Justice Department censors Supreme Court ruling discussing dissent

[unixronin]

[Credit:  Various]

In its ongoing legal battle with the ACLU overthe Patriot Act, the Justice Department has seen fit to censor a portion of a freely publicly-available 1972 Supreme Court ruling which calls into question the validity of stifling dissent under the vague justification of "national security".

The Justice Department tipped its hand in its ongoing legal war with the ACLU over the Patriot Act.  Because the matter is so sensitive, the Justice Dept is allowed to black out those passages in the ACLU's court filings that it feels should not be publicly released.

Ostensibly, they would use their powers of censorship only to remove material that truly could jeopardize US operations.  But in reality, what did they do?  They blacked out a quotation from a Supreme Court decision:

"The danger to political dissent is acute where the Government attempts to act under so vague a concept as the power to protect 'domestic security.'  Given the difficulty of defining the domestic security interest, the danger of abuse in acting to protect that interest becomes apparent."

The mind reels at such a blatant abuse of power (and at the sheer chutzpah of using national security as an excuse to censor a quotation about using national security as an excuse to stifle dissent).

The Memory Hole article includes links to many other documents in which the Justice Department has censored innocuous passages claiming the excuse of national security.  All you liberals who insist that the Second Amendment is unimportant and irrelevant, and it's the First Amendment that really protects all our freedoms, and they could never take that away?  Well, here's another salvo in that attack on the First Amendment that you keep saying could never happen.

Think hard about it, and do your dissenting while it's still legal to do so.

Comments

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

OK, so it is indeed a single-transferrable-vote system. That's not unlike what Ireland uses, and in fact I have to wonder if they based it off the Irish system. I think the Irish system is the first transferrable-vote system put into national use, so it probably makes a good example for study, and by all accounts it seems to work well.

I see the point of your primary-vs-election example, and I wasn't thinking the primary part through. Clearly if your candidate in the primary does not gain his party's nomination, writing him in for the election is a futile exercise.
However, I'm still not sure the logic is complete. I infer in your example that A and B are of the same party, and likewise C and D.

Now assume a third party with candidates E and F (or maybe the third party doesn't hold a primary, and simply runs E). Suppose further that you prefer E to both B and D, even if (for the sake of argument) not A or C. Do you still cast your vote, come election time, for B?

I follow the Voltaire argument of "the best is the enemy of the good." But I think that in the same vein, "not worse" is the enemy of "better".