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Pentagon Aims To Buy Up Book
jamie writes "Operation Dark Heart, a book about the adventures and frustrations of an Army officer who served in Afghanistan, has ruffled some feathers at the Pentagon. From the article: 'The Defense Department is attempting to buy the entire first printing — 10,000 copies — of a memoir by a controversial former Defense Intelligence Agency officer so that the book can be destroyed, according to military and other sources."
They're buying the damned book themselves, paying cash for it. It's not really censorship if they, instead of banning it, go through entirely legal channels to simply purchase every copy of it, is it?
Grey area?
I think our government should just abolish the first amendment. They clearly don't believe in it. This just makes me so sick. Where is wikileaks when you need them?
Quite an experience to live in fear, isn't it? That's what it is to be a slave.
Didn't the Church of Scientology do something similar to this once?
Maybe he should also publish a Kindle version. The author could really clean up then.
Isn't this like a license to print money? Just make another edition and pentagon is guaranteed to buy it all up?
that's what SHE said
He should have a copy transcribed, and release it in a torrent.
Living With a Nerd
or the world is going to run out of trees. The publisher can just keep doing new print runs forever. If I were the author I would love this. Besides you can't really get better PR then this.
Some things are more important than an animated rat
...he'll release the book in digital form. Good luck buying up all the copies of that.
So we go from burning Korans to burning military memoirs.
America may be a bastion of free speech, but when we lack the ability to openly discuss things with every last bit of information at hand, we become blinded by ignorance. The government would not be helping itself in this instance - they would merely be strengthening the appearance of being censors and spreaders of ignorance, doubt, and fear.
What America's aristocracy cannot do with the law they will do with money.
The blurb is intentionally misleading here. The govt gave the OK for the book but then upon a later review they were worried about some names released and a 2nd printing has already been agreed upon by both parties. They are just deciding what to do with 10k books that were already printed. Obviously the publisher spent money to already print them so they aren't going to just destroy them.
It's nice to see them take up a nice inoffensive passtime like reading instead of all that nasty stuff with guns and bombs.
if i was the publisher, i would print up 100,000 instead of 10,000.
Why not just kill him. It's vastly cheaper. Hasn't stopped the govt in the past - why stop now?
This is going to make the author's sales look incredible. First printing sells out instantly... second printing? presumably the same. Until he's suddenly the best selling author of the year. I wish the military had this kind of interest in MY writing...
but if God created circular logic...
Sold 10000 copies in it's first hour of publication! Just keep those presses running, if every copy sells he's got a nice little money maker there.
I need to create abook the Pentagon doesn't like. First day you are instantly on the best sellers list, and then the game of cat and mouse begins. How many books will they burn... and how many publishers are lined up for the illustrated edition...
that we in America live in a fascist state. It doesn't matter which of the two party oligarchy is in power any longer.
I realize you're just posting to spam your link, however if you look at the article it answers your question.
It was initially cleared for printing by the military. A different military organization later took a look at the book and had some objections. The author appears to have edited newer editions of his book to comply with what the military wanted (changing names I think) however the first 10,000 books were already printed.
The military now wants to buy the first edition out so that people will only be able to buy the newer, revised editions.
Be worth grabbing a copy if this is true. A rare first edition.
n/t
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
I think I got the name right... Anyway, this uber spy got on the wrong end of bureaucracy when his gf was diagnosed with cancer. The UK govt went apeshit when he was about to publish his memoirs to earn a crust. The guy was one of those over performers that seems to be able to do everything with ease (the bastard!), and got a real full blown slagging off in the press by politicians that knew nothing about him, but they were told by #10 to say X, Y and Z when asked. No one had heard of him, cared about it, or what he was doing in and out of HMS until the propaganda mechanism got going. Net result? Book band in the UK, world wide coverage because so, many many people learned exactly what the govt was trying to hide.
