about the Osama bin Laden raid, and Stuxnet, all considered successes by the administration. The reports infuriated Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who essentially accused the Obama White House of leaking these top secrets for political gain.

“This is not a game. This is far more important than mere politics. Laws have apparently been broken,” McCain cried. To the best of my knowledge, no investigation of these alleged leaks to the press have been ordered or are active, and I have yet to hear Messrs. Brooks, Simon and Cohen describe these leakers of those details as self-indulgent, losers or narcissists. [Addendum, 9:24 p.m.: There is a Stuxnet investigation.]

Another variety of the political leak is the counter-leak or convenient declassification, designed to neutralize or stigmatize an unauthorized leaker. The National Journal’s Ron Fournier, a former Washington bureau chief for the Associated Press, explicitly charges the Obama administration with dispensing intelligence about the bin Laden raid to the press to “promote the president’s reelection bid.” He claims that virtually every unauthorized leak ends up being matched by the release of classified information or “authorized” leak. Indeed, immediately following Snowden’s NSA leaks, Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), the chairman of the House of Representatives Intelligence Committee, is said to have claimed NSA spying helped defeat a planned attack on the New York City subway system, although that claim is disputed.

Sometimes the counter-leak is more revealing than the leak it was intended to bury. In 2012, then-national security adviser John Brennan went a tad too far counter-leaking in his attempt to nullify an Associated Press report about the foiled underwear bomber plot. In a conference call with TV news pundits, Brennan offered that the plot could never succeed because the United States had “inside control” of it, which helped expose a double-agent working for Western intelligence. Instead of being prosecuted for leaking sensitive, classified intelligence, Brennan was promoted to director of the CIA; that’s the privilege of the policy leak.

Authorized leaks from the top aren’t the only ones that generally go unpunished. Sometimes when policy debates get driven underground by secrecy, members of the governing elite band together and tell their story to the press. The most recent example of this banding would be the 2005 stories in the New York Times about a previous secret NSA surveillance program. The Times series by James Risen and Eric Lichtblau enraged the Bush White House, but there nobody was charged with leaking because the series portrayed itself (accurately, I would guess) as the product of intense, internal government dissent. As Risen and Lichtblau wrote, nearly “a dozen current and former officials” spoke to the paper anonymously about the program “because of their concerns about the operation’s legality and oversight.”

The willingness of the government to punish leakers is inversely proportional to the leakers’ rank and status, which is bad news for someone so lacking in those attributes as Edward Snowden. But as the Snowden prosecution commences, we should question his selective prosecution. Let’s ask, as Isikoff did of the Obama administration officials who leaked to Woodward, why Snowden is singled out for punishment when he’s essentially done what the insider dissenters did when they spoke with Risen and Lichtblau in 2005 about an invasive NSA program. He deserves the same justice and the same punishment they received.

We owe Snowden a debt of gratitude for restarting—or should I say starting?—the public debate over the government’s secret but “legal” intrusions into our privacy. His leaks, filtered through the Guardian and the Washington Post, give us a once-in-a-generation opportunity to place limits on our power-mad government.

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At the top of my reading pile: “Fire James Clapper,” by @fmkaplan. Send your reading list to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com. Drink deep from my Twitter feed or not at all. Sign up for email notifications of new Shafer columns (and other occasional announcements). Subscribe to this RSS feed for new Shafer columns.

Using EFTPOS (electronic funds transfer system at point of sale) in a store in Sidney, Dec. 11, 2012.  REUTERS/Tim Wimborne

Leaks to the press, like hillside rain tugged seaward by gravity, gather momentum only if the flow is steadily replenished.

After a major leak to the Guardian‘s Glenn Greenwald resulted in a scoop Wednesday about the National Security Agency’s harvesting of phone records, reporters instantly mined their back pages for leads and rang up their sources to amplify and extend his story, and went looking for leakers of their own. In other words, the press pack prayed for rain.

But before that scoop had run its course, Greenwald (and Ewen MacAskill) went to press with another revelation about the NSA’s Prism program, which collects email, chat, VOIP conversations, file transfers, photos, videos and more from Web users. A similar Washington Post piece by Barton Gellman and documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras beat the Guardian duo by a few minutes, a downpour in a very short time. The Guardian-Post overlap was so pronounced that it’s likely the two publications were nurtured by the same source, identified in the Post as “a career intelligence officer.”

Friday afternoon, Greenwald and MacAskill dropped another bombshell about Obama’s cyberattack plans in the Guardian. These aren’t leaks. This is a flood.

Faster than you can say evaporation-condensation-precipitation, I expect this week’s exposés to produce additional investigations that will produce more leaks and further scoops about our digital records. This will now fuel new cycles of reporting, leaks and scoops — and another, and another — as new sources are cultivated and reportorial scraps gathering mold in journalists’ notebooks gain new relevance and help break stories.

Greenwald’s storm will continue to rage because, I suspect, the story won’t be limited to just phone records or Web data. Ultimately, it will be about the government’s pursuit of all the digital breadcrumbs we produce as necessary byproducts of day-to-day life — and phone records and Web data are just a small part.

Bank records, credit history, travel records, credit card records, EZPass data, GPS phone data, license-plate reader databases, Social Security and Internal Revenue Service  records, facial-recognition databases at the Department of Motor Vehicles and elsewhere, even 7-Eleven surveillance videos comprise information lodes that are of equal or greater value to the national security establishment than phone and Web files. It doesn’t sound paranoid to conclude that the government has reused, or will reuse, the interpretation of the Patriot Act it presented to the secret FISA court in its phone record and Prism data requests to grab these other data troves.

Lest I sound like a Fourth Amendment hysteric, I understand there’s nothing automatically sacrosanct about any of the digital trails we leave behind. Lawful subpoenas can liberate all sorts records about you, electronic or otherwise.

What’s breathtaking about these two government surveillance programs that the Guardian and the Washington Post have revealed is that they’re vast collections of data about hundreds of millions of people suspected of no wrongdoing and not part of any civil action. Defending the phone-record cull, National Intelligence Director James R. Clapper explained this week that smaller sets of information aren’t very useful in screening for and identifying “terrorism-related communications,” hence all must collected.

Besides, as the government and its supporters insist, phone-record metadata does not include the names of individuals or organizations connected to the phone numbers (and government eavesdropping isn’t part of the operation).

I won’t belabor the point made better in scores of venues this week about how massive phone-record sets can be manipulated to produce revelatory information about individuals. Not even a saint could resist the siren call to combine data sets and use them in impermissible ways for “the good of the people.”

