Send Judith Miller to Prison -- and Bob Novak after her.

There's a public debate going on about whether or not journalists should have an absolute right to protect the confidentiality of their sources. This is a principle established in the 60s, during the Vietnam era, when newspapers were revealing Secret and Top Secret information. Then, to own the means to publish required mulitple millions of dollars. The government could easily shut you down, if it wanted -- just send in the police, on some trumped up charge. If a reporter used a confidential source to reveal secret information, the courts ruled that the confidentiality was protected absolutely --- doesn't matter if a law was violated in providing the information to the journalist. That rule made sense, as newspapers held a special position in our society, owning the expensive means for distribution of information -- that free flow of information being key to the openness of our democracy, and how easily that flow could be threatened by an angered government.

What does that protection mean in an age of blogs? The means of distributing information are now as widely owned as computers. Bloggers like DailyKos and wonkette have as much distribution as many national papers, and if they get taken down, there are millions of other places where someone wishing to leak the secret that Valerie Plame is a CIA agent in order to exact political revenge on her husband can do so.

This blanket journalistic privilege no longer makes sense. Protection of confidential sources should change in our legal system -- the confidentiality can be allowed by the courts if a societal good served by the information being distributed outweighs the violation of the law against revealing top secret information. The courts will be called on to decide that the source of certain information can be protected by a pledge of confidentiality -- by co-conspirators, in this age of blogs, since the "professional journalist" tag is fuzzified --- if the revealed information serves an important societal good.

Like the whistle-blower laws which protect government employees, or the laws permitting violence when it happens in self-defense, this would permit Top Secret information to come out when the leaker (Scooter Libby? Karl Rove? we still don't know) decides that they must serve a societal good. If the courts agree, then, fine, their identity is safe. If the courts don't agree -- and I think they won't in this case -- then off to prison with them, and with anyone who protects them.

We let police shoot people. We just don't let them shoot anyone, anytime they want to. We even offer them deference -- the benefit of the doubt -- when they do shoot people. But they don't get an absolute free pass to shoot anyone anytime they want to. Neither should journalists -- anymore, in the age of blogs -- have an absolute right to protecting the confidentiality of their sources. The information they reveal should have to serve a societal good.

Throw Judith Miller in prison, until she's willing to cooperate with our courts and law enforcement, in figuring out who vindictively and with malice outed Valerie Plame. And throw Robert Novak in after her.

Oh, and if you have any interesting top-secret leaks which serve a greater societal good, send them to me. If I agree, I'll publish them here, and argue "societal good" up to the Supreme Court.