globeandmail.com: Secrecy law quashed, RCMP admonished
"Increasingly, the courts are recognizing that in order to have a healthy and vigorous media, governments simply have to respect the rights of journalists to have their sources." Hurriedly enacted after the Sept. 11 terror attacks, the anti-leakage provisions were used by the RCMP in 2004 to seize documents from the home and office of Ottawa Citizen reporter Juliet O'Neill, after articles she wrote caused the Mounties to suspect that she was receiving leaked material.Here is the problem: If it is ilegal to divulge some secrets, it should not be permitted to harbour those individuals who break the law. The fact that a secret was divulged to a reporter does not make the breech permissible. Protecting the source is at least morally equivalent to harbouring a criminal - if not worse. When you harbour a criminal you are not furthering a crime. When a reporter reports a state secret they are compounding the security breech. What privellege do reporters have? In order to have protection must one find a national reporter? How 'bout a small town reporter? student paper? blogger? man on a soapbox at the corner?
I have no doubt that there are times when secrets out to be revealed, but often secrets MUST be kept secret and a legal situation that gives protection to those who break the law permits the exploitation of national secrets for partisan purposes. And here is my dilemma: without risking legitimate national secrets, or elevating certain ordinary citizens to be public confessors how does one ensure secret whistle blowing? Maybe a few judges have to be actual confessors with security clearences to hear whistle blowers [which would also protect the whistle blower from reprisals]. I don't have the answer, but airing national secrets to reporters is probably a bad idea.
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