Nicholas Kristof, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for his work on the Chinese resistence at Tiananmen Square, writes in his New York Times column [reg req'd] about books, easily available on the internet, which provide recipes for chemical and biological weapons. And then, in a sentence which scares me — a First Amendment absolutist — he writes, “But still, do we as a nation really want to permit books that facilitate terrorism and mass murder?”
His answer, explained in the rest of the column, is “No. We should censor these kinds of books.”
I don’t claim to speak for the nation, but, as for me, my answer is: “Yes.” I want to permit any and all books. I want to permit any and all speech. I do not want government prohibiting any kind of information whatsoever, for any reason whatsoever.
This is the slippery slope we hear of all the time, because: who will decide what information is too dangerous to publish? The Department of Homeland Security? The Justice Department? A secret court? (It must be a secret court because otherwise, the book will be entered as evidence at the trial and will be available to the public.) How will we know what books have been banned? How will we know what information is not getting through the censors. What limits will be placed on the censors?
This column particularly scares me because I don’t expect to read of the advocacy of government censorship in the pages of the Times, the newspaper which defied government bans and published the Pentagon Papers.
And I certainly don’t expect to read it in the words of a reporter who, just a week earlier wrote that one of the most regrettable aspects of these times will come to be seen as “…the way some people’s civil liberties have been steamrolled since 9/11. I fear we’ll look back on this with a hint of shame, much as we recall the abuse of ‘Reds’ after the Bolshevik Revolution and of Japanese-Americans during World War II.”