Even before governments start to combine data, it knows too much about you. Once it gets started, it can know practically everything worth knowing. A former NSA employee captured the grand scheme succinctly last year when he told Wired magazine, “We are, like, that far from a turnkey totalitarian state.”

Daniel J. Solove, who has been beavering away at privacy issues for some time, addresses what he calls the “exclusion” problem posed by the government’s massing of personal data. He writes:

“Many government national-security measures involve maintaining a huge database of information that individuals cannot access. Indeed, because they involve national security, the very existence of these programs is often kept secret. This kind of information processing, which blocks subjects’ knowledge and involvement, is a kind of due-process problem. It is a structural problem, involving the way people are treated by government institutions and creating a power imbalance between people and the government. To what extent should government officials have such a significant power over citizens? This issue isn’t about what information people want to hide but about the power and the structure of government.”

Journalists love nothing more than to learn and share secrets, which, with the Guardian and the Washington Post as our guides, appear to be in ample supply.

If anything, journalists are fully vested in maintaining their constitutional rights to ask questions, associate freely, and speak and write their minds. If journalists react strongly to government intrusions — even well-meaning intrusions intended to protect us from acts of terrorism — it’s because we’re too intimate with the misuse of power and regard most government secrets as measures designed to displace freedom in favor of security.

Or as a character in David Hare’s film Page Eight put it disparagingly, “We can’t be free because we have to be safe.”

The only thing that beats leakers is a long, hard freeze. In my experience, fire beats ice every time.

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One of these days I’m going to retire my loosey-goosey Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com for a fully encrypted inbox! My Twitter feed, however, will always be public and therefore never subpoena-worthy. Sign up for email notifications of new Shafer columns (and other occasional announcements). Subscribe to this RSS feed for new Shafer columns.

PHOTO (Insert A): A man types on a computer keyboard in this Feb. 28, 2013 illustration file picture. REUTERS/Kacper Pempel/Files

New York Times Executive Editor Jill Abramson sent her pithy regrets: “We will not be attending the session at DOJ. It isn’t appropriate for us to attend an off-the-record meeting with the attorney general. Our Washington bureau is aggressively covering the department’s handling of leak investigations at this time.” The AP sent a similar snub, as did CNN, McClatchy Newspapers, the Huffington Post, CBS News, NBC News, Reuters and Fox News.

“If the government wants to justify its pursuit of journalists, they ought to do it in public,” McClatchy’s James Asher said.

What made the face-off so delicious was the way it pitted two self-righteous and pompous entities against each other. On the one side, you’ve got the government, which wanted to keep secret the thinking behind its devious — but legal — series of subpoenas and search warrants directed at journalists, while still blabbing about it. On the other, the press, which swoons for these sorts of sit-downs as long as the meeting isn’t public knowledge, because such revelation makes them look like suck-ups and collaborators, which they can be.

Had Holder stealthily invited a couple of bureau chiefs and editors over to his place for afternoon cookies and milk to ask for their help in getting out of his PR pickle — of appearing anti-press — I’m sure most would have obliged him and maintained the requested omertà. But that wasn’t the attorney general’s strategy. In order to relieve the anti-Holder political pressure the press has exerted in the past two weeks and the calls from several corners for his resignation, Holder needed to publicize the soiree. The purpose of the meeting was not to explain or apologize or promise to change Department of Justice policy. The purpose of the meeting was to have a meeting, and to begin a “dialogue” with the press over its “concerns” so the press would give Holder some breathing room.

Exactly who was using whom still needs to be sorted out. Was Holder exploiting the press by pretending to seek its counsel, or was the press boosting its own status by telling Holder to shove his off-the-record invitation? One Twitter user almost untangled the weave of hypocrisy with this succinct sentence: “Journos decline a secret talk w/ #DOJ about how DOJ can best respect & protect journos’ rights to secret talks.”

Because the press is too decentralized to congeal into an effective cartel, the Department of Justice found another way to make its hour-long Thursday afternoon get-together happen. Journalists from the Washington Post, Politico, the Wall Street Journal, New York’s Daily News and the New Yorker agreed to attend, and Holder whispered into their ears his minor words of remorse. How do we know what Holder whispered if the meeting was off the record, which literally means the information can’t be shared? Because the Department of Justice relented, allowing the press to “describe what occurred during the meeting in general terms,” as the Washington Post‘s coverage put it. (Additional meetings like yesterday’s are planned for the near future, and given that they’re no longer off the record you can expect more news organizations to attend. My employer, Reuters, citing the changed ground rules, sent representatives to a session today.)

The Post‘s news account of yesterday’s meeting, which cites “participants” as its sources, finds Holder “acknowledging criticism” that his department had grown too aggressive. Acknowledging criticism is not the same as agreeing, of course, as all passive-aggressive adepts know. The Post story continues to explain Holder’s “broad commitment” to “update internal guidelines,” as if antiquated guidelines were the problem and a new review the solution. But the existing guidelines are fine. Self-imposed and observed by both Democratic and Republican administrations, the current Department of Justice guidelines remind attorneys general to walk en pointe whenever contemplating the subpoena of information from journalists or the issuance of search warrants. Fine-tuning the guidelines won’t protect reporters and their sources as long as the attorney general still goes wild with subpoenas and search warrants in leak investigations, as Holder did in the Fox News case and his deputy, James Cole, did in the AP case. Politico reported that “Holder stopped short of offering any concrete changes to the guidelines.”

As for a “shield law” to protect the press, to which Holder and President Barack Obama have lent so much lip service, allow me to direct you to an authority on that topic, journalist Matthew Cooper. Cooper, who fought all the way to the Supreme Court a subpoena to appear before a grand jury investigating the Valerie Plame case, writes this week in the National Journal that the shield law currently under consideration by Congress wouldn’t have been much help to him, the AP or Fox News had it been on the books a decade ago. And he’s right.

If you resist looking at the current spat in the freeze frame of current events, you might view Holder as sincerely troubled by the press corps’ reaction, as a new Daily Beast piece does, and see his efforts as an attempt to reset the press-government relationship to the way it once was. Maybe the press has learned the value of showing the White House a little backbone. Perhaps Holder regrets nothing and is buying time with gestures so he can resign on his own terms after the noise stops. Or maybe we’re all overinterpreting, and all that has transpired this week is the standard Washington power dance, with duplicity and fatuousness by all.

I’d pick door No. 4.

