Word: censorship
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Reagan's leak rules open a fierce debate about censorship...
...Friday last March. That is when bureaucrats head home for the weekend and Washington correspondents relax their vigilance. When the order was discovered by reporters-Congress had been given no advance notice-Justice Department officials belittled its significance. The polygraphs would be applied sparingly, they said, and the censorship agreements would affect only about 1,000 of the highest-level employees...
...most Americans, the Administration has proposed a sweeping plan to monitor the public activities of government officials on a scale unprecedented in our history. Last week, the Senate wisely delayed the implementation of the President's controversial directive to subject federal employees to random lie detector tests and lifelong censorship. The rule (which will now go into effect next April) would have applied to officials cleared for "sensitive compartmented information." According to the General Accounting Office, the investigative arm of Congress, that category involves 2.5 million individuals, almost half of all federal workers; an additional 1.5 million civilian contractors with...
SUCH A BROAD, unrestricted directive portends an alarming era--of government intrusion into individual privacy and First Amendment rights. The censorship rule--a ban affecting nearly 113,000 workers in the highest levels of government--would effectively curtail informed criticism, permitting one Administration to censor the writings of previous Administration officials. In last week's House hearings, Deputy Assistant Attorney General Richard Willard, the Administration official who drafted the proposals, characterized the nondisclosure pledge as an "appropriate" counterintelligence technique...
Meanwhile, a myriad of former government employees, journalists, and constitutional experts condemned the measures as "an appalling document." Former Undersecretary of State George Ball testified that enforcement of the Reagan directive "would require the establishment of a censorship bureaucracy far larger than anything in our national experience." The American Society of Newspaper Editors denounced the policy as a "peacetime censorship of a scope unparalleled since the adoption of the Bill of Rights...