Unabomber Bitches About Studio Notes

Theodore "the Unabomber" Kaczynski is trying to lay claim to more than 40,000 pages of his writings to allow the public to read them in their original form. The government wants to auction "sanitized versions of the materials" on the Internet to raise money for four of the Unabomber's victims. But Kaczynski has thrown a monkey wrench into the works:

The journals contain blunt assessments of 16 mail bombings from 1978 to 1995 that killed 3 people and injured 28, as well as his musings on the suffering of victims and their families. The government wants to auction sanitized versions of the materials on the Internet to raise money for four of Mr. Kaczynski’s victims.

But, citing the First Amendment, Mr. Kaczynski has argued in court filings that the government is not entitled to his writings and has no right to alter them. The writings were among the items taken from his remote Montana cabin after his arrest in April 1996. In a motion drafted in pen, he said he planned to argue that the government had too much discretion under a federal restitution law to confiscate writings.

The four victims pursuing restitution from Mr. Kaczynski were initially reluctant to agree to the auction, fearing it could ghoulishly generate more notoriety for him and further publicize their pain. But some were equally horrified by the prospect of Mr. Kaczynski reclaiming his writings.

Mr. Kaczynski came to be known as the Unabomber after the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s code name for the case, Unabom, coined because the targets included universities and airlines. In his 18-year bombing campaign Mr. Kaczynski seemed bent on thwarting the advance of technology, and his victims included university professors, scientists and business executives.

One victim who is not seeking restitution, David Gelernter, a professor of computer science at Yale, said in a letter to the court that he hoped “the criminal’s property will be destroyed, or (if need be) sealed for a century at least and then made available at no charge to scholars of depravity.”

A lawyer for Mr. Kaczynski, John P. Balazs, said his client wanted to donate the originals to a library.

Truth really is stranger than fiction, isn't it?

My feeling is this: The Unabomber is a nutjob. Let his work be published unedited. His crazed and demented writings will speak for themselves. Free governments have nothing to fear from people like Ted Kaczynski.

All sympathies to Dr. Gelernter's victimhood status, but it's not the place of the Government to decide which objectionable writings do and don't belong to the people who wrote them. Nor is it the Government's place to unilaterally rewrite such documents... doing so will only add to the perception that Kaczynski is a victim of some type of Government conspiracy.

Publish them in their entirety or don't publish them. I don't want the Government to get it into their heads that they need to start issuing "redacted" and "cleaned up" versions of other criminal writing and manifestos.

A jew-baiting-free version of Mein Kampf, for example.