Ssssh, Don't Disturb The Citizens

"Article in Telepolis(?): "British intelligence agencies have threatened legal action against newspapers if they reveal the address or contents of a U.S. Web site that has published a top secret leaked intelligence report." The URL-which-may-not-be-spoken is http://cryptome.org/mi5-lis-uk.htm, which discusses British counter-intelligence activities against a Libyan diplomat in London.

Comments

Quick!

[dlc]

$ cd /home/ftp/mirrors
$ ls
DeCSS.tar.gz
pchack.exe
quakelives-2-19-00.zip
$ wget --no-parent -rqm -l1 http://cryptome.org/mi5-lis-uk.htm
$ ls
DeCSS.tar.gz
pchack.exe
quakelives-2-19-00.zip
mi5-lis-uk.htm
$

Everybody download the page and put it next to their deCSS and PCHack mirrors!

darren

Cthulhu for President!

Guess Jar Jar's more important

[unitron]

If a leaked CIA document were sitting on a UK website and the US govt. was threating any US site that linked to it, would that story be relegated to the sidelines as this one has been, or be considered "Stuff that matters." enough to be featured in the main lineup?

Re:Guess Jar Jar's more important

[jellicle]

*shrug* It's an interesting story, but if there's one thing that the internet isn't going to change it's that governments are going to try to protect their secrets by any means possible. Not necessarily a bad thing in principle, though it has funny or stupid results from time to time.

We're making an effort to run more stuff in the individual sections where appropriate. We hope that the sections will be as visible to people interested in those topics as the main page is. Not everything can go on the main page, and obviously some people will rank some things higher than others. You're probably right that the U.S. government trying to suppress a CIA document would be destined for the main page; that's a function of the fact that most of the people involved with slashdot and surely most of the audience are from the U.S. If you complain to a UK newspaper that they're burying some U.S. news to the last page, are they going to change?

Feel free to email Rob and complain - I know he just loves complaints (snicker).
--
Michael Sims-michael at slashdot.org

Official Secrets Act

[coyote-san]

The key to this is the "official secrets act." In most(?) countries, something that is classified can be suppressed even if leaked. All the government drone needs to do to kill a story is say the magic words "official secrets" and reporter's notebooks are confiscated, publishers take down stories and books, etc. Needless to say, this power can (and has been) abused to protect the crown from stories which are embarassing, but not a threat to national security. (Also, as another poster observed, in the UK at least there is no legal concept of "citizen" -- only "subjects" of the monarch. It is hard for a subject to refuse their monarch, but much easier for sovereign citizens to tell the G-man to jump in the lake.)

The US used to have an unofficial "gentleman's" equivalent, but it was blown wide open with the publication of the "Pentagon Papers" during the Vietnam war. The government tried to suppress publication "in the national interest," but the courts held that the true national interest lay in free, public discussion of the contents of those papers.

Things stood there for a couple decades, then the War On Drugs introduced the first "official secrets act" (by a different name) in the US -- much to the horror of the civil libertarians. Nobody disputes the national and personal interests in protecting the identify of informants, but we're all deeply concerned that this will be the proverbial camel's nose under the tent.