Streisand effect? Not really, only in name, Peter Wright had the same treatment a long time before with his Spy Catcher.
Or, he'll change the names like the military wants, and release a second edition, like he already has.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
This would be funny if there was a Kindle version offered. Try to buy out all of those {grin}.
However, hop over to Amazon and they tell you that the first edition isn't available, no Kindle version is listed at all, and that a "revised edition" will be coming on Sept. 14.
Here it was almost old time thinking colliding with modern day realities.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
If you just read the summary it sounds like its just a PR issue, when the issue is security. He put in a lot of sensitive information that needs to redacted in future versions. He has agreed to the changes. However, since the army mistakenly approved it originally, they are footing the bill for the first printing which still contains the sensitive information. Everything worked the way it should.
1. write a book about a subject
2. the subject must be something that someone or some organization wants to cover up
3. the said someone or organization buys all your copies in order to cover up the subject
4. profit!
Actually the idea of some entity trying to buy every single copy of a book to keep it secret, strikes me of more like a PR stunt than something feasible.
If you want to actually bury something, you buy the _rights_ to it. Then you get copyright extended until kingdom come like Disney. Copyright is just as misused for preventing something from being seen as it is used as originally intended.
Trying to just buy the copies off the market is purely pointless if someone else has the copyright, as basically nothing can prevent him from just printing more. I mean, it's not like buying something that costs millions and rare resources to produce. Printing another 10,000 copies or even a million is cheap and trivial. If anything, some entity trying to buy 10,000 copies just added demand worth 10,000 copies, and you'd be stupid not to cash in on it.
On the other hand, the delusion that something is going to be rare because someone else wants to buy all copies, is a pretty much guaranteed way to make idiots think this is a literally once in a lifetime opportunity to grab a copy before the government. It's making it sound like it's more rare than it is, and about to run out.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Okay, suppress all of these -- take 'em, shred 'em, burn 'em -- but don't you dare touch the Quran.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Exactly what I was thinking, and what they appear to be doing. According to the article, the second print run has been edited enough that the DoD is okay with it being public. The DoD is buying the 10,000 copies that are already printed, and allegedly didn't go through the proper DoD security review prior to publication.
I bet his spam link is full of virus-infected crap, too. "Hey, it's 50 CODECs into a single installation package, what can go wrong?"
1) Take the money. ...
2) Print more.
3) Profit!
rinse & repeat
When you are done, release it electronically (creative commons anyone?). Information wants to be free.
So the government is going to buy all prints straight from the press?
How about a second print?
Surely this will become the most popular book of all times, as measured in sales.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
I mean, they sold out the first printing, which means there is plenty of demand :D
We were all warned a long time ago that MS products sucked, remember the Magic 8 Ball said, "Outlook not so good"
AND it's paying for your enormous deficit, which is likely to bankrupt US pretty soon..
Ok, you've got two unwinnable wars, then what?
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
Instant best seller! Start the second run.
coffee | nose > keyboard
Yea!!! Modern day book burning!!!!
We American's have finally come full circle now. Next week, burning a witch at the stake (Sponsored by Kingford)
sigh...
The real Sig captains the Northwestern. This one captains
Also, there's already a perfectly working package that does that.
http://www.cccp-project.net/
Yeah, I just saw that. What a shame.
presumably you'd have to do a denial of service? This is an argument for eBooks that I hadn't considered before....
So, where's the torrent?
Pentagon, meet the Streisand effect.
Proud member of the Ferengi Socialist Party.
Yes, how dare the author choose to defer to the military, and how dare the military attempt to use the long arm of the dollar in order to protect other resources.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
The government cannot censor material before it is printed by regular people. But if you worked for the government and write about intelligence you learned while there, then the government can review it and "suggest" redactions before it is printed.
