The media is mostly controlled and distributed by private companies that collude with the government for their own benefit, Google and Yahoo are exactly such companies.

if by collude you mean do so under threat of legal action and possible end of your business, then perhaps you are right.

for a site like this I am always amazed at how many people think it is easy to stand up to the full brunt of the government. the US government not only has the capability to do any business and person on US soil what it wants, it has people within it who relish in that power and who won't bat an eye to use it. if there is a legal issue the laws can simply updated "for the people".

this is not to say its any different elsewhere, the government controls the laws, the weapons, and through those can end your ability to do business if not simply through confiscation.

Well, since most media is advertising dependent, they're dependent on access to information to give you something of value, to in turn sell ads. If investigating or reporting on something shady means, a press operative can no longer be allowed access to an election campaign, or means their correspondents get snubbed at press conferences. They'll cooperate or not report on something, or follow the delivered narrative in lieu of their long term business interests.

It's much simpler when you stop trying to pretend the people who run these companies are benevolent angels out to do good in a scary scary world. These companies are run by the same class of people that run the government, they have the same interests and they collude in order to further their interests. Very simple.

The Joseph Nacchio story is very complicated and not the best example of the point you are making, sadly. Qwest was undeniably naughty with the books on his watch and they had a case. I agree it sucks, just saying he's not the best example.

Thats the entire point he is making. Blackmail and other forms of influence and control are their modus operandi, they used knowledge of his illegality (which they had most likely got unconstitutionally) to try to bend him their way, and the prosecution was vengeance for defiance.

If anyone wants to have a serious discussion of the control structure, lets start with Milners Kindergarten and the round table groups. Even the NSA has a shadowboss.

Which isn't to say that government organizations only ask companies with unquestionably above board accounting to engage in legally dubious initiatives.

Plainly, there's no reason to take a company's compliance as a sign that they 'have nothing to hide'. Likelier, it was in part because they did that they complied.

No, it just means, if you're going to dig in and take on the government make sure your house is clean. That's all it means. That applies to dealing with anyone with power, really, not just the government.

I'm not sure why I'm being downvoted. They had a case, and while the conclusion I was responding to is extreme, Qwest's accounting fraud ran into the billions and they had a pretty strong case that Nacchio profited from that. I'm not saying whether I agree or disagree nor am I saying I don't think Nacchio is notable for taking on the feds, just that Qwest is not a good example of what happens when you do because the government had a legitimate gripe with the books.

Being clean is not an adequate defense. First off, no one is perfectly clean. If you were by some freak of nature actually clean, they would just throw a bucket of mud in your face before accusing you of being dirty.

The way the experts play is by mutually assured destruction. You get enough blackmail material on someone to assure their cooperation, and you leak just enough to them for them to think they have some leverage over you.

That's why fraternity initiation rituals are usually at least embarrassing, sometimes humiliating, and maybe even illegal. Rather than ensuring cooperation using intimidation by strength and the constant threat of swift and certain retribution, as with organized crime's code of silence, that mutual blackmail ensures that whomever it is that acts against the group first loses most. The renegade can be dogpiled, discredited, and disavowed, and the damage to the group is minimized, because no one person can know all the dirty secrets.

If you want to take on the government, you have to be as clean as possible, while also knowing where a few of the bodies are buried. But in that case, it may be easier for the government to recruit you to switching to their side. So you also need the moral fortitude to put principles over huge, heaping piles of money. And in that case, how did you get to be CxO of a big company, again?

Lots of other companies, especially lots of other investor-driven telcos in the late 1990s and early 2000s, were guilty of the same and worse, and were never charged.

The proliferation of fake crimes like insider trading gives the state discretion to imprison anyone for basically political reasons. Any executive who owns financial instruments that refer to the firm that employs her can be found guilty of insider trading, if federal prosecutors wish.

So the NSA didn't demand access to Qwest computers and then didn't prosecute Nacchio when he refused.

http://www.businessinsider.com/the-story-of-joseph-nacchio-a...

I'm wondering which telecom wound up winning the contracts and complied. They obviously went somewhere else instead.

The Palantir witchhunt against Peter Thiel is another example -- threatening to invalidate government contracts because of some imagined discrimination due to Thiel's political views.

Curious -- where was it reported the govt wanted to invalidate Palantir contracts?