From ‘Je Suis Charlie’ to Attacks on Free Speech; New York Times, 2/29/16

Editorial Board, New York Times; From ‘Je Suis Charlie’ to Attacks on Free Speech:

"Yet laws hastily adopted in the aftermath of a terror attack have a tendency to come back in forms not intended or foreseen. More dangerously, it seems an inevitable extension of Murphy’s law that if a government is given unintended powers, those powers will be misused. The National Security Agency’s misuse of its surveillance powers, as revealed by Edward Snowden, are a notorious example, and what future leaders might do is chillingly demonstrated by Donald Trump’s suggestion that the United States should close parts of the Internet to combat terrorism — and his postscript: “Somebody will say, ‘Oh freedom of speech, freedom of speech.’ These are foolish people.”

On the contrary, what is foolish is the rush to exploit fear and crisis to suppress the freedoms that define democracy — the very freedoms Charlie Hebdo stood for and its attackers sought to undermine. There is no question that terrorism requires a robust response, but it cannot be used as justification for arbitrary and unfair laws."

[Op-Ed] Don’t Censor Influenza Research; New York Times, 2/1/12

[Op-Ed] Howard Markel, New York Times; Don’t Censor Influenza Research:

"The censorship of influenza research will do little to prevent its misuse by evildoers — and it may well hinder our ability to stop influenza outbreaks, whether natural or otherwise, when they do occur.

In this case, censorship is too little, too late. The data generated by one of the research teams was already presented at a conference in Malta in September, where copies of the paper were distributed. But even if the data weren’t already available, the key details could likely be inferred from other information that is already available."