This past week I received in the mail my renewal notice for my membership in the ACLU. It seemed to be an appropriate week for this as this was the week that letters were sent out from the federal government informing all federal employees of a ban on reading any of the information put out by Wikileaks. Employees were not only banned from reading this on government-issued computers, which, while silly, would seem fair, but also banned from reading such information on private computers in private homes. And the Air Force, not yet content, blocked The New York Times from its computers, because this august paper printed some of the leaked material.
Mind you, I am not condoning what Assange did. Releasing classified information just because one can, without any thought of consequences or appropriateness is hardly cheer-worthy. And, though I've read a fair bit about this information, I've not read the releases themselves, nor do I wish to; my guess is that much of what I'd read would prove soporific, interspersed, perhaps, with a tantalizing tidbit or two.
The content itself isn't what interests me. This material has been published in numerous publications, in whole or part, publications read widely and available to huge portions of the world population. But our government, the same government which rails against government-sponsored censorship elsewhere and which erects monuments to freedom, has, in effect, told a significant part of the populace not to read the newspaper and varied thoughtful magazines, or at least those parts of such materials that contain leaked information. Apart from the absurdity of this ban (if I pull up The New York Times on my computer and some of this information is on the front page, but I avert my eyes, am I guilty of breaking the ban just because the page was in front of me?), the larger question looms. While I was busy trying to avoid banned material, did I manage to miss the repeal of the First Amendment?
No comments:
Post a Comment