When the sky is turned into dark blue with shades of orange, you can see the sun is disappearing in the back of the mountains. People say it is more beautiful when it rains. I have never had chance to see the rainy scene. However, the foggy mist around the lake makes this place like heaven. The weather, the color of the sky, and the color of the lake water altered from seconds to seconds. You can’t really predict what you would see in the next minutes. That’s why I love here so much--full of pleasant surprises all the time. Lorenz High School

We are who we are. NBC’s airing of Cho Seung-Hui’s ranting thanatopsis isn't anything media wouldn't have run with 200 years ago. We’ve grappled with the appropriateness of painful revelations from the early days of the republic – as we should. These are decisions free people make for themselves. It’s the ever-present security vs. freedom tussle -- central to every free people’s zeitgeist. The Cho video controversy isn’t far removed from the appropriateness of warrantless wiretaps and the PATRIOT Act. Do we accept encroachments on first principles because we’re told there’s a greater good at stake, or do we agree that there is no greater good than an open society where the individual’s rights deserve first consideration?

In a liberal democracy, the press provides and we partake. Or not, it's up to us. Without that latitude, we might feel more polite, but we'll have paid for it dearly. The freedom to dig for and speak the truth is a curse at times and the price we pay.

Bad taste? Sure. Hurtful to survivors? In many cases, undoubtedly. Such images evoke a visceral response from normal people. But that doesn't mean we should be shielded from them. Aside from sparing ourselves some discomfit, what do we have to gain from censors deciding what we should and shouldn't know?

It would have been far more alarming had NBC turned the material over to the FBI without airing it. When we get to that point – and we will if we’re not careful – the real terror begins.

Jack McEnany, Editor LostNation.TV

Jack McEnany, Editor LostNation.TV

It seems to me that there are two different prongs to this debate.
One involves a public policy claim: crowd-sourced research of these videos will better lead to prevention of future murders. I am a little skeptical of this claim. It may lead to some better understanding of the psychology of this young man, but I strongly doubt that it will lead to the kind of clues that themselves lead to mass-murder prevention.

The second is more complicated: that NBC doesn’t have the right to keep video that it chooses not to use—its a moral claim about the obligation of some category of organizations to share information. For what category of information, and to what category of people, does this obligation apply? If the videos had been sent to me, as a citizen, I’d feel no obligation to share them (unless I was convinced of the public policy argument)—any more than I’d feel an obligation to share a suicide note I happened to read, or a thousand pieces of political information that I might know but choose not to put in the public sphere. I think this intuition is widely, and rightly, shared—that a private citizen who comes upon information does not have a general responsibility to share it.

What about bloggers? What if the package was sent to a blogger? Josh Wolf was released this month after 225 days in jail, having refused to share video footage from a San Francisco protest that could have been incriminating. Most will say that is different because Wolf took the video himself, and therefore has special rights to protecting his recorded experience, but its still a relevant comparison. Most bloggers would strongly resist the idea that the fact of being a blogger, or a independent sharer of media, creates an obligation to share scoops, tips, video, or email sent to them. Does Josh Marshall have an obligation to share all emails sent to the tip line at TPM? Of course not. Would a collection of tips sent to TPM be more informative than Cho's videos? Probably. Might people rail at Josh Marshall if he didn’t release the video, had it been sent to him instead of NBC news? Probably. But my guess is that it would be because of our curiosity—we want to see it, we want to know, we want to understand—more than because we believed he had an obligation.

Since we cannot insist that NBC share it because Cho wanted it shared, then, is there something unique about a news organization that enhances its obligations to share, over that of a citizen or a blogger? Beyond the first argument—the public policy claim—I think not. It may be, however, that a general public policy claim does justify the moral claim—as a general rule, unsolicited, unused, not-untrue documents sent news organizations should be shared, because we would, in fact, know more about the world—more about political cconnections, more about science, more about corruption, more about natural resources, more about police methods, a little more about everything—if a version of the tip-line to NBC were shared.

Finally, some might argue that there is something unique about the fact that it is video, creating a different obligation to share it than if it were text. If they did make this argument, I wouldn’t understand it, though I’m open to hearing it.

My gut instinct is the exact opposite of Winers—I am glad that they are not automatically sharing it, and I hope they take their time. Its clear that the best way for NBC to make money off this is to share all the videos, all the text, all the materials. If they are held back, it seems to me quite likely to be for real reasons of concern, and I take for granted that there is role in society—a role for media companies but for all of us—for making judgments based on delicacy and concerns about feeding a fascination with the grotesque. There is no rush to reveal—even the strongest crowdsourcer would have to concede its unlikely anything will change in the next few months that depends upon the release of these videos--and I hope they make their decision carefully and unrushed and with the best interests of all of us in mind.