If You Can't Stop The Reporting, Stop The Distribution Of News

I've spent some time noodling over Dean's latest post. This one is on the erosion of the First Amendment.

Imagine that: a federal registry of government-sanctioned reporters. Not sounding too free-speechy, now, is it? But it shouldn't be surprising as the poltical class in this country, comprised of Democrats and Republicans alike, are fully vested in and thus fully supportive of extending/expanding the status quo. Never make the mistake of thinking otherwise.

So, it's happening already where you have free speech for some but not free speech for others and if you are reading this now, which you are, you don't need to be a rocket scientist to assume that bloggers and blogging would be in that latter category.

At first I thought, "What's the big deal? A clever person could find all kinds of ways around this if they wanted to post seditious things." While that's true, the problem would become: who would read what you posted?

My traffic here is about a fourth of what it was at my peak. I don't get links from the big boys any more and I'm sure I've been written off as a total nut. That's fine, let others get the links. But what if there were no links to get?

You don't have to go after the bloggers if you can go after the distribution systems. Drudge, Instapundit, Hot Air, whatever. If the MSM, as Dean suggests, colludes with the government to protect themselves from attack, then that isolates the online community. Even in the absence of NSA tapping in to all Internet traffic, finding the choke points would be trivially easy. You wouldn't even have to successfully prosecute link masters like Glenn Reynolds. All you'd have to do is shut them down while the case was pending and it would disrupt the flow of information from content creator to content consumer.

Glenn could be placed under, umm, "police protection." For his own good, of course.