Obama's war on media
NSA chief urging crackdown
on press coverage of leaks
In an almost surrealistic video posted by the Pentagon, the head of the NSA calls for restrictions on the press's First Amendment right to publish information obtained from leaked documents.

"I think it's wrong that that newspaper reporters have all these documents, the 50,000 – whatever they have and are selling them and giving them out as if these – you know it just doesn't make sense," Gen. Keith Alexander, the NSA director, says in an interview with the Pentagon's Armed With Science blog.

"We ought to come up with a way of stopping it," Alexander says. "I don't know how to do that. That's more for the courts and the policy-makers but, from my perspective, it's wrong to allow this to go on."

The general says he knows of no better way to counter terrorists than via his agency's surveillance measures. However, he thinks there ought to be a better way of dealing with the press than in permitting it to publish whatever it wishes under the full protection of the First Amendment.

As eery but lulling background music plays, Alexander argues that on the one hand the press is getting its facts wrong but that on the other hand the accuracy of the reporting is helping terrorists.

At one point the general ridicules accounts of the metadata monitoring of 70 million French phone calls, but omits any reference to his agency's wiretap of German Prime Minister Angela Merkel's cell phones.

Pentagon blog with video
http://science.dodlive.mil/

Politico's story
http://www.politico.com/blogs/under-the-radar/2013/10/nsa-chief-stop-reporters-selling-spy-documents-175896.html

Greenwald's followup
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/oct/25/europe-erupts-nsa-spying-chief-government

Cameron jousts as embarrassing trial looms
British Prime Minister David Cameron threatened government action against the Guardian if it does not stop publishing embarrassing leaks that he says compromise national security. Cameron's carefully stage-managed parliamentary attack on the Guardian comes as he and his Conservative Party face highly embarrassing testimony in the phone hacking trial of Rebekah Brooks, former editor of the News of the World who had been an intimate friend of Cameron. Rupert Murdoch's media organization has been a strong supporter of Cameron and the Tories. The Guardian is sharply critical of Tory policies.