On Information Restriction: Two Cases

You might say that we live in an Information Era. With Wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, and the massive number of blogs on the Internet, there’s no shortage of user-generated information to dilute the all the credible information produced by legitimate news sources, journals, organizations, and other outlets whose content comes from experts and is reviewed for accuracy. Even respected news outfits like CNN and government representatives have turned to Twitter for reporting on or communicating agendas. However, the problem is not just that we have so much information available to us that we could literally never run out of it, or even that so much of that content is not credible or accurate; the problem is that, while we drown in information, there is still a lot more valuable information that gets restricted. Just today, I learned about two different cases that got me thinking about our relationship to information.

The first story is about Ai WeiWei, a Chinese artist and activist who appeared on Christiane Amanpour’s segment on CNN today. Through art, he comments on the Chinese government's oppression of free expression. One of his projects involves breaking urns from the Han dynasty or painting logos like Coca-Cola’s on them to demonstrate “the commercialization of an ancient culture” and bring into the national consciousness an awareness of the past while shattering old conceptions of it. Another was an installation made of children’s backpacks that criticized the local government for badly constructed schools and for officials’ weak response following the 2008 Sichuan earthquake that killed thousands of children. Chinese police have beaten him for his activism, and the government has shut down three of his blogs. Ai uses Twitter and other social media outlets to spread his message and believes such sites are the future of activism.

Meanwhile, China has banned or restricted sites like Twitter and Facebook as well as other sources of information, enforcing censorship laws through a “Great Firewall” to filter and prevent accessibility of certain kinds of information to its people. Google, which until recently operated on a .cn domain, adhering to the government’s censorship measures, has redirected searches on that domain to one based in Hong Kong, where they do not have to self-censor.

Just imagine if, instead of having only to regularly wade through the overwhelming magnitude of “bad” information, we were so blatantly kept from learning about our own history, certain religions, etc. Censorship isn’t a new practice, and in the U.S. we’ve had bouts of information restriction through bans on films and books, but the Internet is a global network. It seems like it should be free of such censorship, doesn’t it? How odd that I can search topics like the Beijing Olympics or Tiananmen Square in Las Cruces, New Mexico, and find different information than someone living in Beijing.

Here’s another example of information restriction that falls closer to home:

While driving to Starbucks today, I was listening to NPR and caught a portion of an interview with a former priest, Patrick Wall, who left the Catholic Church after acting as a “fixer” for several years. I missed the beginning, but Wall was in the middle of explaining his role in the Church when I tuned in. He said that when allegations or rumors about the misconduct of priests were received by the higher-ups, those priests would often receive new assignments rather than face expulsion or punishment by the Church. By sending the priests to new parishes, it avoided legal conflicts and protected the reputations of the Church and the individual priest. Wall’s job was to go to parishes in an interim capacity to clean up or “fix” the problem. He wished to teach and live a balanced life of prayer and service. Instead, he found himself being sent out all over the place, year after year, to deal with other people’s mistakes. His life, he said, was dictated by other men who had screwed up, and they were the ones who got to return to the monastery and live the kind of life he wanted for himself. In 1998, at 33 years old, he left the Church. Now, he is an advocate for victims of abuse in the Church.

Having been on the inside, Wall knows how impossible it is for such victims to seek justice. He explained that, when a priest was reassigned, there would be documentation in archival files but that there was a separate “secret archive” that hid additional information which might tarnish the individual’s reputation. Wall explained, “If you don’t know what you’re asking for, they don’t have to produce it.” Wall and other “fixers” like him were instructed in how to deal with scandals. In fact, according to a December 2008 NPR piece, there was a document called the “Crimen Sollicitationis “(1962), kept under wraps until 2003, that mandates secretive pursuit of such abuse investigations and perpetual silence on their findings under penalty of excommunication.

The practice of hiding information and sending priests on new assignments rather than rehabilitating or punishing them exacerbates insufficient protection for victims, whose allegations must basically be proven with tangible evidence before Church officials will treat the matter seriously. It also allows for repeated offenses by the same individuals. I suspect that this has changed some since 2003 when the U.S. Church hierarchy implemented reforms to address cases of sexual abuse that got a lot of attention during the preceding two decades. Now, with the current sex scandal plaguing the Church in Europe, U.S. officials are urging the Vatican to adopt those reforms world-wide. U.S. news outlets, like The New York Times, have reported that Pope Benedict may have been involved in covering up such scandals when he oversaw investigations in his previous position as Cardinal, indicating that such behavior may reach the highest office in the Church.

I lament the saturation of inaccurate information and non-news that’s privileged by media outlets – celebrity gossip, Joe the Plumber types’ sound bites exalted as expert opinion, misinformed hate speech that masquerades as political rhetoric, etc. But I’d rather deal with that than be restricted from any kind of information. For the most part, Americans are free to seek information, and while I might feel passionately in the moment that a person who holds up a stuffed monkey and a sign telling Obama to go back to Kenya should be punished, I can honestly say that the freedoms, not only of speech, but also of access to speech and other sources of information are among the greatest liberties we enjoy.

Exercise your freedom of speech - what do you think about our Information Era?