Quote:
Originally Posted by WT Sharpe
That being said, I believe you have a point. Information which would compromise national security, such as troop movements during times of war, should not be made public.
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There is a world of difference between the delaying of the release of time-sensitive information, and the attempt to suppress such information indefinitely. Among other reasons, the latter is impossible. Any idea which has been thought of can be thought of again. (I recall a few years back reading the published journal of a graduate student who worked out, from public documents, how to construct a fission bomb.) I firmly believe that
all "classified" documents should have a mandatory declassification date, probably of 20 years or less.
I don't think any books should be banned. I strongly believe there are no ideas more dangerous than the suppression of ideas itself. That would include
Mein Kampf in Germany. The applicable aphorism here is "those who ignore history are doomed to repeat it."
Yelling "fire" in a crowded theatre is not comparable. That is, again, a matter of timing and delivery, rather than a matter of information. If a person were to notice a fire in a crowded theatre and were to leave surreptitiously, rather than informing others of the emergency, I believe that would be a criminal act of equal or greater malignity than yelling "fire" when there is no actual threat.
Neither is the illegality of libel or slander comparable to the banning of information. I've been sued (unreasonably and unsuccessfully) for libel. The plaintiff was unable to show any damage (or any other impact) of the statements I made, which I believed to be true at the time that I made them. That was sufficient to convince the jury that I didn't owe the plaintiff anything. As my attorney explained to me, "the proper defense against a lie is the truth." One cannot fight pernicious lies by forcing them underground. In the case where one person does publicly make an untrue statement about another
that causes damage, it is that damage that dictates how the case is handled. The statements themselves are not repressed.
This does not mean that I think every written text needs to be published-- that's a matter for people who fund the publication of books to decide. In a free market, the success or failure of books in the marketplace determines their worth, and books that an experienced publisher believes are likely to fail have no inherent "right" to be published. But if an author who believes in their work wants to self-publish, no law should prevent them.