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PHOTO: U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder puts his hand to his heart during the national anthem as he hosts a special naturalization ceremony at the Department of Justice in Washington May 28, 2013.   REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

The great thing about the Web is that it has given the opportunity to billions of people, who would otherwise never have had a chance to publish, to express their most urgent thoughts with an Internet connection and a few finger-flicks. It’s also the Web’s downside, as you know if you’ve had the misfortune to encounter a triple-Lutz revolting page during a Google search.

But thanks to the First Amendment, there are few U.S. laws banning expression on the Web outside of posting child pornography, specific physical threats, libel or copyright infringement. So there are few ways to eliminate hostile, ugly, vile, racist, sexist or bigoted speech from its many, many pages.

That doesn’t mean that there’s no recourse should you find content on the Web you disapprove of, as we learned this month when Facebook surrendered to a protest and boycott led by two groups, Women, Action, and the Media and the Everyday Sexism Project, and activist Soraya Chemaly. They opposed depictions of rape and violence posted by Facebook users and demanded, among other things, the removal of such “gender-based hate speech” from its pages. They also sought better policing by Facebook moderators to block future user-posted content that “trivializes or glorifies violence against girls and women.”

To illustrate its objections, Women, Action, and the Media posted screen-grab examples of gender-based hate speech from Facebook members’ pages. Some of the images juxtapose photos of women in degrading or helpless positions with messages promising rape. “Slipped the Bitch a Roofie—Bitches Love Roofies,” reads the copy over one unconscious young woman in her undergarments.

Others make jokes of women bleeding from the face or black-and-blue from a beating. “She Broke My Heart. I Broke Her Nose,” reads another.

Facebook acceded to the protest after the groups convinced Nissan UK to cancel advertising and had other major advertisers on the site contemplating the same. Given the company’s existing community standards, the promise to eliminate a new classification of expression was no leap. The 1 billion-member-strong site already prohibits “graphic imagery for sadistic pleasure,” “hate speech” (including attacks based on race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sex, gender, sexual orientation, disability or medical condition), “bullying and harassment,” “promotion or encouragement of self-mutilation,” “nudity and pornography” and “violence and threats.” Adding another monitored and prohibited category hasn’t really inconvenienced the company.

Besides, who can object to Facebook’s decision to set rules for conduct inside its house? Just because Facebook has given you free access to its 21st century universal printing-press doesn’t mean it has an obligation to publish your message. If you don’t like Facebook’s rules, you can still create controversy and test boundaries at other social media sites.

You want absolutely free speech? If it’s that important to you, go pay for the right to exercise it somewhere else on the Web.

At the risk of reading Facebook’s mind, I suspect its capitulation has less to do with expunging transgressive content from its pages than protecting the flow of corporate advertising dollars that prop up its $56 billion market cap. Radio and television broadcasters were equally sensitive to protests and boycotts back in the old days when their business models — like Facebook’s — were providing a free, advertiser-supported service.

Whole “standards and practices” divisions were established at the networks to sanitize TV shows lest they offend. This CNN timeline of TV censorship gives you an idea of how aggressively corporate censors worked to keep such obscene words as “pregnant” off the air, to obscure Elvis Presley’s gyrating pelvis, to block the bare navels of Gilligan’s Island‘s Mary Ann, I Dream of Jeannie‘s Jeannie, and Gidget from the visual field of viewers.

But as radio and television began to migrate from their free venues to paid ones, that which was once forbidden has become almost compulsory. Smutty talk and naked bodies that would have given a network censor a brain hemorrhage back in the 1960s have been proliferating on every channel — even on the free channels!

Activists have little leverage in deterring the producers at SiriusXM’s X-rated comedy channels or cable’s HBO, Starz, Cinemax and Showcase channels from running shows whose plots, dialogue and imagery would automatically violate one of Facebook’s content guidelines. Nudity and pornography are so pervasive on cable that you could probably start a channel of that name and nobody would protest.

“The vocabulary of hate is potentially as rich as your dictionary, and all you do by banning language used by cretins is to let them decide what the rest of us may say,” Jonathan Rauch wrote almost 20 years ago in a persuasive Harper’s magazine essay titled “In Defense of Prejudice: Why Incendiary Speech Must Be Protected.”

One of Rauch’s many rousing points was that prohibitions on speech and expression by “purists,” as he calls them, almost inevitably backfire. Banishing or excommunicating the speakers of ugly, stupid and coarse ideas does not eliminate them. It usually drives them underground where sweet reason can’t be heard and where shame does not work.

Banning the ugly also creates a mechanism by which other speakers can be suppressed. “Trap the racists and anti-Semites, and you lay a trap for me too,” Rauch wrote. “Hunt for them with eradication in your mind, and you have brought dissent itself within your sights.”

There’s more danger contained in prohibiting vile speech than there is in vile speech itself.

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PHOTO: REUTERS

The most recent casualties in the alleged press war are Fox News Channel and the Associated Press. The phone records of reporters at these outlets were subpoenaed by federal investigators after the organizations published national security secrets. Then you have New York Times reporter James Risen. Federal prosecutors have been trying to force Risen onto the stand in the trial of alleged leaker-to-the-media Jeffrey Sterling (CIA) since the latter days of the Bush administration. When media strumming on the free-press topic reaches full volume, reporters and their defenders include the leak prosecutions of Thomas Drake (National Security Agency) and John Kiriakou (CIA), even though no journalist (or journalist record) appears to have suffered a subpoena in these cases. (However, the indictments in both the Drake and Kiriakou cases cite email communications with journalists.)

Championing the besieged press has become so popular that some Republicans have switched sides. Even the commander-in-chief of the alleged war, Barack Obama, has proved himself capable of making sad faces about the “war” on journalism! In his national security speech Thursday, he said, “I am troubled by the possibility that leak investigations may chill the investigative journalism that holds government accountable.” Obama went on to promise a review of the Department of Justice guidelines on press subpoenas. These are the guidelines that ordinarily exempt reporters from federal subpoenas and which his Department of Justice ignored in the AP and Rosen investigations. To make nice with the press, Obama promised to convene a powwow of DoJ bigwigs and media organizations to address the press corps’ “concerns.” (Word to my press colleagues: Invitations to discuss “concerns” with bureaucrats are usually a prelude to a kiss-off.)

But all this legal battering of the press, while real, hardly rises to the level of war. Take, for example, the language in the affidavit for search warrant for Fox News reporter James Rosen’s emails, which refer to a “criminal offense.” To journalists’ ears, the affidavit sounds like the precursor to an arrest, and has caused many otherwise sober reporters to protest that the Department of Justice was attempting to criminalize their business. But as George Washington University Law School Professor Orin Kerr argues in this precise blog item, the language in the affidavit “is designed to show compliance with the Privacy Protection Act” and is not a prelude to a prosecution.

