Sergeant Cid Posted:

To argue that ‘freedom of information’ should be part of ‘freedom of speech’, you then have to decide which information you mean. Do you mean all information? In that case, you, as an individual, would not be allowed to keep your SSN, your bank PIN, etc., private.

Two fallacies: First we’re talking about government’s information, not citizen’s information. (though that does accentuation the point about how gray the First amendment is); Second: “allowed to keep” does not apply as there is no requirement to disclose anything here, simply the federal government being unable to enact laws to prohibit it’s circulation.

Individual citizen’s do not ‘need to know’ all the particular details of the government’s inner workings. They can form opinions based upon the outward results. Your ‘right to know’ does not supersede another person’s ‘right to safety & security’.

Agreed.

But it swings both ways. If the general public had never learned of the Japanese “concentration camps” our government held in WWII it would not be held in disgust now and the idea of it becoming public would hold no force in preventing anything similar in the future because it would be illegal to talk about. I’m sure you can think of a dozen similar instances, point being that there can be no checks and balances when any branch of government can say to the public “it’s a security issue” and no one gets to know about it or speak of it.