The Chinese, in practice, do not give the constitution almost any weight.
For example: The constitution promises freedom of religion. It doesn't take much search to find out how patently false this is...
Wikipedia: "Though technically the "supreme legal authority" and "fundamental law of the state", the ruling Communist Party of China has a documented history of violating many of the constitution's provisions and censoring calls for greater adherence to it. Furthermore, claims of violations of constitutional rights cannot be used in Chinese courts, and the National People's Congress Constitution and Law Committee, the legislative committee responsible for constitutional review, has never ruled a law or regulation unconstitutional."
nice job changing the goalposts from "[Mr Fan's rights are] all enumerated in the Chinese constitution" to "[Mr Fan doesn't have rights, but...] every party member has a right to stand in meetings and press for change."
Chinese (Russian, Venezuelan) constitution does not worth paper it has been printed on. Authoritarian regime has any tools to override any statement of constitution, and face no consequences. Rights are for party bosses, responsibilities for the people.
To be fair there are examples of unconstitutional behaviour also in many democracies, that theoretically should follow higher standards than authoritarian governments.
Take for example the Guantanamo bay detection camp
In 2005 a judge ruled that
A federal judge ruled Monday that some foreign terror suspects held in Cuba can challenge their confinement in U.S. courts and she criticized the Bush administration for holding hundreds of people indefinitely as “enemy combatants,” saying that doing so unconstitutionally violates their right to due process.
But no one paid for it and Guantanamo bay is still open, bi-partisan executive orders have been issued over the years to keep the operations running.
Obama promised to close it, but didn't (TBF he had the entire Congress against, but in the end he didn't keep on his promise)
In January 2018 the Trump administration signed an executive order to keep Guantanamo open indefinitely.
As of today there are still 40 people detained awaiting justice.
All the basic human rights and freedoms as defined in the constitution subject to the capricious whims and full discretion of the CCP. In other words: none.
> Ms. Fan’s legitimate rights have been fully ensured
If she was able to find a lawyer, and hire that lawyer, and it was not a CCP plant, and if the lawyer won the case, neither of them would be allowed to leave the courtroom.
Then the CCP would go after the families of both her and her lawyer, and cancel any pensions and demolish their houses.
National security “endangerment” is the bane of journalists/messengers all over the world ranging from Julian Assange to so many countless others. It seems they are not safe anywhere.
From the article:
“Chinese authorities have detained Haze Fan, a Chinese national and Bloomberg News staff member working for their Beijing bureau, on suspicion of national security endangerment, Bloomberg reported on Friday.”
Do you believe there is any value in a nation classifying information under different security clearances? If so, should there be any punishment for taking something classified and putting it into public domain?
Surely this depends on the contents of the information. I refuse to carte blanche trust a government to decide secrecy when every indication is that this is used to mislead citizens. This emphatically is true for both governments in question.
In the US it is perfectly legal for journalists to distribute classified information, as long as they don't hold a security clearance themselves. I think this strikes the right balance. Note that a journalist can still be prosecuted for breaking other laws like theft, computer abuse, or conspiracy if they use illegal means to obtain the information. But that's separate from publishing the information once they have it.
But your caveats mean that, in practice, they can come after anyone who actually came into contact with the material unless it was dead-dropped to them without their knowledge, and even then, maybe they were 'encouraging' it.
See Julian Assange. What's his case hinge on again, "conspiracy to commit computer intrusion"? Any amount of working with a source would be such a conspiracy.
That's not quite right. Journalists can publish classified information as long as they don't encourage or help with the original leak. So distributing classified info that someone mailed you is fine, but telling someone what info to go and get for you is not fine (legally speaking).
Do you believe that governments ever abuse classification power? If so, should there be any circumstances where classified material can be shared in the public domain?
> ...should there be any punishment for taking something classified and putting it into public domain...
"something" is a word that goes to a core issues of the whole thing. For democracy to function, people need to be able to argue that things are bad ideas.
