New York Times Champions Vigilantism

The New York Times arguments, for their "right" to decide on the true security classification of any piece of data (as opposed to whatever classification the official mechanisms have assigned to the data) brings up one very interesting little point that should embarrass the old Soviet Union:

All of those Soviet spies who risked their lives trying to transmit information back to Moscow, could have avoided all of the problems by merely relaying their information to the New York Times, who would then print it and let Moscow know!

And to think that these silly spies were practicing all of these spy-games when they merely needed to tell the NYT.

I guess, by the Times' brilliant reasoning, any Iranian-run blog could publish any secret data (as a member of the media) without having to worry about silly ideas such as security classifications and the like.

The most pathetic part of this whole situation is that the Times could not even find the one argument that they DO have in their favor. The fact that the administration knew that the Times had the information and did not THREATEN the Times, at that point, with prosecution if they printed, could be interpreted (without much difficulty) as a tacit acceptance of the Times' right to run the story, not even to mention the extremely embarrassing fact that the administration then went on to, later, give the information to other press outlets.

But, thankfully, the folks at the NYT are too stupid to have found their one and only possible defense.

In the end, the Times is advocating "Vigilante Security Classification Groups", each of which makes their own decision as to how classified some data should be. Without a doubt, any modern society structured as such could not exist for any great length of time.

Finally, if the Times believe that they have the right to judge security classifications, then why don't I (or you) have the right to independently judge "Acts of Treason"?

Luckily, for the NYT, they don't bend to the will of logic and good taste, so they have no problem with the stupidities and inconsistencies of their own argument. Typical.