Slashdot Mirror
Ex-MI6 Officer Publishes Banned Novel on Blog
SpooForBrains writes "Ex-MI6 officer Richard Tomlinson has been fighting a battle with the UK Secret Services for some time now, over his plans to publish a novel detailing his experience in the service, and over claims that he published a list of MI6 agents online (a claim he denies). The latest salvo in the battle (as reported on The Register occurred on Friday when he published the first chapter of his new novel "The Golden Chain" on Blogspot. He has since put up all the remaining chapters, apparently in an attempt to have them seen before the security services have them taken down."
http://cryptome.org/tomlinson-mi6.htm
If a square is really a rhombus, why aren't all triangles purple?
To my knowledge, the book is still banned in Britain.
May I suggest you attempt to verify your knowledge before making accusations like that? In fact, the book was never banned in Britain at all, AFAICT, and has certainly been openly sold in Britain ever since its first publication abroad.
What really happened is more complicated and somewhat less sinister.
Once the British government brought proceedings against Wright in Australia, in June 1986 two British newspapers picked up on the story and published some excerpts. The government therefore obtained a legal injunction forbidding those newspapers (and those two alone) from publishing any more excerpts. In 1987, when the book was published in the USA, a third newspaper attempted to publish excerpts, and another injunction was issued. The three injunctions were then challenged in the House of Lords (the British equivalent of taking the case to the Supreme Court), which initially confirmed them while the case was in progress; but ultimately in October 1988 the Law Lords ruled in favour of the newspapers and overturned all the injunctions.
Note that at no point was possession of the book itself banned in Britain; while it was not published in Britain at first, many copies were imported from the USA, and no attempts were ever made to prevent that or to prosecute any importers.
The "bans" were very specifically limited to publication of excerpts in three newspapers, and those bans lasted less than 2 years before they were overturned by due legal process. So while the government did indeed attempt to censor the book, we're not talking about an oppressive totalitarian regime that decrees what its citizens are allowed to think; we're merely talking about a government being duly diligent in its efforts to ensure national security.
And I seem to recall that even in the USA, with its consitutionally guaranteed right to freedom of speech, you can cause a national scandal by revealing the identity of a CIA field agent...