No charges have been filed against Rosen, and the Department of Justice say none are anticipated. The Obama administration has yet to indict any journalists for acquiring or publishing classified information and claims it has no plans to do so. Testifying before the House Judiciary Committee on May 15, Attorney General Eric Holder expressed his negative enthusiasm for prosecuting journalists.

“You’ve got a long way to go to try to prosecute people — the press — for the publication of that [classified] material,” Holder said, and such prosecutions have “not fared well in American history.” (See Josh Gerstein’s take on the affidavit and the business of prosecuting journos.)

The leak crackdown — and there has been one — has been mostly on the supply side, in the bureaucracy’s offices and corridors where the government leakers dwell, and not the demand side in newsrooms, where journalists hang out. As Scott Shane and Charlie Savage explained in the New York Times almost a year ago — long before the AP and Rosen cases surfaced — happenstance contributed to the uptick in prosecutions. Obama inherited cases from the Bush administration, both parties in Congress supported a more restrictive secret-keeping policy, leak investigation protocols were “streamlined” in 2009 and surveillance technology was making it easier to bring prosecutions that stick. Also, the WikiLeaks torrent of 2010 ripped through the headlines, causing the administration major grief and leaving it with a grudge against the press. And, in June 2012, additional new rules to hinder leakers were promulgated.

Meanwhile, Republicans cheered on leak-chasers. In June 2012, 30 Republican senators agitated for greater leaks investigations because they believed that Obama’s administration — seeking to improve the president’s chances in the 2012 election — was planting leaks about the drone program, the “kill lists” and Stuxnet with the New York Times, where big stories appeared. Of the drone story in the Times, conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer declared, “This was no leak. This was a White House press release.” These sentiments were shared by progressive Glenn Greenwald, who wrote that the story came from inside the administration and was “designed to depict President Obama, in an Election Year, as a super-tough, hands-on, no-nonsense Warrior.” (Hat tip to Huffington Post’s Michael Calderone.) Meanwhile, Senators Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and John McCain (R-Ariz.) demanded the naming an outside special counsel to investigate the leakers. I have little doubt that before too long we’ll be reading on our front pages about the press-entangling investigations into the drone, the kill list and Stuxnet leaks, and the cries of war on the press will escalate ‑ again, a crackdown on suppliers, not demanders.

Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, went the Republican leak-haters one better last year — proving that Obama’s war on the press belongs to all political parties and two branches of government — by proposing a dozen new anti-leak measures. She wanted intelligence agency employees to report all contact with the media, to limit contacts between intelligence employees and the press to designated officials only, to expand polygraph testing in the executive branch, to restrict commentary in the press by former government officials and to establish a half-dozen record-keeping programs to monitor and discourage leaks. The bulk of Feinstein’s initiative failed, but it will be back.

Inevitably, press complaints about a war against them include gripes about how tightlipped the current administration has become. According to Leonard Downie, reporters covering today’s White House say officials won’t talk to them and refer them to hostile, bullying press aides instead. “The White House doesn’t want anyone leaking,” one anonymous reporter told Downie about the permanent snub, continuing, “There are few windows on decision-making and governing philosophy. There is a perception that Obama himself has little regard for the news media.”

I can match Downie’s reporting on this point: My colleagues tell me the same about the Obama administration, likening it to an information black hole. And here, I think, we locate the bedrock of the press beef against Obama. Journalists naturally oppose leak investigations for the practical reason that leak investigations dam the free flow of information that makes their stories breathe.

Of course, the work that journalists do is important, and yes, I want more openness from the administration and less vindictive approaches to leakers. But to fully comprehend the press corps’ complaints, it helps to understand that the press lobbies ‑ just like any other interest group whose privilege is threatened by government laws, policies and prosecutions. Inordinately sensitive to any changes in the standard source-reporter customs, the Washington press corps revolts at even minor changes in their status. Obama’s wholesale deflation of their standing has made comrades out of ideological enemies. How else to explain Len Downie hollering “Nixon” at the same time Fox News’s Roger Ailes is invoking “McCarthy” to denounce the Obama administration?

Suppression of the press contains in it the seeds of its own destruction. Or at least I like to think so. By bottling up information and limiting the opportunity of the press (and civilians) to scrutinize it, politicians lose the faith of some of the most ardent supporters and inspire professional doubters and free-thinkers in the press to redouble their efforts. Obama’s campaign against leaks can only succeed if he exterminates all second-guessing from inside the national security establishment. And seeing as the president is only a short-timer and the national security establishment is permanent, and constitutes an interest group as well, all his victories over leakers and the press will be temporary.

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PHOTO: U.S. President Barack Obama makes a point about his administration’s counter-terrorism policy at the National Defense University at Fort McNair in Washington, May 23, 2013. REUTERS/Larry Downing

From the mainstream we hear the grousing of Washington Post National Political Editor Steven Ginsberg, Washington reporter John Solomon and the Associated Press’s Matt Apuzzo. From the partisan corners come the protests of the Daily Caller’s Tucker Carlson, the New Yorker‘s Ryan Lizza, Fox News Channel’s Brit Hume, the Guardian‘s Glenn Greenwald and the chronically underemployed Keith Olbermann. All deplore, in vociferous terms, the excesses of a Department of Justice leak investigation that has criminalized the reporting of Fox News Channel’s James Rosen.

While I join this chorus of rage, I also wonder how much of Rosen’s trouble is of his own making. Did Rosen get caught and get his source in trouble because he practiced poor journalistic tradecraft?

First, the background: According to this morning’s Washington Post, Rosen became part of a federal leaks probe because secrets appeared in his reporting on North Korea. Ordinarily, the Department of Justice limits itself when investigations bump up against the press, but in this case the feds pushed hard, obtaining a search warrant to seize Rosen’s private emails, asserting that he was a possible “aider, abettor and/or co-conspirator” in the alleged leak. That is, they posited that Rosen might be a lawbreaker for requesting classified information from his source.

Rosen’s alleged source, Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, was indicted in 2010 for disclosing national defense information. Although no charges have been filed against Rosen, journalists are logically demanding that the government explain how it can be a crime for a reporter to pursue government secrets when it is not (yet) a crime to publish them. If that’s the case, then hundreds, if not thousands, of current Washington reporters are criminals.

The search warrant — like the recently reported seizure of Associated Press telephone records by Department of Justice — indicates the federal government may be changing the rules on how it spars with reporters. If that’s the case, and I’m not sure it is, journalists should use whatever legal means at their disposal to resist.

