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Comment by ehvatum | Hacker News Reader

> pretty ignorant to imply that suppressing information is inconsistent with democracy

It sort of is inconsistent with democracy. People should know for whom and for what they vote.

Is it? In most democracies in the world there are things you cannot publish even if they are true - Britain for example still maintains an official state censor, and even in the US there are still some state secrets that you cannot publish regardless of how true they are. Britain and many other countries also maintain a right to privacy that protects non-public-figure individuals against salacious soap-opera tabloid shit - you can't just go telling the whole world that Joe Q Public cheated on his wife, even if it's absolutely true because it's not a good idea for the panopticon to be pointed at the powerless like that.

Again, as should be said every time the topic comes up here on HN - the idealization of absolute and unlimited free speech is kind of a uniquely American phenomenon and even then it is not quite absolute. The rest of the world views freedom of speech as a right that needs to be limited and balanced like every other right.

Everyone has frequently talked about how we shouldn't be having media broadcast the manifestos of these shooters and glorifying them, how the media should just suppress information about them and refuse to publish their pictures and only and talk about them in the abstract... isn't that exactly what is going on here? This guy killed the prime minister and you want to know exactly what his cause was in exacting detail...

Britain’s an interesting case, but I don’t think it makes the point you think it does. Yes, there’s a censor, but the real reason all the newspapers report the same thing at the same time is cultural a) newspaper ownership is concentrated amongst a very small group of people, most of whom are billionaires b) they employ people who they trust to do the right thing c) journalism in the U.K. operates a revolving door with the conservative party’s communications division d) partly as a result of that and partly as a result of falling revenues, most journalist's idea of what good journalism is consists of asking two people what they think and reporting what they say e) this makes them extremely dependent on the lobby system, which is pretty similar to press clubs e) Blair set a precedent for cutting funding to the BBC if it said things it didn’t like, and the current government hasn’t hesitated to threaten to do it again f) this culture is so ingrained it has spread even to those publications that theoretically shouldn’t be affected.

So the situation in Japan is pretty similar to that in the U.K. You just need to identify the levers.

> c) journalism in the U.K. operates a revolving door with the conservative party’s communications division

Actually the prime minister’s press office, and to be fair Labour perfected this process thanks to Alastair Campbell.

> and even in the US there are still some state secrets that you cannot publish regardless of how true they are

That is simply not true. There are many examples where USA newspapers published leaked secrets and the journalist were not convicted for it in any case.

The Pentagon Papers come to mind as the most famous example: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_Papers

The claim was that there are some secrets, not all secrets which is the claim you countered.

Ok. There are no secrets “you cannot publish” in the USA. Prove it otherwise. Either by citing law, or even better by citing precedent.

Ever heard of Assange?

(Also https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Born_secret among others; there is a ton of those.)

Your link does not seem to contradict what i’m saying “ The constitutionality of declaring entire categories of information preemptively classified has not been definitively tested in the courts.”

You said:

>There are no secrets “you cannot publish” in the USA.

As evidenced above there sure are. The “constitutionality” doesn’t matter.

Looking at the DoJ's indictment of Assange -- they stated:

The indictment also charges Assange for his posting of a narrow subset of classified documents on WikiLeaks that allegedly identified the names of human sources—including local Afghans and Iraqis who were assisting U.S. forces in theater, and those of journalists, religious leaders, human rights advocates, and political dissidents living in repressive regimes. Assange thereby is alleged to have created grave and imminent risk to their lives and liberty.

(Source: https://www.justice.gov/opa/press-release/file/1165636/downl... )

That would appear to be a specific example of secrets that cannot be published?

"Born secret" and "born classified" are both terms which refer to a policy of information being classified from the moment of its inception, usually regardless of where it was created, and usually in reference to specific laws in the United States that are related to information that describes the operation of nuclear weapons.

"Again, as should be said every time the topic comes up here on HN - the idealization of absolute and unlimited free speech is kind of a uniquely American phenomenon and even then it is not quite absolute."

Yeah, I just got smacked down on here for suggesting that not sharing all the details, naming names, etc could be because they don't want to encourage copycats, and that the US could address some of it's violence via a law limiting the details they provide.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5296697/

>even in the US there are still some state secrets that you cannot publish regardless of how true they are.

Sunlight is the best disinfectant. The "powers that be" have gotten drunk on their ability to not only hide information from the public, but more often than not to muddy it by releasing floods of false information so that people don't know what is what.

These are the same people we owe things like Operation Northwoods and MK-Ultra to, so they can't be trusted.

Yes, there is information that should not be printed, including that which clearly harms national security, like the locations of all the nuclear missiles. In the US, this happens by voluntary cooperation by the press. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_of_Censorship

This specific story is not one of them. It is useful to society to understand that cults destroying individuals' financial security can make them desperate enough to assassinate.

Not necessarily backing the decision of the Japanese newspapers here, but US politics is basically a circus of unsubstantiated allegations which are front and center because they get more eyeballs. Sensationalism is hardly a pillar of democracy. It's a scourge and the country would be better off if Fox, MSNBC, Twitter's apocalypse algorithms etc. were a little more reserved.

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