There are political opponents. Then there are people who divulge state secrets.
Egypt is busily silencing political opponents. Some here call for the same.
Obama is busily silencing those who dig into the bureaucracy, find stuff that may or may not be in context, and then reveal it because ... well, for various reasons. We usually assume that their reasons are the ones that we idealistically would have. In some cases the dissent is political; sometimes it's pathological.
You have to go to a rather extreme degree of abstraction before those start to look the same. At that point even Obama and Hitler start to appear similar--both warm blooded, oxygen breathing, have melanin in their skin and hair and eyes; both sport Y chromosomes and use silverware when eating, have a language with recursion and anaphoric referencing (both even spoke Germanic languages!). Etc.
The two kinds of suppression find merger in places like the PRC and USSR, where everything that's not officially vetted for public dissemination is a state secret. A plane crashes? State secret. Suicide rates? State secret. The number of tractors that broke and couldn't be replaced on state farms this year? State secret.
The opposite of this is not absolute freedom of speech but reasoned freedom of speech--there has to be a clear metric, one that we can debate but when settled upon with input from all parties and due compromises is stuck to. So blogging takeoff times of bombers from an airbase with estimated times of arrival at their destinations given a "secret informant" would generally be considered a bad thing and illegal, even if you disagreed with the war. The US government would properly pitch a fit if access codes and routing instructions were posted for targetting and launching nuclear weapons--even if this is, strictly speaking, information held by a government of the people and by the people, and "we" are "the people." Hiss's providing of atomic bomb plans to Uncle Joe was probably a bad thing, unless you really think that the US was going to use atomic and a balance of power between the Great Satan and the Bringer of a Shining Future was necessary. Posting "here's an easy way to grow castor beans and make your own ricin, with a special appendix on weaponizing anthrax for fun and profit" would also be frowned upon.
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