PW Daily reported yesterday that Simon & Schuster has joined with its author Valerie Plame Wilson to file a lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York against the CIA, charging that the agency is interfering with Plame’s efforts to write her memoir. The lawsuit, which names the CIA, CIA director Michael Hayden and J. Michael McConnell, director of national intelligence, alleges that the executive branch of the government is trying to stop Plame from using the dates she served in the CIA in her book even though those dates have been made public.
“The CIA’s effort to classify public domain information is an unreasonable attempt at prior restraint of publication, and a violation of our First Amendment rights. We have filed our suit in the belief that the CIA’s actions have implications that are much broader than this particular case, and that could have a chilling effect on the nature of public discourse in a free society,” said S&S in a statement.