But reporters should never depend on the law alone to protect them and their sources from exposure. By observing sound tradecraft in the reporting of such delicate stories, they can keep themselves and their sources from getting buried when digging for a story.

Rosen’s journalistic technique, if the Post story is accurate, leaves much to be desired. He would have been less conspicuous had he walked into the State Department wearing a sandwich board lettered with his intentions to obtain classified information and then blasted an air horn to further alert authorities to his business. For example, one data point investigators used to connect Rosen with his alleged source, Kim, was the visitor’s badge the reporter wore when calling on the State Department offices. According to security records, Rosen and his source left the building within one minute of each other and then returned only several minutes apart inside the half-hour. A few hours later that day (June 11, 2009), Rosen’s secret-busting story was published.

Even teenagers practice better tradecraft than this when deceiving parents.

Next, Rosen’s email communications also appear to have compromised his alleged source. According to the Post, one email exchange between Rosen and Kim “seems to describe a secret system for passing along information,” including code names. Wrote Rosen: “One asterisk means to contact them, or that previously suggested plans for communication are to proceed as agreed; two asterisks means the opposite.” Rosen also wrote to Kim requesting “breaking news ahead of my competitors,” “what intelligence is picking up” and “some internal State Department analyses.”

None of these entreaties are in themselves damning, but a smart reporter seeking secret information might want to afford a source more protective cover than stating his requests in a form that is as insecure and eternal as email.

Other ways Rosen compromised Kim: Phone records establish at least 36 calls between Kim’s desk phone and Rosen’s various phone lines. And according to computer logs, two of those calls coincided with Kim opening a classified report on his computer. Didn’t these guys watch The Wire? Don’t they know about burn phones? Kim didn’t help himself much, either, printing out and leaving next to his computer a copy of Rosen’s article.

Last, the nature of Rosen’s report was almost guaranteed to attract attention from the intelligence establishment. The story described the CIA’s findings, “through sources inside North Korea,” of that country’s plans should an upcoming U.N. Security Council resolution pass.

Although Rosen’s story asserts that it is “withholding some details about the sources and methods … to avoid compromising sensitive overseas operations,” the basic detail that the CIA has “sources inside North Korea” privy to its future plans is very compromising stuff all by itself. As Rosen continues, “U.S. spymasters regard [North Korea] as one of the world’s most difficult to penetrate.”

Once the North Koreans read the story, they must have asked if the source of the intel was human or if their communications had been breached. In any event, you can assume that the North Koreans commenced a leak probe that made the U.S. investigation look like the prosecution of a parking ticket.

I have a hard time understanding what purpose Rosen’s scoop served. He appears to have uncovered no wrongdoing by the CIA in North Korea and no dramatic or scandalous change of U.S. policy that’s being concealed from the U.S. public. Boiled to its essence, the story says the U.S. has penetrated North Korean leadership. It’s a story, all right, but I can’t imagine any U.S. news outlet running it without more cause, and I’ll bet that Fox News would take it back today if it could. I doubt that Rosen has committed any crimes against the state, but offenses against common journalistic sense? I’m not so sure.

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PHOTO: U.S. President Barack Obama looks through binoculars to see North Korea from Observation Post Ouellette during a visit to the truce village of Panmunjom in the demilitarised zone (DMZ) separating the two Koreas, north of Seoul March 25, 2012. REUTERS/Yuriko Nakao

Journalists gasp and growl whenever prosecutors issue lawful subpoenas ordering them to divulge their confidential sources or to turn over potential evidence, such as notes, video outtakes or other records. It’s an attack on the First Amendment, It’s an attack on the First Amendment, It’s an attack on the First Amendment, journalists and their lawyers chant. Those chants were heard this week, as it was revealed that Department of Justice prosecutors had seized two months’ worth of records from 20 office, home and cell phone lines used by Associated Press journalists in their investigation into the Yemen underwear-bomber leaks.

First Amendment radicals — I count myself among them — resist any and all such intrusions: You can’t very well have a free press if every unpublished act of journalism can be co-opted by cops, prosecutors and defense attorneys. First Amendment attorney Floyd Abrams speaks for most journalists when he denounces the “breathtaking scope” of the AP subpoenas. But the press’s reflexive protests can prevent it from seeing the story in full, which I think is the case in the current leaks investigation.

(Disclosure: About 50 news organizations, including my employer, Reuters, sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder objecting to the subpoenas.)

The Obama administration has already used the Espionage Act to prosecute more government officials for leaking than all of his predecessors put together, but we shouldn’t automatically lump its pursuit of the underwear-bomb leaker in with those cases. Perhaps this investigation is chasing an extra-extraordinary leak, and the underwear-bomber leak is but one of the drops.

The AP story that has so infuriated the government described the breakup of an al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula plot to place an underwear bomber on board a U.S.-bound airliner. Published on the afternoon of May 7, 2012, the story patted itself on the back for having heeded the White House and CIA requests to not publish the previous week, when the AP first learned of the operation. The AP states in the article that it published only after being told by “officials” that the original “concerns were allayed.” In a chronology published in today’s Washington Post, we’re told that the CIA was no longer resisting publication of the AP story on the day it hit the wire (Monday) and that the White House was planning to “announce the successful counterterrorism operation that Tuesday.”

That may be the case, but the government was still incensed by the leak. In fact, it appears that officials were livid. As my Reuters colleagues Mark Hosenball and Tabassum Zakaria reported last night, the government found the leak so threatening that it opened a leak investigation before the AP ran its story.

Now, what would make the Obama administration so furious? My guess is it wasn’t the substance of the AP story that has exasperated the government but that the AP found a source or sources that spilled information about an ongoing intelligence operation and that even grander leaks might surge into the press corps’ rain barrels.

At the risk of making the Department of Justice’s argument for it, a leak once sprung can turn into a gusher as the original leakers keep talking and new ones join them, or as the government attempts to explain itself, or as others in the government begin to speak out of turn. From what I can tell, all of the above happened after the AP story appeared.

As Reuters reported a week and a half after the AP scoop, the White House sought to spin the AP story immediately after its publication. “At about 5:45 p.m. EDT on Monday, May 7, just before the evening newscasts, John Brennan, President Barack Obama’s top White House adviser on counterterrorism, held a small, private teleconference to brief former counterterrorism advisers who have become frequent commentators on TV news shows,” Reuters’ Hosenball wrote.

One of the participants in the conference caller, President Clinton’s former counterterrorism chief, Richard Clarke, proceeded to milk and re-milk the conference call over the next two days in his role as an ABC News contributor.