That's what happened here, it's just they printed 10,000 copies that were insufficiently redacted, so those will be destroyed, the company compensated and then more copies with the proper redactions printed. As to the jokers making comments about digital copies, those would be destroyed and no one compensated, because the "buying up books" here isn't to get them off the market, they won't be going to market anyway. It's just to compensate for expenses of printing books they cannot now put on shelves as-is.
This is censorship, because it is the government restricting speech. But is is a special case of info from a government employee, and that is allowed under the law, whether you agree with it or not. It has been this way for some time, I used to have a paperback from the early 70s that advertised the government went to court to stop its publication because the author worked for the CIA before. That book was eventually published with some redactions as this one will too.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
The publisher will just laugh and print more. I'm disgusted that the Pentagon would trade real taxpayer money for fake property.
Is this perhaps a job for Wikileaks? There are copies "in the wild" after all...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
That was Assange's palm smacking his rather large forehead!
Read the full article?? Cmon does anyone really do that???
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This way, once both editions are OCR'd, a simple DIFF will tell us what the government considers to be critical data. The bad guys (if there are any who care about this and don't already know it) don't even have to read the whole thing now.
The Slashdot summary is a gross misrepresentation. The govt had problems with use of real names in a number of places. The publisher is already running a second printing that does not use the names. The ONLY issue here is what to do with the 10000 or so copies printed before the changes were made. To argue that this is about censorship is gross hyperbole.
...and by doing so, they are making the book popular. Te publisher will just print more, and everyone's gonna want to read it because it's the book the Pentagon tried to hide. It'll also be on best sellers lists because they are buying 10,000 of them.
For all the people say "LOL they'll just print more" or "OMG censorship is bad!" here are the relevant parts of the story:
"[T]he Defense Intelligence Agency objected to the use of the names of American intelligence officers, among other issues." and "A new print run, without the disputed passages, is being prepared by the publisher."
This compromise is reasonable and legal. We still get the story but the intelligence officers names won't be published.
So now I'll write a book explaining about how the Pentagon bought up the other book and they'll have to buy my book too = Profit.
Sorry, but gray text on gray background is making my eyes bleed.
It'll never end...
The real destruction of the constitution started in 1798 with the Alien and Sedition Acts. Some might even say the Whiskey tax of 1791 was a breach.. Either way the path is well worn..
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Shaffer, who is now a senior fellow at the Center for Advanced Defense Studies in Washington, describes a number of planned covert operations, including an aborted cross-border surveillance operation using sophisticated eavesdropping technology that targeted high-level al-Qaeda operatives based in the tribal areas of Pakistan.
The operation was shut down by military officials concerned about offending Pakistan, according to Shaffer's account.
So, we shouldn't be able to know that high level terrorists are still running about planning and participating in violent bloodshed against their own people and others?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
They bought up his entire run of Bibles. He willingly sold them to the government knowing that they would be destroyed. Then Tyndale used the profits to finance an even larger print run.
they are aware of a thing called the internet, right.....
you can't buy up all the copies
Maybe Terry Jones ought to buy up all copies of the Koran instead of burning them!
The Luddites were ahead of their time.
Hopefully, it'll pop up at Wikileaks or Cryptome
You need at least TWO people in order to have a conspiracy. You can't conspire with yourself, you dipshit.
They should sell the pentagon the first 10,000 copies, then release it as an ebook
Looks like someone that got a review copy has listed it up on ebay
Sitting at almost $1200 as I write this.
"Freedom in the USA is not the ability to do what you want. It is the ability to stop others from doing what THEY want"
"Thank you for giving us a green light to print money, Pentagon." --The Publishers
The first printing was so popular, we're going to crank out another 100K pronto!
Have gnu, will travel.
16365 James Madison Highway Gordonsville, VA 22942-8501 It would be a shame if that warehouse accidentally got burglarized and the book published online.
If the summary is correct, and the book is actually published (nevermind if the Pentagon magically buys all copies) it will be deposited at the Library of Congress (the US's only Copyright Library, unless I'm mistaken - we have 5 UK Copyright Libraries, including one outside the UK). Go read it there and post the contents (in your own words, other than where fair dealing/use allow).
