Although I don't entirely agree with Michael Kinsley's judgments (although his judgments are rather vague) on national-security leaks vs. the First Amendment contained in his review of Glenn Greenwald's No Place to Hide, Kinsley's first two paragraphs, and snippets from the third and ninth, agreeably say just about all I expected from Greenwald's book:
"My position was straightforward," Glenn Greenwald writes. "By ordering illegal eavesdropping, the president had committed crimes and should be held accountable for them." You break the law, you pay the price: It’s that simple.
But it’s not that simple, as Greenwald must know. There are laws against government eavesdropping on American citizens, and there are laws against leaking official government documents. You can’t just choose the laws you like and ignore the ones you don’t like. Or perhaps you can, but you can’t then claim that it’s all very straightforward....
In "No Place to Hide," Greenwald seems like a self-righteous sourpuss, convinced that every issue is "straightforward," and if you don’t agree with him, you’re part of something he calls "the authorities," who control everything for their own nefarious but never explained purposes....
Greenwald doesn’t seem to realize that every piece of evidence he musters demonstrating that [powerful or influential] people agree with him undermines his own argument that "the authorities" brook no dissent.
Go ahead. You can read Kinsley's full review. But essentially you just did.