Outlaw editors: change a lede, go to jail.

• Author: Welch, Matt
• Position: Citings

THE DAY AFTER April Fool's Day, the Treasury Department asserted with a straight face the government's right to criminalize the heretofore First Amendment-protected act of editing an article or book. It is a sign of either how debased our expectations have become or how skillfully the Bush administration can shift the goal posts of public debate that the move was hailed as a victory for free speech.

Last September, Treasury's ominously named Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) made an obscure ruling on a question posed by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE): How did the publishing of scholarly work by Iranian scientists square with the Trading With the Enemy Act and International Emergency Powers Act? OFAC advised that most basic editing--even as little as the "reordering of paragraphs or sentences, correction of syntax, gram mar, and replacement of inappropriate words," or the addition of a single illustration--constituted a "service" provided to a citizen of a fully embargoed country and was therefore punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

The decision seemed to violate the 1988 8erman Amendment, which specifically exempted the exchange of "information or informational material" from...