Say the military classifies a video because it would undermine public support for a war. There should be no punishment for leaking that, as it is information that is relevant to the public - if it would sway their decision making, then it shouldn't be kept from them.
Say the military classifies troop deployments that are irrelevant to all public decision making - leaking that should be punishable.
So to decide if something is punishable or not, we have to deal with a specific issue and make a judgement on whether that specific issue could reasonably have influenced public decision making.
I once looked into the Swedish law back a decade or so ago when Wikileaks did their first big publication.
As it happened there were a few court case back during the cold war where classified military information were published by news paper and the paper ended up in court. Recalling what I read, they made a few tests in order to confirm their conclusion.
1: Did the leaked information exist publicly before the publication. It make no sense to continue demand legal protection for information which is already public.
2: Did the leaked information cause any harm by being leaked. If it can not be demonstrated to have caused harm then the information should not have been classified from the start and thus do not deserve legal protection.
3: Was publicizing the information in the public interests?
This has made prosecuting news papers for publicizing classified information almost impossible.
Seems like it would be hard to quantify number 2, depending on how your define "harm". Foreign relations might be harmed (which might indirectly lead to deaths down the road), even if nobody was directly killed or injured because of the leak.
It have not stopped government from continuing classifying documents, and media publisher could in theory be found guilty, but the bar is set very high,
The first test is also much harder that one might think. Open source intelligence tend to have a lot of information if one know what to look for. Similar, small news paper can often be early in publishing information before more mainstream publishers.
If that is the case, the term sadly becomes meaningless then.
Because then any random person with a smartphone and a social media account can claim to be a journalist and make a video (or a tweet?) claiming anything and everything. That Bill Gates is building a zombie army. That they found evidence of rampant election fraud, subscribe, hit the bell icon, and come back next week when they'll release the kraken!
Obviously needing certification would also be a bad thing, because then who does the certification, and will they be neutral? ("Welcome to Russian Journalism Certification. First question: what do you think about Vladimir Putin?")
How about Woodward/Bernstein? Or Obermayer/Obermaier? Or Murrow? Rachel Carson? Cronkite? Frances FitzGerald? I could go on, but my point is putting journalist in scare quotes is insulting to the thousands of brave men and women who have spoken truth to power and risked everything to expose corruption.
You're telling me that Rachel Carson was a CIA asset? That Murrow's withering criticism of McCarthy was somehow a plot by US intelligence? That a German newspaper was coordinating with spooks to expose Mossack Fonseca? I find that orders of magnitude harder to believe than that they were good people dedicated to the truth.
>You're telling me that Rachel Carson was a CIA asset?
Ok. Maybe not her.
> Murrow's withering criticism of McCarthy was somehow a plot by US intelligence?
Of course. When you find weakness of a side, you don't expose it to the public. You let them be the "other side" while you blackmail them for power. McCarthy was not a good politician and he bit more than he could chew. So, there was a power shift that happened internally at that time because of McCarthy's work... but he had to be silenced and curbed because of how he handled things.
>That a German newspaper was coordinating with spooks to expose Mossack Fonseca?
Yes, definitely. If you don't know that CIA was involved in Panama Papers, you know nothing.
>I find that orders of magnitude harder to believe than that they were good people dedicated to the truth.
Oh I belive a lot of people are dedicated to the truth. They just don't end up doing very well when the truth is not good for the establishment. Look at Assange or Snowden... or even McCarthy.
> Why do people insist on calling Assange a journalist?
Because he directed Wikileaks, who report any number of facts in the public interest and helped in revealing a few substantial stories. Wikileaks involvement in the Snowden revelations springs to mind, that bought a conspiracy with global implications to light. Probably one of the most consequential pieces of journalism in history except maybe the Panama papers.
If your definition of journalism is something other than bringing important truths to the public eye, then it is weak and we can all do without it.
