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BLACKED OUT.(The Talk of the Town)
A government censor rarely displays a highly refined sense of irony. Consider the reaction to a lawsuit filed earlier this year by the American Civil Liberties Union to have part of the U.S.A. Patriot Act declared unconstitutional. In Manhattan federal district court, the A.C.L.U. is challenging a provision that allows the F.B.I. to obtain a citizen's personal records--say, which Web sites he visits--without notice to him and without judicial oversight. "The existence of the lawsuit was gagged for nearly a month," Ann Beeson, an A.C.L.U. lawyer on the case, said the other day. "We had to get the Justice Department's approval even to disclose that we had filed the case, and then we had to fight with them over every line in our legal papers. They used a big black Magic Marker to censor stuff on almost every page."
Curiously, one of the passages that the Justice Department censors blacked out, in a letter from the A.C.L.U. to Judge Victor Marrero, was a quotation from a 1972 decision by the United States Supreme Court: "The danger to political dissent is acute where the Government attempts to act under so vague a concept as the power to protect 'domestic security.' Given the difficulty of defining the domestic security interest, the danger of abuse in acting to protect that interest becomes apparent." In a case about the abuse of government power, how could the government censor the Supreme Court's warning about the abuse of government power?
Geoffrey Stone, a former dean and provost of the University of Chicago law school, has a theory. "If you look at the whole letter, you see that they probably had some flunky go through and censor every reference to 'security' or 'national security,' " he said. "Government censorship always acts in a way that is risk-averse. It's not that they are bad people. Every incentive they have is to over-censor. If someone under-censors and lets something slip through, his head is in a noose with his bosses." Stone added, "It's just the inevitable craziness of the mind-set of censorship."
Stone has spent the last three years thinking about questions like this one, as he worked on a ...
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