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EDITORIAL:
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On censorship

“Secrecy,” wrote Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “is hugely inefficient… The best way to ensure that secrecy is respected — and that the most important secrets remain secret — is for secrecy to be returned to its limited, but necessary, role.”

In this week’s issue of Up Front, Erik Schechter takes a close look at the role played by Israel’s military censor, an institution that has its origins in the British Mandate’s wartime emergency regulations. Today, most Israeli newspapers (including this one) voluntarily submit to its judgments on security-related stories. It’s an open question whether we should continue to do so.

In theory, the advantage to a newspaper of complying with the censor is that it gives us “access” — to off-the-record briefings, high-level interviews, field exercises, and so on. In practice, such access is often next to worthless.

Military reporters rely on a network of informal contacts to bypass official channels. IDF officers and Defense Ministry bureaucrats leak stories on a preferential basis. Connections rule. The censor’s office, far from keeping the nation’s secrets, is mainly a minor speed bump on the road toward their exposure.

A recent example: In October, the Los Angeles Times reported that Israel had modified its US-made, submarine-launched Harpoon missiles to carry nuclear warheads. The item would never have passed muster with the censor’s office. But nothing prevented the entire Israeli news media from retailing the story, with a curt nod to the Times.

The sheer futility of trying to quash information in the Internet era is one thing. The quality of the censorship is another. For this investigation, the Jerusalem Post sent the censor’s office three patently fraudulent stories. One mentioned a West Bank city that does not exist; another the unit number of an engineering battalion that could not exist; a third a technology that exists only in the imagination of Hollywood.

We have reprinted these little jokes inside. Readers can see for themselves that while the censor applied his pen, he did not apply his brain. As a test of his office’s operational fitness, it’s a shocking display of incompetence.

The current chief censor, Brig. Gen. Rachel Dolev, should take notice.

More broadly, the Israeli government needs to rethink its information effort, of which the censor’s office is one part. What should a nation keep secret — and how? And what should it reveal — and how?

At present, there are bureaucracies of dubious efficacy. There is no strategy. Nobody seems to have given thought to Moynihan’s observation that keeping too many secrets devalues the worth of any given secret. Conversely, nobody seems to realize that by keeping fewer secrets, you are better able to manage the information that really counts.

Israel today is a country of open secrets. This serves neither the country’s security interests, nor its public-relations interests, nor indeed the public interest. A media that routinely bypasses the censor’s office trades in leaks of questionable veracity. Rumors are treated as fact; the interpretations of this or that official are treated as the authoritative view of an entire agency; everyone thinks they’re in the know. But they are not in the know, and the quality of public debate suffers as a result.

As for the Defense Ministry, it neither imposes reasonable standards for the dissemination of information nor stiff penalties for unauthorized leaks. It has only itself to blame when real secrets get out.

This cannot go on forever. At some point, the state’s failure to manage its information outflow will lead to consequences and embarrassments. We hope our cover story prompts officials to act before they are forced to react.