Here’s a headline I noticed in The Daily Telegraph the other day: “Writer in legal fight to protect terror notes.” The story attached to it was of a journalist, one Shiv Malik, who had collaborated with a former terrorist named Hassan Butt on a book to be called Leaving al-Qaeda: Inside The Mind of a British Jihadist. Now the British security services were knocking on his door and demanding access to his notes as a matter of national security, and he was taking legal action to prevent them from having it. “Terrorism is probably the pressing issue of the age,” argued Malik’s barrister, James Eadie, before a three-judge panel in London. “What makes those who take part in it do so is a subject of the widest public interest, and so is an insight into the reality of what goes on. Serious journalism directed at shedding light on those features, drawing on experiences of an individual who has been there, is of the highest public importance.”

Let’s be blunt: this is about money. And status, of course, though that is hard to separate from money. In other words, the story of Butt’s terrorist career is now Malik’s intellectual property, and he has a right to profit from his claim. He certainly is under no obligation to share it with anybody—whatever the benefits it might provide to British national security—for free. Besides, national security would be better served—such was the implication of Eadie’s argument—by affording Malik his intellectual property rights, since his profiting from it would encourage other journalistic entrepreneurs to do likewise and thus bring more information about terrorism and terrorists to light.

Right or wrong, Eadie does have a larger point that is worth paying attention to. The 19th century had the Gold Rush in California and the Yukon and the land rush in Oklahoma. The pre-World War I era in Europe had the “scramble for Africa.” You could even say that the late-20th-century wave of Third World migrants seeking a piece of the American Dream—which is now also the European dream, as the millions of Turks in Germany, Moroccans in France, and Pakistanis in Britain can attest—was a similar race to claim a proprietary interest in an economic opportunity that was going begging.

It is possible to make a living by saying almost anything about the terrorist threat, the global warming threat, or any other real or imagined threat—except that they don’t exist.

But today, while immigrants are struggling for the chance to make our fire, fetch in our wood, and serve in offices that profit us, we entrepreneurs of the first-tier economy are dashing to the unplowed lands of the Internet to stake our claims to some small acreage of our own, which we may hope to parlay into a (more or less precarious) living—perhaps by publishing a book, like Malik’s, or by setting up a website that will lure enough visitors to make it attractive to advertisers.

Terrorism must qualify as a pretty fertile bit of bottom-land in the informational land rush, though it can be difficult and dangerous to cultivate it. More promising, perhaps, are going intellectual concerns such as global warming or the energy crisis or the healthcare crisis or the unprecedented iniquities of the Bush administration or other well-established journalistic properties. Not, of course, that these are virgin lands; far from it. They are more like those areas of economic growth in a developed intellectual economy which demand for their continued growth the import of labor from the pool of the willing but intellectually dispossessed. Writing about terrorism with the help of a tamed terrorist is probably not going to make Malik’s fortune; but it might make him a decent living if he can keep the tamed terrorist all to himself.

And who—besides perhaps the security services—would begrudge him? But it is well for the rest of us to remember that all these subjects and a great many more represent vast vested interests. There is probably no way to calculate the precise number of journalistic and academic jobs that owe their existence to popular perceptions of the dangers posed by terrorism and global warming; but it is bound to be considerable. It is possible to make a living by saying almost anything about the terrorist threat, or about the global warming threat, or about a multitude of other threats, real or imagined—except that they don’t exist. Of course, if your job derives from the campaign against global warming, you don’t lose anything by pooh-poohing the terrorist threat, and vice versa. Don’t buy the other guy’s alarmism. Buy mine!

There used to be a word, disinterested, that expressed an idea which, today, is almost inconceivable. It is the idea of inquiry for the sake of inquiry alone: truth for truth’s sake, we might call it. People actually assumed, when they read a book or an article, that the writer had had no other interest in his subject than coming to know (and therefore leading his reader to know) the truth. How naïve that now seems! The truth has to build a constituency, just like any other political candidate or issue; without a constituency, it is no longer truth. Perhaps only the security services can still claim to have a disinterested approach to information, at least in the economic sense. But their prospects of fighting off the new information enclosure movement are not looking very rosy at the moment.

James Bowman, author of “Media Madness” and “Honor: A History,” is a resident scholar at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

Image by The Bergman Group/Darren Wamboldt.