Copyright Libraries: Use Them or Lose Them!
[yes, I do work for a Copyright Library]
But then, that is the essence of the military.
At least the Nazis were practical. Burning books was far cheaper than buying them. And we certainly would not want citizens reading "unapproved truths". This stuff is way too sick for me to consider without getting angry.
1. Write book the military doesn't want seen in public
2. Publish
3. Let Pentagon buy up entire printing
4. Keep making more printings for them to buy
5. PROFIT!!!
-- QED
I'll bet he just said something uncomplimentary about the poorly trained unaccountable spooks getting in the way of military operations and subverting the chain of command. That would get past military censorship but be objected to by a spook finding out about the book afterwards.
The other more mundane alternative is that another copy of the manuscript lay gathering dust on a spooks desk until the books were printed.
Dutch auction, everyone pays the 2nd highest bid price. You could even limit one bidder from buying them all.
Regards.
I'm guessing they're not that proud of themselves?
Clearly cockroaches need darkness.
Did the DoD get a volume discount?
We need a "+1 -- nice sig" moderation.
Ok. So the retirement's not that great, and this is just ingenuity at work to beef up the ol' pension - at taxpayers' expense, as usual. With the usual winks and nods. "What's wrong with that"?
Geez. Stop complaining. Go write your own books. ;p
that the military is attempting to suppress information that the public has a right to see is frightening in it's implications.
Where have you been? Living under a rock? What implications are there that weren't already implied many many decades ago. In fact most military organisations would like to suppress all information until they were the only ones left who knew anything.
In case there are more people living under that rock I should add that the main implication of military especially military intelligence secrecy is that the organisations are not really there to serve the public good but to serve other goals against the public good
The issue is, of course, that the publisher paid to have a first run done. Would rather suck if they couldn't sell any of those. It would be a big sunk cost. Never mind if the government would even have the authority to tell them not to sell it, it would be a really dick move, one that would hurt the publisher. So the government instead said "We'll just buy up the entire production run. You agree to sell them to nobody else, we take all of them and destroy them, you go ahead with the 2nd edition with our blessing." Government is happy, they got the names redacted. Publisher is happy, they didn't lose money. Life is good.
...if the entire first printing sells out almost immediately (Regardless of the reason), doesn't that pretty much ensure it will get another printing?
Friend: "The NIC is misconfigured..." Me: "No prob, I'll just telnet in and fix it." *Silence*
It's perfectly obvious the Pentagon has too much money to spend. We spent $3 TRILLION for the Pentagon to lose the Iraq War, and will spend $TRILLIONS more losing the Afghanistan War. Over $1T a year for the past decade to make the Terror War permanent, and its threat to America's security an intractable problem. After spending about a half trillion a year on military and "intelligence" for the decade before that which failed to protect us from the attacks exactly 9 years ago today.
The Pentagon shouldn't have enough money to spend censoring books that say how the Pentagon is a waste of money. The Pentagon should have $300B a year or less to spend on actual defense. Give $200-400B a year to NASA, and $300B a year to send everyone to college for free. Then watch the country's security stabilize and grow as we think up and execute actual solutions to our problems, rather than shooting everything in sight - and at our own shadow.
--
make install -not war
In my opinion, a big part of problem with the war on drugs (and abstinence only education as well) is that the people who support the lies become invested in them... Financially to be sure, but intellectually and emotionally more so.
For some, it's cognitive dissonance and for other's it's reputation.For the emotional, there's such a belief in the lies told about drug use, and they are so heavily invested in those beliefs that it's impossible for them to truly consider alternatives. For the more rational supporters of prohibition, they've put so much of their reputation on the line, that it's nearly impossible for them to back off and admit that they spread misinformation, and wasted billions upon billions of dollars, ruined lives, and manipulated everyone over this issue.