I don’t mean to suggest that Clarke “leaked” sensitive information from the Brennan conference call. Rather, he repeated what he was told about the operation. And once he started talking, his comments widened the AP’s rivulet into a 10-inch water main. On the May 7, 2012, edition of World News Tonight With Diane Sawyer, Clarke said:

The U.S. government is saying [the bombing plot] never came close because they had insider information, insider control.

That was new news. The AP story said nothing about an insider, an infiltrator or a double agent.

The May 7 Nightline ran a slightly longer clip of Clarke in which he said:

The U.S. government is saying it never came close because they had insider information, insider control, which implies that they had somebody on the inside who wasn’t going to let it happen.

“Insider information.” “Insider control.” “Somebody on the inside.” Gee, you don’t suppose Clarke was implying that the U.S. had infiltrated al Qaeda to stymie the underwear-bomb plot, do you?

Clarke had more to say the next morning, on a May 8, 2012, Good Morning America appearance:

You have to wonder if this plot was foiled by someone on the inside, whether or not that means that source is blown, and therefore they no longer have someone on the inside and would not know about the next plot.

And in his May 8, 2012, World News Tonight With Diane Sawyer, appearance, Clarke said:

It’s quite an accomplishment to be able to pass yourself off as an al Qaeda terrorist to the terrorists when, in fact, you’re working for a U.S. or allied intelligence agency.

Clarke wasn’t the only one expanding the AP’s original story, which was mute about infiltration or double agents or the participation of another intelligence agency. On the morning of May 8, 2012, Representative Peter King (R-N.Y.), a member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, shared what the Obama administration was telling him on Soledad O’Brien’s morning CNN, much in the way Clarke had shared. Here’s their exchange:

O’BRIEN: There was a drone attack that was able to kill Fahd Mohammed Ahmed al-Quso. Are these two things linked? The drone attack over the weekend that was by U.S. accounts successful, and foiling this plot?

KING: Yes, I was told by the White House they are connected, they’re part of the same operation, and that’s why I said this operation is still ongoing.

Fahd al-Quso — of whom O’Brien and King speak, had a $5 million U.S. bounty on his head and was on the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted Terrorists list for, among other things, his role in the bombing of the USS Cole — was killed in a May 6 CIA drone strike in Yemen’s Shabwa province. Although the killing of al-Quso was mentioned in the AP story, it made no connection between the foiled plot and al-Quso’s death. But now thanks to Clarke, who was briefed by White House aide Brennan, and King, who also claims to have been briefed by the White House, the world learned that the underwear bomber plot had been undone by a double agent inside al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

The press advanced the story. The Los Angeles Times (“Al Qaeda bomb plot foiled by double agent,” May 9) claimed that the double agent who handed off the underwear bomb to authorities was working in cooperation with Saudi Arabia’s intelligence agency. The New York Times (“Airline Plotter A Double Agent, U.S. Officials Say,” May 9, published on the Web May 8) similarly claimed that the double agent “was actually an intelligence agent for Saudi Arabia” and “operated in Yemen with the full knowledge of the CIA but not under its direct supervision, the officials said.”

The Wall Street Journal (“Bomber Plotter Was Informer,” May 9) reported that the double agent answered “to a foreign intelligence service that works in concert with the CIA. Saudi intelligence officials played ‘a large role’ in handling of the double agent inside AQAP, this official said.” Upon convincing al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula that he would complete the suicide attack, the double agent was given the bomb. Instead of detonating it, he gave the bomb and new intelligence about the group to intelligence officials.

NBC News (“Spy who uncovered underwear bomb plot is British national, sources say,” May 10) maintained that the double agent held a British passport and that multiple “security services” had participated in the operation, including that of Saudi Arabia. Reuters (“British played central role in foiled bomb operation: sources,” May 10) gave British intelligence services MI5 and MI6 “a central role” in the operation. (MI5 is the U.K.’s domestic security agency. MI6 is its CIA equivalent.) The Telegraph (“British secret agent was al-Qaeda mole who cracked new ‘underpants’  bomb plot,” May 10) reported that the double agent was recruited by MI5 and MI6, and worked with the Saudis on the operation.

Echoing King’s comments on CNN, the New York Times, NBC News, the Telegraph and the Los Angeles Times reported that the double agent (or the double-agent operation) had helped the CIA’s drone find and kill Al-Quso.

What not for the U.S. government to like here?

To begin with, the perpetrators of a successful double-agent operation against al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula would not want to brag about their coup for years. Presumably, al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula will now use the press reports to walk the dog back to determine whose misplaced trust allowed the agent to penetrate it. That will make the next operation more difficult. Other intelligence operations — and we can assume they are up and running — may also become compromised as the press reports give al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula new clues.

Likewise, the next time the CIA or foreign intelligence agency tries to recruit a double agent, the candidate will judge his handlers wretched secret keepers, regard the assignment a death mission and seek employment elsewhere.

Last, the leaks of information — including those from the lips of Brennan, Clarke and King — signal to potential allies that America can’t be trusted with secrets. “Leaks related to national security can put people at risk,” as Obama put it today in a news conference.

The ultimate audience for the leaks investigation may not be domestic but foreign. Obviously, the government wants to root out the secretspillers. But a country can’t expect foreign intelligence agencies to cooperate if it blows cover of such an operation. I’d wager that the investigations have only begun.

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PHOTO: U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder addresses reporters at a news conference at the Justice Department in Washington, May 14, 2013. Holder was likely to face a storm of questions on Tuesday over the Justice Department’s controversial decision to seize telephone records of the Associated Press, a move denounced by critics as a gross intrusion into freedom of the press.   REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst

Although legislators and regulators previously sought to hobble political-intelligence operatives, their efforts were stoked by a Capitol Hill leak about Medicare policy on April 1 that reached Height Securities — a political intelligence outfit — which in turned relayed the information to its clients in a 75-word note about 35 minutes prior to the official announcement. Clients acted on the tip, goosing skyward the price of such health insurance company stocks as Aetna, Health Net and Humana.

The Securities and Exchange Commission has issued subpoenas about the Height Securities leak, the Government Accountability Office has white-papered the political-intelligence topic, and Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) — a legislator who puts the grand into grandstanding — has started his own investigation of Height Securities and aims to introduce a bill to police the political intelligencers. (Grassley’s interest must be amplified by the fact that a former staffer turned lobbyist appears to have ferried the controversial leak to Height Securities. It’s like that horror movie cliché, in which the call is coming from inside your house. Or something like that.)

