It?s called sender?s remorse and it?s pretty sickening. We?ve all felt that feeling you get just after you?ve sent or posted somethingonline that you know is going to bite you later. Your stomach tightens up right away, but the regret lingers for quite a while.
Because you know that, with Google crawling around, that angry e-mail or drunken snapshot may be found sometime in the future by, say, a prospective employer or, even worse, a curious date.
People get careless with personal information because we all have an irrepressible need to share details about ourselves ? often unwisely ? in order to seem interesting and important to others. Tom Wolfe calls this information compulsion, and it may be partly to blame for the leaks that led to last Friday?s New York Times story about a secret administration program to monitor the financial transactions of terrorists.
Times Executive Editor Bill Keller said that sources for the story included officials who were “uncomfortable with the legality of this program.” Such misgivings are perhaps understandable, given that the program started off as an emergency post-Sept. 11 measure.
But if the officials? concerns were entirely in good faith, why go to the media? The people who disclosed this information to reporters soothed their consciences ? and indulged their egos ? at the cost of national security.
It is deeply disturbing that the leakers did so with little apparent fear that they would be found out and made to suffer serious consequences. Now is the perfect time for this to change. If the republic can survive a months-long investigation into the non-outing of a non-covert agent, it can survive the vigorous investigation of a leak where the stakes actually matter.
As for The Times deciding to print the story, I?m no more surprised at that than Roy Horn of Siegfried & Roy should have been when his tiger tried to eat his head. Newspapers publish things people tell them. If The Times hadn?t squeezed the toothpaste tube that leakers had uncapped, it eventually would have been some other paper, perhaps The Wall Street Journal or the Los Angeles Times, who were sitting on the story.
Even so, The New York Times should be included in any leak investigation. In an age of information and of terror, applying the First Amendment will be a continual challenge, so we might as well start addressing these issues now.
There is the issue of whether the government should ever have the power to prevent something from being published. With the Pentagon Papers case, the Supreme Court ruled ? rightly in that case ? that freedom of the press trumped the Nixon administration?s assertion of executive authority.
But with the ease of publishing on the Web, such prior restraint is a practical impossibility. The Bush administration discouraged the Times from publishing, but both parties knew who had the upper hand.
The reporter?s privilege to protect sources is a different matter. The Times will claim the privilege and refuse to disclose who leaked what to whom. But reporter?s privilege is just that, a creation of custom and statute. It is not defined in the Constitution and it must ? in narrowly applied instances ? be balanced against very real national security concerns.
If a reporter or editor is an essential witness to a security breach that may have endangered the lives of thousands of innocents, the government should be able to compel their testimony. Our right to know does not supersede our right to exist.
Aaron Keith Harris writes about politics, the media, pop culture and music and is a regular contributor to National Review Online and Bluegrass Unlimited. He can be reached at [email protected].
