To astonishment in Australia, but pretty much a
resounding “huh?” in the United States, Wikileaks yesterday
published a censorship order issued by the Supreme Court of the
Australian state of Victoria on June 19 of this year. The order
imposes a five-year ban on publication of any material in Australia
about a corruption case involving high officials of Indonesia,
Malaysia, Vietnam, and the Australian government itself.
It’s an authoritarian move that remains happily alien to
Americans who enjoy civil liberties that, however eroded, remain
generally superior to what’s available even in countries we
consider comparable to our own.
Wikileaks puts the order in context, noting:
The court-issued gag order follows the secret 19 June 2014
indictment of seven senior executives from subsidiaries of
Australia’s central bank, the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA). The
case concerns allegations of multi-million dollar inducements made
by agents of the RBA subsidiaries Securency and Note Printing
Australia in order to secure contracts for the supply of
Australian-style polymer bank notes to the governments of Malaysia,
Indonesia, Vietnam and other countries.
The
text of the gag order justifies the move “to prevent damage to
Australia’s international relations.”
Well, that sort of thing would be embarrassing,
wouldn’t it.
As a careful Sydney Morning Herald
report on the revelation points out, “The suppression order is
itself suppressed. No Australian media organisation can legally
publish the document or its contents.”
In fact, “anyone who tweets a link to the Wikileaks report,
posts it on Facebook, or shares it in any way online could also
face charges.”
Is it even necessary to point out that this is exactly
the sort of story that independent media are supposed to ferret out
and expose to the light of day, accompanied by editorials about the
moral failings and jailability of the government officials
involved?
I’ve
made much of America’s slippage on rankings of
press freedom, and the United States government’s growing habit
of
concealing information and punishing anybody who speaks to
reporters. But we still don’t have nation-wide gag orders in
this country.
When Britain’s The Guardian was threatened with
prosecution for publishing Edward Snowden’s revelations about
surveillance by the National Security Agency and its U.K.
counterpart, the GCHQ, that newspaper
teamed up with the New York Times to make sure
government officials couldn’t block their release. “Journalists in
America are protected by the first amendment which guarantees free
speech and in practice prevents the state seeking pre-publication
injunctions or ‘prior restraint,'” Lisa O’Carroll wrote for The
Guardian.
And good for us. Our government officials may be grasping,
punitive control-freaks, but they can only dream of wielding the
bludgeon regularly deployed by their counterparts in many other
established “free countries,” let alone by governments that don’t
even pretend that freedom is a local priority.
Censorship orders, like those released by the Victorian court,
are certainly unenforceable in the modern Internet age—as
demonstrated by Wikileaks. But it’s to America’s credit that its
residents rarely have to pull such end-runs around government gag
orders.
It’s up to us to keep it that way.
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