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18 September 2010

Stupid Censorship Undermines Real Security Concerns

As the New York Times reports, when government censors err overly on the side of caution, it undermines the idea that the government should be trusted to censor anything.

The Defense Department is buying and destroying the entire uncensored first printing of “Operation Dark Heart,” by Anthony Shaffer, a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve and former Defense Intelligence Agency officer, in the name of protecting national security.

Another supposed secret removed from the second printing: the location of the Central Intelligence Agency’s training facility — Camp Peary, Va., a fact discoverable from Wikipedia. And the name and abbreviation of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps, routinely mentioned in news articles. And the fact that Sigint means “signals intelligence.”

Not only did the Pentagon black out Colonel Shaffer’s cover name in Afghanistan, Chris Stryker, it deleted the source of his pseudonym: the name of John Wayne’s character in the 1949 movie “The Sands of Iwo Jima.”


Compare the two versions of the book here:



By: Brant

1 comment:

  1. Yes, basically dumb. Pretty low quality censorship. I could do better.

    There is so much info out there in the public domain. What is generally lacking is the ability to aggregate, sift and present something coherent and useful while discarding the rantings of the nutjobs.

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