[posguy]

Hey now, inferring that some journalists deserve protection because they may have credentials with a company or govt is both silly, and very dangerous. It creates a situation where you literally strip protection away from most journalists and put them in harms way.

Jake Appelbaum had a sendoff speech where he covered how his fellow journalists were putting him in grave danger when calling him an "Internet Activist" meanwhile he was publishing in the same paper as they were. He also covered how The Guardian left Julian Assange out to hang, allowed known compromised systems to remain in day to day use, and banned fellow journalists at other news orgs from writing about quite a few papers/topics from the Snowden archives.

[Freak_NL]

> Hey now, inferring that some journalists deserve protection because they may have credentials with a company or govt is both silly, and very dangerous.

I'm not sure what you mean by your comment with respect to what I wrote — I'm not inferring anything. The ESTA visa waiver program allowed for some leeway in granting people who visited certain countries (e.g., Iran, Iraq) access in certain cases. This seems to have included politicians and journalists. I expect that the US government did limit this to accredited journalists.

Personally I agree with those critics who point out that the whole ESTA program is effectively a thinly disguised visa program. It is a shame that it exists in the first place.