Freedom of the press vs. rule of law.
Jun. 29th, 2006 03:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shirenomadI've been hearing a lot about the New York Times disclosure of that treasury program. I was concerned about freedom of the press and all that. So I dug up the original article myself. Go ahead, read it. I'll wait.
Done? Good. Now point out where in that article the Times so much as suggested that a law had actually been broken.
You can't find it, can you? There's just comments that this program could be used to break the law if abused.
If I buy a cutlery set, I could abuse it by stabbing someone. This does not mean I will, and until one of those knives is located with blood on it, it is not the business of the New York Times that I made the purchase. If KFC reports their chicken is perfectly healthy, they could be lying through their teeth. But unless the New York Times has some sort of evidence that Original Recipe is cancer-causing, they can't publish the list of herbs and spices without being sued for everything they're worth.
There are any number of law enforcement regulations that could be abused, whether they be at the local police level or at the level of national security. Some are, and when that abuse happens, you'd better believe the New York Times has a right to report it. But there's no evidence of abuse here; the Times admitted as much. They just think that there might possibly be abuse at some point in the future.
Now let's talk about the term "Classified." That means that information is determined as not in the public's right to know about. Giving classified information to the public is illegal and carries harsh penalties.
If the New York Times had put forth evidence of actual abuse -- even one incident! -- I'd argue that yeah, that could be something worth publishing, classified or no. I support whistleblowing when it's warranted; you shouldn't be able to hide the blatantly illegal behind "Classified" or "Confidential" or "Trade Secret" or whatever. But there isn't anything illegal. The Times doesn't claim there is -- just vague implications of "concern" over the potential for it. The article even admitted that safeguard after safeguard was in place to make abuse of the system very difficult.
Given that, why did the New York Times think this was worth violating confidentiality to report? For that, read the letter that the editor, Bill Keller, published as a follow-up (linked from the main article), which can be summed up as "Well, some people think we violated the law, but we listened to the arguments for why the information was classified, and we personally decided those arguments weren't good enough, because this was news." Apparently Keller thinks that something about his job makes declassification his call to make. "It's my right to publish whatever I want, so long as I personally say it's newsworthy. I am above the laws that govern others; I am the press."
Yes, there's freedom of press in the Constitution, but if I publish confidential information from my company on this journal for the hell of it, I get fired. If I stumble across the flight plan of the president and I put it up here, the Secret Service comes knocking on my door and with good reason. And if I put up Bill Keller's personal and unlisted phone number, he's within his rights to sue me for harassment over any resulting threatening calls, no matter how much I claim the public had a right to know how to reach him. Because there are things the public does not have the right to know, and I do not have the absolute and unchecked right to override which items fall under that list. Neither does the editor of the New York Times.
Done? Good. Now point out where in that article the Times so much as suggested that a law had actually been broken.
You can't find it, can you? There's just comments that this program could be used to break the law if abused.
If I buy a cutlery set, I could abuse it by stabbing someone. This does not mean I will, and until one of those knives is located with blood on it, it is not the business of the New York Times that I made the purchase. If KFC reports their chicken is perfectly healthy, they could be lying through their teeth. But unless the New York Times has some sort of evidence that Original Recipe is cancer-causing, they can't publish the list of herbs and spices without being sued for everything they're worth.
There are any number of law enforcement regulations that could be abused, whether they be at the local police level or at the level of national security. Some are, and when that abuse happens, you'd better believe the New York Times has a right to report it. But there's no evidence of abuse here; the Times admitted as much. They just think that there might possibly be abuse at some point in the future.
Now let's talk about the term "Classified." That means that information is determined as not in the public's right to know about. Giving classified information to the public is illegal and carries harsh penalties.
If the New York Times had put forth evidence of actual abuse -- even one incident! -- I'd argue that yeah, that could be something worth publishing, classified or no. I support whistleblowing when it's warranted; you shouldn't be able to hide the blatantly illegal behind "Classified" or "Confidential" or "Trade Secret" or whatever. But there isn't anything illegal. The Times doesn't claim there is -- just vague implications of "concern" over the potential for it. The article even admitted that safeguard after safeguard was in place to make abuse of the system very difficult.
Given that, why did the New York Times think this was worth violating confidentiality to report? For that, read the letter that the editor, Bill Keller, published as a follow-up (linked from the main article), which can be summed up as "Well, some people think we violated the law, but we listened to the arguments for why the information was classified, and we personally decided those arguments weren't good enough, because this was news." Apparently Keller thinks that something about his job makes declassification his call to make. "It's my right to publish whatever I want, so long as I personally say it's newsworthy. I am above the laws that govern others; I am the press."
Yes, there's freedom of press in the Constitution, but if I publish confidential information from my company on this journal for the hell of it, I get fired. If I stumble across the flight plan of the president and I put it up here, the Secret Service comes knocking on my door and with good reason. And if I put up Bill Keller's personal and unlisted phone number, he's within his rights to sue me for harassment over any resulting threatening calls, no matter how much I claim the public had a right to know how to reach him. Because there are things the public does not have the right to know, and I do not have the absolute and unchecked right to override which items fall under that list. Neither does the editor of the New York Times.
no subject
Date: 2006-06-30 05:07 am (UTC)The article itself admits that several enemy leaders have been caught unaware by the program, and their resources-in-transit seized. No, we don't know what they would have done had they not been caught, but I think it's fair to say things would be nastier for our side. From there it follows that we're going to miss out on some choice captures and fail to intercept large wads of cash being used in terrorist activity. (Intelligence is actually in the process of determining a damage assessment from the revelation of the program.)
The term is almost always applied to information regarding EVENTS (which is to say, occurances or operations that occur over a relatively brief timespan) and NOT to long-running programs because such programs have an increased weight in regards to the public interest and therefore it is more difficult to justify their continued classification.
During WWII, we broke the German's codes early and used that information in the ULTRA program to predict several of their submarine movements. ULTRA continued for the duration of the war and wasn't declassified until the 70s. Had a newspaper revealed the existence of the program, the Germans would have switched codes and their sub fleet would have been deadly again.