I have not heard of this case before, a fact which helps to illustrate why we must keep a watch for abuses of freedom of expression. Josh Wolf is apparently being prosecuted for the crime of committing journalism. It’s hard to believe that a country founded on the ideals of freedom continues to slide inexorably down the chute into totalitarianism, and it’s happening the way you boil a frog, i.e., but degrees so gradual that we don’t notice. I don’t care what his politics are; the fact that he was jailed for so long for this is a travesty.
My realization comes in the wake of a story about France’s attempt to make it illegal for anyone other than a “professional” journalist (which, I suspect, will mean a licensed one, which means the government decides who is a journalist) to video record a violent crime. Obviously, that’s not First Amendment—after all, France isn’t the U.S. It is, nevertheless, chilling to recognize that another supposedly free nation is moving in this direction.
