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  3. Big crimes deserve tough responses. In any country the theft and publication

Big crimes deserve tough responses. In any country the theft and publication

游客2023-12-14  16
问题     Big crimes deserve tough responses. In any country the theft and publication of 250,000 secret government documents would deserve punishment. If the leak costs lives, let alone the careers and trust that have already perished amid the WikiLeaks disclosures, the case for action is even stronger.
    Nor should a government fear to act because its adversaries are popular and fight back. That the digital Jacobins of WikiLeaks have a cult following should not save them from condemnation or prosecution. Removing illicit material from the Internet is hard. But governments spend a lot of money, rightly, on chasing child pornography, bomb-making techniques and copyright breaches to the Internet’s margins. Similarly, discouraging WikiLeaks and those who give it financial and technical support is justified for elected politicians in a law-governed state.
    But calibrating that response raises questions of principle, practice and priority. Businesses will go their own way. Some, such as PayPal, Visa and MasterCard, which handled donations to WikiLeaks, and Amazon, which provided web-hosting services, have dumped it as a customer in response to American outrage. More may follow. They risk attacks from its fans, just as those that refuse face hostility from their customers in America. Too bad: business is full of hard choices.
    For the American government, prosecution, not persecution, offers the best chance of limiting the damage and deterring future thefts. The blustering calls for the assassination of Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder now in custody in London awaiting extradition to Sweden on faintly mysterious charges of sexual assault, look both weak and repellent. If Mr. Assange has broken American law, it is there that he should stand trial, just like Bradley Manning, the alleged source of the stolen documents. If not, it may be some consolation that the cables so far reveal a largely flattering picture of America’s diplomats: conscientious, cool-headed, well-informed, perceptive and on occasion eloquent.
    If America sticks to those standards now it will display a strength and sanity that contrasts with the shrill absolutism and cyber-vandalism of the WikiLeaks partisans. Calling Mr. Assange a terrorist, for example, is deeply counterproductive. His cyber-troops do not fly planes into buildings, throw acid at schoolgirls or murder apostates. Indeed, the few genuine similarities between WikiLeaks and the Taliban —its elusiveness and its wide base of support—argue against ill-judged attacks that merely broaden that support. After a week of clumsy American-inspired attempts to shut WikiLeaks down, it is now hosted on more than 700 servers around the world.
    The big danger is that America is provoked into bending or breaking its own rules, straining alliances, eroding credibility and—because it will not be able to muzzle WikiLeaks—ultimately seeming impotent. In recent years America has promoted the Internet as a menace to foreign censorship. That sounds tinny now. So did its joy of hosting next year’s World Press Freedom Day. Russian glee at American discomfort are a sure sign of such missteps.
    The best lessons to bear in mind are those learned in such costly fashion during the past decade of the "war on terror". Deal with the source of the problem, not just its symptoms. Keep the moral high ground. And pick fights you can win. [br] What is the author’s main purpose in writing this passage?
选项 A、To advise America to learn from its mistakes.
B、To tell the readers how to look at WikiLeaks.
C、To discuss how to deal with WikiLeaks.
D、To show readers how to stick to their rules.
答案 C
解析 主旨题。本文开篇提出自己的看法：严重的犯罪理应得到严酷的惩罚。由此引出维基解密事件，一开始就陈述看法，指出政府该如何处理这一事件：作为一国政府也不应该惧怕采取行动；对美国政府来说，应该采取起诉而不是迫害的做法；将阿桑奇称为恐怖分子将会起到严重的反作用；过去一周中尝试关停维基解密网站的尝试可谓拙劣；更大的危险在于美国被迫要对自己的原则进行通融或者突破；最应该吸取的是来自过去十年反恐作战中代价高昂的教训：必须表本兼治，坚守道德优势，打响稳赢不输的战斗。可见，本文从开始就是就如何应对维基解密泄密事件进行论述，故[C]为答案。作者只在最后一段提及“The best lessons to bear in mind are those learned in such costly fashion during the past decade of the‘war on terror”’，其他段落没有涉及吸取过去经验教训之意，[A]非主旨：作者只是陈述自己的观点，应该如何处理维基解密泄密事件，并没有告诉读者应该如何看待该事件，排除[B]；同理，也没有给读者其他建议，排除[D]。
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