Last night I watched some excellent reporting by Anderson Cooper on the detention of David Miranda (Glenn Greenwald’s spouse). Greenwald believes this incident was meant to intimidate him and all journalists.

This weekend I had also read a good story in the NY Times called How Laura Poitras Helped Snowden Spill His Secrets. There was also an online feature called Behind the Cover Story: Peter Maass on How He Got the Very Secret Laura Poitras to Open Up. Both are interesting reading and not unrelated to this discussion free speech and fear.

Laura Poitras is a documentary film maker and some of her films on Iraq and surveillance have irritated US authorities to the point that she is on a watch list and subject to to extensive security screening and sometime detention. All of this and more can be found in How Laura Poitras Helped Snowden Spill His Secrets (see link above).

I suppose now that Poitras is known to have gotten Edward Snowden (and his NSA secrets) to Glenn Greenwald, she is even more unpopular the US government.

Both the Miranda and Poitras stories raise the question of whether this apparent retaliation is meant to introduce an element of fear of the consequences of free speech that will make Americans less willing to speak freely if they happen to disagree with our government.