The true threat to freedom

Michael Ledeen puts his finger on a more general problem than sharing of intelligence:

The usual mess, with the lawyers getting in the way of rational policy.

JJA: It wasn’t illegal, first of all. How could it have been? The "information" wasn’t proprietary, and it wasn’t secret. The data came from newspapers and magazines, they just analyzed it, and apparently they analyzed it quite well. There was no legality that prevented them from pointing out the significance of the data to anyone — law enforcement or Army cook. It’s just nonsense. Some prissy lawyer in the JAG undoubtedly lectured these guys about spreading sensitive information, but at the end of the day, that wasn’t decisive. Their superiors blocked the analysis for a much more important reason: It didn’t fit with what the policymakers wanted to believe.

I've seen this intimidation by lawyers firsthand. It's spread across the land, infecting school boards, bureaucrats and officials. It's destroying freedom of speech because a lawsuit you win can be more expensive than one you lose.

It's intimidation like this that kept the German people from speaking out against the rounding up of Jews. It's a kind of prior restraint that the courts don't touch, because there's no one to litigate it. Some civil liberties the ACLU has brought us.