"... the WikiLeaks team has racked up numerous awards for journalism over the years, including the Walkley Award for Most Outstanding Contribution to Journalism (2011), the Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism (2011), the International Piero Passetti Journalism Prize of the National Union of Italian Journalists (2011), the Jose Couso Press Freedom Award (2011), the Brazillian Press Association Human Rights Award (2013), and the Kazakstan Union of Journalists Top Prize (2014).
The claim that Assange is “not a journalist” is both an irrelevant red herring and a self-evident falsehood. It is made not by people with an interest in maintaining a small and specific linguistic understanding of what the word journalism means, but by people who want to see Julian Assange imprisoned by the same government which tortured Chelsea Manning because he made them feel emotionally upset. It’s a fact-free argument made entirely in bad faith for inexcusable motives: the desire to see a journalist imprisoned for telling the truth.
When someone says “Assange isn’t a journalist”, they aren’t telling you what Assange is. They’re showing you what they are. "
Because the FBI accused him of being a hostile foreign intelligence agency and could skip a lot of restrictions in charging him. Assange argued he was a journalist and the USA law protects his actions in the US.
So, her intentions were not to go against China. But then she should have been more thoughtful and opted for not reporting the story at all, like it's usually done. If only Fox news is reporting it, the news is easily ignored by liberals. If Bloomberg starts reporting it, even if ends up with a counter, it's still seen by a lot of liberals, some of whom may be able to spot what's going on.
From a Chinese court point of view, her intentions were pro-China (she's working for Bloomberg afterall) but still she could be charged for negligence. Hope it's just some jail time and not a death sentence.
53 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 120 ms ] threadAnyone knows what those are?
For example: The constitution promises freedom of religion. It doesn't take much search to find out how patently false this is...
Wikipedia: "Though technically the "supreme legal authority" and "fundamental law of the state", the ruling Communist Party of China has a documented history of violating many of the constitution's provisions and censoring calls for greater adherence to it. Furthermore, claims of violations of constitutional rights cannot be used in Chinese courts, and the National People's Congress Constitution and Law Committee, the legislative committee responsible for constitutional review, has never ruled a law or regulation unconstitutional."
Take for example the Guantanamo bay detection camp
In 2005 a judge ruled that
A federal judge ruled Monday that some foreign terror suspects held in Cuba can challenge their confinement in U.S. courts and she criticized the Bush administration for holding hundreds of people indefinitely as “enemy combatants,” saying that doing so unconstitutionally violates their right to due process.
But no one paid for it and Guantanamo bay is still open, bi-partisan executive orders have been issued over the years to keep the operations running.
Obama promised to close it, but didn't (TBF he had the entire Congress against, but in the end he didn't keep on his promise)
In January 2018 the Trump administration signed an executive order to keep Guantanamo open indefinitely.
As of today there are still 40 people detained awaiting justice.
If she was able to find a lawyer, and hire that lawyer, and it was not a CCP plant, and if the lawyer won the case, neither of them would be allowed to leave the courtroom.
Then the CCP would go after the families of both her and her lawyer, and cancel any pensions and demolish their houses.
From the article:
“Chinese authorities have detained Haze Fan, a Chinese national and Bloomberg News staff member working for their Beijing bureau, on suspicion of national security endangerment, Bloomberg reported on Friday.”
From Australia:
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2015/apr/27/asio-...
From the UK:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/20/nsa-snowden-fi...
See Julian Assange. What's his case hinge on again, "conspiracy to commit computer intrusion"? Any amount of working with a source would be such a conspiracy.
I respect the process by which journalists are prosecuted in one country
I didn't even look into the laws in this other country I already didn’t respect, journalists there are prosecuted
Quite another when regular citizens / journalists are pressed into service to protect the state from embarrassment.
"something" is a word that goes to a core issues of the whole thing. For democracy to function, people need to be able to argue that things are bad ideas.
Say the military classifies a video because it would undermine public support for a war. There should be no punishment for leaking that, as it is information that is relevant to the public - if it would sway their decision making, then it shouldn't be kept from them.
