Not JUST FOIAs. Fixing Pre-Publication Review: What Should Be Done? By Steven Aftergood Friday, January 15, 2016 at 9:15 AM Jack Goldsmith and Oona Hathaway called attention in several recent columns to the pre-publication review process (here, here, here, and here) that many current and former national security officials and other government employees must submit to before their work can be published. The process, they argued, has become dysfunctional, overstepping legitimate national security boundaries and infringing on freedom of speech as well as the public’s right to know. Their case is strong. Among many pertinent examples, the experience of former Army Reserve officer Anthony Shaffer is particularly instructive. After he wrote a memoir of his Afghan war experience, Shaffer submitted his manuscript to the Army for review, as required, and the approved text was printed. But then the Defense Intelligence Agency intervened and objected that in its estimation the cleared volume still contained classified information. Publication was halted, and the Department of Defense was obliged to purchase and pulp thousands of copies of the book, although numerous publicity copies had already been released. A new version of the book with the objectionable words and passages blacked out was finally published for sale. (Shaffer presented his version of events in a First Amendment lawsuit he brought in 2010, with very limited success.) What makes the Shaffer case valuable in this context is that both the pre- and post-publication review versions of his text entered public circulation, permitting external scrutiny of the deletions required by the official reviewers. In nearly every case, the redacted words and passages seem to be devoid of national security sensitivity, as the Army itself had originally concluded. The most frequent redaction is the cover name that the author used while serving in Afghanistan, “Christopher Stryker.” Also commonly deleted are references to the National Security Agency, its headquarters location in Fort Meade, Maryland, and the use of the term “SIGINT” (signals intelligence). Somewhat more plausibly, the identity of the former CIA chief of station in Kabul was replaced with a pseudonym. But rather less plausibly, a passing mention of the name of character actor Ned Beatty was deleted. The point, in other words, is that there is an empirical foundation for the belief that pre-publication review has gone off the rails. As it is conducted today, the review process too often arbitrarily impedes the freedom of many US government employees to participate in public discourse. In full with links at JUst Security: https://www.justsecurity.org/28827/fixing-pre-publication-review-done/ -- RR "You might want to ask an expert about that - I just fiddled around with mine until it worked..."