I personally suspect that drug prohibition will end in two stages... The first will be for a vocal group to really put the message out there, and to educate the public that legalization, while not perfect, would be a significant improvement over prohibition. This group needs to convince people that lies are not education, and that truth and reality are far more effective messages against drugs than scare tactics and misinformation.
The second stage will be the rotation of those invested in prohibition out of power, which IMO will happen naturally - no one's going to be forced out of government due to an anti drug position, but they are going to eventually retire. It may take many years, but as those who grew up with a drug education take positions in government.
Gay rights is a similar issue... It's been pointed out that gay marriage has overwhelming support from my generation (people younger than their mid 30s) and that it's really only a question of who will legalize gay marriage... Do those in power want to go down in history for supporting gay rights? Or do they want to wait another 30 years until my generation is in power to do it?
End rant...
Because, as we all know, if BUSH!!!!111!!1 was involved, the administration would be offering to help promote the book.
Your history is a little too molested for my taste. the real destruction of the US constitution started during the civil war time and really became institutionalized during FDR. You are at minimum 100 years off and generalship at least 30 years off the most noticeable disregard of it.
I certainly hope so! You guys need a complete remake. There are two things that Americans are obsessed for no apparent reasons: The constitution and the divine wisdom of the founding fathers. (Well, there are more then two but only those are relevant here)
The thing is that the constitution was drafted centuries ago. By people who lived centuries ago and were just normal (though perhaps clever) humans. The world has changed in pretty much every possible way. Whether it comes to issues about communication, privacy, immigration, economy, weapon rights... In every possible aspect there are numerous entirely new issues that was not even possible to foresee when the constitution was drafted. There have been new theories in economy, politics and philosophy and whole new concepts have came up in all the areas... In other words: The constitution of the USA is a completely obsolete document.
I't was meant to be changed and updated over time: Mechanics for that exist. But it hasn't been modified nearly as much as it should have been because it seems as if americans have been taught to worship it for its own sake! (There is similar problem with the constitutions of other countries but they're - in general - newer and thus more up to date. Also, it is less of a taboo to modify them.) It seems stupid to try to find out what the founding fathers in their divine wisdom would have thought about about any modern subject when what should be done is to find out what people are thinking about it now: If there is a consensus AND people consider it very important, it should be in the constitution. Else, it should not.
Constitution in democracy exists pretty much for one reason: To prevent rights being taken away from one group too quickly. To use the mandatory hitler example: If a very fascistic movement somehow got to power in the USA, they couldn't just draft a law to put all jews to camps. They would first need to change constitution to do that, which would take time. This means that the people opposing such a law could rally at the next elections and failing that, jews would have time to move to another country, other nations would have time to interfere, etc... Or, to continue that example for 2nd amendment fans: If the people would consider overthrowing the government in non-democratic means, the government couldn't just stop that by ordering all private arms to be confiscated. It would take time and thus give the revolutionaries time to either act or choose to abandon the plan.
So there is a reason to make it slow to take away certain important rights from the people. It doesn't make the constitution and everything itself holy or anything like that. It might be a good idea to force complete rewrite of the constitution every 50 years or so to make sure that it is up to date with modern society. (And also to force the society to think, examine and study its values every few decades or so)
I heard that the founding fathers RTFA
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I really hate throwing around words like 'truth' and 'lies' given how strongly they've become associated with religious viewpoints and conspiracy theorists, but it seemed appropriate given the misinformation being intentionally spread.
'Condoms don't work'
'Marijuana is more dangerous than cigarettes and alcohol.'
As an aside, it's really disappointed that we've given up the word 'truth...'
Nothing keeps a book from broader publication as effectively as the first printing selling out completely in a matter of days.
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Censorship is not when you decide to not watch or read something. It is your right to do so.
Censorship is if you'd decide that no one should be able to watch that movie and had the ability to enforce it. THAT is censorship.