The press corps has pursued the political intelligence story with zeal. The Wall Street Journal, which broke the story, is still on it, the Washington Post series has put it on page one and Bloomberg News, Reuters, Roll Call, Legal Times and others have contributed coverage, as well.

But as is the case with other Washington “scandals,” no laws appear to have been broken by the Capitol Hill leaker, the individuals who forwarded the leak, Height Securities or its clients who placed stock market bets based on the alert. This incident is miles removed from insider trading, in which material, non-public information is used for profit and which is strictly prohibited by U.S. law.

The apparent lawfulness of political intelligence gathering didn’t prevent Grassley from flapping his wings with an April 4 press release.

“When a political intelligence professional is paid to gather inside information from congressional or agency sources that can be used to make investment decisions, that professional should have to register and disclose his or her activities to the public,” Grassley stated.

“It’s difficult to trace,” Grassley told Roll Call this week. “Obscure people are talking to people they know, or maybe people they don’t know, and they ask questions that may appear innocent to the guy being questioned, but then it ends up being valuable economic espionage information.”

Obscure, untraceable people talking to people they know or don’t know, gathering information from congressional or agency sources, asking questions that appear to be innocent but turn out to be valuable to businessmen. Say, doesn’t that sound a lot like what the financial press does every nanosecond of every minute of every hour around the world? Isn’t this what we call … journalism, as practiced by the reporters at the Wall Street Journal, Reuters, Bloomberg, the Financial Times, CQ, financial newsletters, CNBC, Fortune, Businessweek, business news sites and elsewhere? Not to mention the pricey financial information vended through the Bloomberg terminal or from my mother company, Thomson Reuters.

Bloomberg View columnist Jonathan Weil arrived at a similar conclusion in early April as the “scandal” was just revealing itself, describing the 75-word note Height Securities analyst Justin Simon sent to his company’s clients as an “amazing scoop.”

“Maybe someone told Simon something without permission, but that wouldn’t be the analyst’s problem,” wrote Weil. “Journalists get stories all the time by sweet-talking people into blabbing things they shouldn’t. There’s nothing wrong with that.”

There’s been nothing wrong with it for five or six centuries, as Chris Roush’s 2006 history of business journalism, Profits and Losses: Business Journalism and Its Role in Society, informs us. The earliest business journalism from the 15th and 16th centuries pushed both financial data and political intelligence to readers, Roush writes. Acting quickly on government news has always been lucrative, he points out in an interview, citing a favorite historical example: Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton’s January 1790 decision to reorganize the young country’s debt and “refund the existing debt at face value,” as he words it in his book. Informed investors boarded ships bound for Southern states to beat the news trickling down by land. Once they arrived in Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina, they reaped windfall profits by purchasing debt at 10 percent to 20 percent of face value from the unsuspecting. Roush shrugs his shoulders at the Height Securities story. “This is nothing new, this is using information to make money in the market,” he told me.

The microscopic interest of businessmen and investors on Washington laws, regulations and policies has paralleled the growth of government and the expansion of the state’s economic interventions. Journalists and other specialized Washington classes such as lawyers and lobbyists benefited from the establishment and expansion of the New Deal, which put Capitol Hill on par with Wall Street. The Great Society and its many codicils deposit new regulations and rules in the Federal Register as fast as the pages can be printed, making an early-warning system essential for capitalists. One historical marker of the demand for Washington arcana comes from my friend Michael Dolan, who spent 25 years covering regulatory issues for newsletters. Dolan recalls a 1970s newsletter covering the Pennsylvania Railroad bankruptcy that commanded a yearly subscription price of $3,500 and went to just 50 subscribers. Bloomberg’s recent launch of Bloomberg Government and its acquisition of BNA posits that very tapped-in company’s sense that the market for transactional government news will continue to grow.

Grassley told Roll Call this week that he wants the law changed to force upon political intelligence operatives disclosure and “transparency” rules similar to the clients-and-fees data lobbyists must submit to the government. His legislative ally, Representative Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.), says her bill would exclude conventional reporters. But how practical is that? The primary difference between Bloomberg, Reuters, Wall Street Journal and all the other collectors of conventional business-and-government news and the myriad political-intelligence outfits and research firms collecting fine-grain business-and-government information is 1) the price they charge for information and 2) how many clients (or readers) they have.

The First Amendment can’t mean much if the reporters (and can you think of a better way to describe them?) serving the hedge fund crowd through companies like Height Securities are forced to disclose lobbyist-type information to the federal government. You might as well force the editorial staff of the Robb Report to register.

If Grassley wants to stop government leakers, he knows where the faucet is — even if he might not know which way to turn the handle.

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PHOTO: Book specialist Charlotte Riordan holds a magnifying glass over a 450-year-old letter written by Mary Queen of Scots during a photocall at Lyon and Turnbull auctioneers in Edinburgh, Scotland March 8, 2012. REUTERS/David Moir

The unscientific show of hands indicated greater newsroom hostility for the Kochs, who have never owned a daily newspaper, than for Rupert Murdoch, journalism’s usual whipping boy, who has owned dozens of papers and rarely shied from using them to advance his business interests: Only a “few people” promised to throw themselves out the window if Murdoch wins the Los Angeles Times.

Murdoch!? The guy whose London tabloids excelled at phone-hacking? The owner of Fox News Channel and the New York Post? The kowtower to the Chinese? Whose newspapers have brought readers such headlines as “Nympho Gets Life for Killing Hubby With Paraquat Gravy,” “Maniac Who Cut Off Mom’s Head to Go Free,” “Uncle Tortures Tots with Hot Fork,” “Leper Rapes Virgin, Gives Birth to Monster Baby,” and “Green-Eyed Sex Fiend Is Hunted.”

Automatically judging Murdoch a better steward of a newspaper than the untested Kochs is an idea that would only occur to a journalist.

(Disclosure: In the early 1980s, I worked at a Koch-funded political magazine, Inquiry, for less than three years. It was a pretty good magazine. I met David Koch at a cocktail party in those years, but he didn’t give me the time of day. I’ve never met or spoken to Charles Koch.)

It’s a mark of the newspaper depression that the only people interested in buying a big-city daily these days are 1) those who have never owned one, 2) those who have recently purchased one and think they’ve discovered the secret to profitability (Aaron Kushner in Orange County, Douglas Manchester at the U-T San Diego and John Georges today in Baton Rouge), and 3) Rupert Murdoch.

