It's not justified and it can never be. Keeping information secret is only justified if releasing it would put a person in serious danger or compromise a police/military operation. And even then it must be balanced against the public interest in transparency, strictly time limited and narrow scoped (no blacking out whole documents).
I don't see how releasing an interpretation of a law could ever compromise law enforcement. Or actually I know how, it's because it would prove the way they do mass surveillance is illegal.
The problem is modern America doesn't see it that way. Any time the government does something evil they just say it's for "national security" and no one questions them. It's like a Winter Soldier password that makes courts go blank and say yes to anything.
> Keeping information secret is only justified if releasing it would put a person in serious danger or compromise a police/military operation.
Sure, but the obvious pro-government response is “revealing that the government is doing bad things reflects badly on the government and damages its reputation at home and abroad.”
Which is true, of course!
I feel the role of the Press is to root out these stories and publish them.
To me the defining moment of the Press abdicating their job was when the NYTs reported the second gulf war. This was the end of me reading it. The Sunday times was staple reading growing up.
https://newrepublic.com/article/146481/new-york-times-bury-s...
https://fair.org/home/20-years-later-nyt-still-cant-face-its...