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In honor of the reading of The Trial, I am posting the beginning of an article that appeared in the Oct. 15 Economist.
The lines in The Trial that reminded me of this article are these:
"And why am I under arrest?" he then asked.
"That's something we're not allowed to tell you."
Here is the beginning of the article, titled "Barbara Streisand Strikes Again":
THIS week a national newspaper ran a fascinating story about absolutely nothing. The Guardian reported on its front page on October 13th that a question had been tabled by an MP in Parliament, but that the newspaper could not reveal “who has asked the question, what the question is, which minister might answer it, or where the question is to be found”. The reason, it explained no less cryptically, was that “legal obstacles, which cannot be identified, involve proceedings, which cannot be mentioned, on behalf of a client who must remain secret”.
The contorted language was the result of a “super-injunction”, an increasingly common form of gagging order that forbids the media not only from reporting certain information, but also from reporting that they have been forbidden from reporting it. The gag in question was granted last month at the request of Trafigura, an oil firm, to prevent publication of the details of a report related to the dumping of toxic waste in Côte d’Ivoire. Trafigura’s lawyers at Carter-Ruck, a firm that specialises in shutting up newspapers, warned the Guardian that mentioning the injunction would place it in contempt of court, even after it was referred to on October 12th in Parliament. Yet proceedings in both Houses have long been reported under privilege—that is, without fear of prosecution for contempt.
Minutes after the Guardian’s bowdlerised article was published online, internet sleuths found the censored material on the Parliament website and published it on their blogs and in their tweets. By lunchtime, shortly before several newspapers were due to challenge its position in a High Court hearing, Carter-Ruck lifted its opposition. The firm and its client were left to observe an example of what bloggers call the “Streisand effect”, a phenomenon named after the unfortunate singer whose efforts to block publication of an embarrassing photograph served to spread it around the internet at once.
End of quote from The Economist. Now, if that isn't Kafkaesque, what is?
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