Metropolitan newspaper executives have exited markets where they see little hope for recovery or expansion. For instance, the Washington Post Co. recently jettisoned its only newspaper title outside of the D.C. area, and the New York Times Co.’s public plans to sell the Boston Globe await only a buyer. One experienced newspaper owner, billionaire Warren Buffett, who owns the Buffalo News and about 21 percent of the Washington Post Co., has been adding small- and medium-sized town titles to his deck. But he has limited his interest to local newspapers that hold a quasi-monopoly advertising position. Recently, Buffett expressed negative interest in buying the Los Angeles Times or any of the seven other dailies (Chicago Tribune, Orlando Sentinel, Baltimore Sun, et al.) in the Tribune Co. chain.

Based on the hand-vote reporting of the Huffington Post, the Los Angeles Times newsroom appears to prefer a bid by Los Angeles philanthropist Eli Broad, a generous donor to Democratic causes, who is said to be working on such a deal with investment banker Austin Beutner, a former Los Angeles deputy mayor. At the Times ceremony, not a single paw of opposition to Broad-Beutner ownership was observed. The pair hopes to convert the paper into a nonprofit corporation. If that vote of confidence was reflective of the greater Los Angeles Times newsroom’s mood, it indicates that its journalists think of their work as a gift to the public that liberal money should forever underwrite. Koch money, alas, is not good enough for them. Nor is it good enough for three of the 15 members of the Los Angeles City Council. They want the city pension fund to cash out of the investment firms that currently own the paper if it looks like a Koch sale will go through. “Frankly what I hear about the Koch brothers, if it’s true, it’s the end of journalism,” City Councilmember Bill Rosendahl told the Los Angeles Times. “I don’t want to see Los Angeles, the second-largest city and the biggest region in the nation, not to have a quality newspaper.”

Oh, and the Newspaper Guild opposes the Kochs, too.

Koch opponents fear they’ll turn the Los Angeles Times into a “conservative mouthpiece,” as one anonymous source put it to Media Matters’ Joe Strupp. Casting the Kochs as conservatives, which Garance Franke-Ruta (the Atlantic), Michael Wolff (USA Today) and David Horsey (Los Angeles Times) do in their recent pieces, makes them sound totally out of tune with cosmopolitan Los Angeles. Such a case can be made, of course, if you track the Kochs’ campaign donations and political philanthropy. They’ve given richly to Republican candidates and the party’s presidential nominee Mitt Romney, they’ve funded controversial climate science research and they’ve supported Tea Partiers.

But this portrait of the Kochs as proponents of smaller-than-small government and deregulation isn’t complete without a mention of their libertarian views — their long history of pairing fiscal conservatism with social liberalism. Politico acknowledged that wrinkle last year in a piece about David Koch in which he spoke in favor of gay marriage, defense cuts and military withdrawal from the Middle East. Hardly the views of a hard-core conservative. If these notions were smuggled into Los Angeles Times editorials or even (gasp!) news pages, would many of the city’s orthodox liberals reject them as propaganda? Last year, Charles Koch’s hometown newspaper, the Wichita Eagle, treated him to a soft profile in which they allowed him to espouse his opposition to corporate subsidies, high defense spending and corporate cronyism. He also accused his fellow corporate CEOs of cowardice for not espousing economic freedom. “He also never says anything about religion, abortion, immigration or gun rights,” the Eagle obliquely added.

These are the ultraconservatives the Los Angeles Times newsroom so fears? Go ahead and disqualify the Kochs from owning the Los Angeles Times because they’re too rich for their own good, but not because they’re batty conservatives or leading members of the right wing or hard right. Those labels don’t apply.

If the Koch brothers think owning the Los Angeles Times will transform the political realm, I have just three words for them: the Washington Times. In just one decade — 1982 to 1992 — convicted felon Rev. Sun Myung Moon spent in excess of $1 billion on his conservative daily newspaper to little political effect. Yes, the Washington Times served as a sort of Conservative Mingles site for Republicans during the Reagan and Bush years, providing a place to swap gossip and backstab, but if Moon’s paper advanced the conservative mission, I’d love to see the evidence.

Rich guys like Moon who have burned part of their fortunes on publications — Mort Zuckerman at U.S. News & World Report and the New York Daily News; Barry Diller and Sidney Harmon Harman and Newsweek; Philip Anschutz at his Examiners; Arthur L. Carter and his Observers and Nation; et al. — assume they’ll extract influence and power from their publications. But as publishing amateurs, all they usually get out of the transaction is a very expensive business lesson before they start looking for the next dumb money to buy them out of their mistake.

“The press is not, and probably never has been, as powerful an agent as politicians seem to believe,” Roy Greenslade wrote in the U.K. Guardian in 2010. “On the other hand, it is certainly not as neutral and lacking in influence as proprietors and editors tend to say.” The same applies in the United States. The largest Tribune newspapers — in Los Angeles, Chicago, Central Florida, South Florida and Baltimore — can make life uncomfortable for state and local government and even on occasion make the feds jump. But as circulation dwindles and competition from other media sources increases, today’s newspaper is a shrinking megaphone.

Why buy a shrinking megaphone? Perhaps old age has made the Kochs impatient — Charles is 77 and David is 72 — and they itch to spend their billions making their mark before they depart. Maybe buying Tribune is their idea of a desperation move. Or perhaps, as Michael Wolff notes in his piece, what the Kochs have in mind is a deal like Murdoch has arranged at the Wall Street Journal, where the news pages remain “straightforward” and the editorial page zigs the Koch line. But where’s the power and influence in an editorial page? If Murdoch’s national Fox News Channel plus his Wall Street Journal editorial page and his New York Post couldn’t get a candidate of its liking elected president in 2012, how the hell will the Kochs crown kings from Los Angeles? Or Chicago? Or Orlando?

Owners, being necessary evils for the production of journalism, shall always be with us. Having survived the Sam Zell disaster, the Tribune papers can probably weather a Koch interlude. But even if the brothers make no editorial changes, they should expect their arrival to drive away readers repelled by the very idea of them as owners. If they do make the sorts of changes their enemies predict they’ll make, I hope they’re prepared for a readership of newspaper dead-enders, the sort who would keep subscribing even after the Antichrist purchased it.

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It’s not completely preposterous that Los Angeles Times staffers would bail out if the Kochs bought it. When Murdoch purchased the Chicago Sun-Times in 1984, more than 60 workers quit rather than work for him. Send your resignation from the Los Angeles Times to Shafer.Reuters@gmail.com for editing. My Twitter feed accepts dead-enders only. Sign up for email notifications of new Shafer columns (and other occasional announcements). Subscribe to this RSS feed for new Shafer columns.

PHOTO: David Koch, executive vice president of Koch Industries, applauds during an Economic Club of New York event in New York, December 10, 2012.  REUTERS/Brendan McDermid