Reporter's notes vanish,
limiting bioterror report
Dr. Edward Lifshitz, medical director of the New Jersey health departmen's communicable disease unit, is charged with the responsibility of educating physicians and hospital staff members on the means of counteracting a bioterrorism attack. He was set to speak at a New Brunswick, N.J., hospital shortly.

Lifshitz is listed as an expert on bioterrorism by the health department's public speaker's bureau.

Information entered by the writer into his cell phone concerning the topics Lifshitz, a public employee, discusses with physicians was erased between last night and this morning. Public pages concerning bioterrorism were blocked today when this writer tried to obtain access.

The topics were posted for physicians to see in a public corridor of St. Peter's hospital. A security guard had interrupted this writer as he took notes, attempting to make an issue of his note-taking. The conclusion is that she contacted authorities who then initiated surveillance and overreacted, taking extraordinary measures to curtail freedom of press.

The fact is that the list of topics was of interest to the public but did not disclose information of value to potential terrorists. The erased notes were less informative than the following page from the Middlesex County, N.J., web site, leading to the conclusion was that the decision to bar access was the sort of overreaction one gets from anxious bureaucrats.

Bioterrorism Guidebook
co.middlesex.nj.us/publichealth/Bioterrorism%20Guidebook.pdf

In the past, this writer has written articles on bioterrorism and was simply attempting to continue in that vein on his web site, Newz from Limbo. The topic is of compelling news value, especially in light of the fact that anthrax was mailed in New Jersey in 2001.

Newz from Limbo is a news site and, the hosting mechanism notwithstanding, should not be defined as a web log or as 'little more than a community forum'... Write News from Limbo at Krypto78=at=gmail=dot=com... The philosophical orientation of Newz from Limbo is best described as libertarian... For anti-censorship links: http://veilside78.blogspot.com/2010/12/anti-censorship-spectrum_23.html (If link fails, cut and paste it into the url bar)... You may reach some of Paul Conant's other pages through the sidebar link or at http://paulpages.blogspot.com/ See http://www.blacklistedjournalist.com/column104e.html for photo