Say the military classifies troop deployments that are irrelevant to all public decision making - leaking that should be punishable.
So to decide if something is punishable or not, we have to deal with a specific issue and make a judgement on whether that specific issue could reasonably have influenced public decision making.
As it happened there were a few court case back during the cold war where classified military information were published by news paper and the paper ended up in court. Recalling what I read, they made a few tests in order to confirm their conclusion.
1: Did the leaked information exist publicly before the publication. It make no sense to continue demand legal protection for information which is already public.
2: Did the leaked information cause any harm by being leaked. If it can not be demonstrated to have caused harm then the information should not have been classified from the start and thus do not deserve legal protection.
3: Was publicizing the information in the public interests?
This has made prosecuting news papers for publicizing classified information almost impossible.
It have not stopped government from continuing classifying documents, and media publisher could in theory be found guilty, but the bar is set very high,
The first test is also much harder that one might think. Open source intelligence tend to have a lot of information if one know what to look for. Similar, small news paper can often be early in publishing information before more mainstream publishers.
Imagine what the western governments would do, if Julian Assange had state secrets, and exposed them for the world to see?
Oh wait..
Because then any random person with a smartphone and a social media account can claim to be a journalist and make a video (or a tweet?) claiming anything and everything. That Bill Gates is building a zombie army. That they found evidence of rampant election fraud, subscribe, hit the bell icon, and come back next week when they'll release the kraken!
Obviously needing certification would also be a bad thing, because then who does the certification, and will they be neutral? ("Welcome to Russian Journalism Certification. First question: what do you think about Vladimir Putin?")
Ok. Maybe not her.
> Murrow's withering criticism of McCarthy was somehow a plot by US intelligence?
Of course. When you find weakness of a side, you don't expose it to the public. You let them be the "other side" while you blackmail them for power. McCarthy was not a good politician and he bit more than he could chew. So, there was a power shift that happened internally at that time because of McCarthy's work... but he had to be silenced and curbed because of how he handled things.
>That a German newspaper was coordinating with spooks to expose Mossack Fonseca?
Yes, definitely. If you don't know that CIA was involved in Panama Papers, you know nothing.
>I find that orders of magnitude harder to believe than that they were good people dedicated to the truth.
Oh I belive a lot of people are dedicated to the truth. They just don't end up doing very well when the truth is not good for the establishment. Look at Assange or Snowden... or even McCarthy.
Because he directed Wikileaks, who report any number of facts in the public interest and helped in revealing a few substantial stories. Wikileaks involvement in the Snowden revelations springs to mind, that bought a conspiracy with global implications to light. Probably one of the most consequential pieces of journalism in history except maybe the Panama papers.
If your definition of journalism is something other than bringing important truths to the public eye, then it is weak and we can all do without it.
The claim that Assange is “not a journalist” is both an irrelevant red herring and a self-evident falsehood. It is made not by people with an interest in maintaining a small and specific linguistic understanding of what the word journalism means, but by people who want to see Julian Assange imprisoned by the same government which tortured Chelsea Manning because he made them feel emotionally upset. It’s a fact-free argument made entirely in bad faith for inexcusable motives: the desire to see a journalist imprisoned for telling the truth.
When someone says “Assange isn’t a journalist”, they aren’t telling you what Assange is. They’re showing you what they are. "
- from https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2019/04/07/assange-is-not-a-jou...
Answer: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-12-10/china-cen...
So, her intentions were not to go against China. But then she should have been more thoughtful and opted for not reporting the story at all, like it's usually done. If only Fox news is reporting it, the news is easily ignored by liberals. If Bloomberg starts reporting it, even if ends up with a counter, it's still seen by a lot of liberals, some of whom may be able to spot what's going on.
From a Chinese court point of view, her intentions were pro-China (she's working for Bloomberg afterall) but still she could be charged for negligence. Hope it's just some jail time and not a death sentence.