Sunday, March 14, 2010
Editorial: The Adventures of [REDACTED]
If Mark Twain had faced government censors, Huck Finn would be blacked out.
From the RoundTable blog
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The Freedom of Information Act gives citizens the right to review government documents. It has enabled curious researchers to discover terrible government abuses and wonderful government successes.
Yet too many elected officials prefer secrecy. They whittle away at the public's right to know, exempting this or that sort of information from FOIA.
They try to have it both ways. Voters like openness, so politicians keep the documents public. Then, when voters aren't paying attention, they render those documents useless with a black pen.
When an agency releases a document, it may redact it. That's the fancy word for the practice of blacking out portions of a document, and it's something government officials abuse to great effect.
Rather than demonstrate the power of redaction with some boring government document, we pulled an American classic off the shelf, one that most people read in school and are familiar with.
Below is the second paragraph of Mark Twain's "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn." We've cited some reasons a government censor might gut this great work of literature.
Visit tinyurl.com/ydyvc54 to read the original passage and see what you're missing.
Then think about what else you're missing. What embarrassing facts and criminal acts do elected officials hide with their black pens?
Now the way that the book winds up is this: Tom and me found the money that the robbers hid in the cave, and it made us rich. We got six thousand dollars apiece -- all gold. It was an awful sight of money when it was piled up. Well, Judge Thatcher he took it and put it out at interest, and it fetched us a dollar a day apiece all the year round--more than a body could tell what to do with. The Widow Douglas she took me for her son, and allowed she would sivilize me; but it was rough living in the house all the time, considering how dismal regular and decent the widow was in all her ways; and so when I couldn't stand it no longer I lit out. I got into my old rags and my sugar-hogshead again, and was free and satisfied. But Tom Sawyer he hunted me up and said he was going to start a band of robbers, and I might join if I would go back to the widow and be respectable. So I went back.
