The government is prosecuting leakers at a brisk clip and on novel theories. It is collecting information from and about journalists, calling one a criminal and threatening another with jail. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/03/us/politics/first-amendments-role-comes-into-question-as-leakers-are-prosecuted.html In its failed effort to persuade Russia to return another leaker, Edward J. Snowden, it felt compelled to say that he would not be tortured or executed. These developments are rapidly revising the conventional view of the role of the First Amendment in national security cases. The scale of disclosures made possible by digital media, the government’s vast surveillance apparatus and the rise of unorthodox publishers like WikiLeaks have unsettled longstanding understandings of the role of mass media in American democracy.
The military judge in Private Manning’s case ruled last year that there was no First Amendment problem with the government’s legal theory. Providing classified information for mass distribution, she said, is a sort of treason if the government can prove the defendant knew “he was giving intelligence to the enemy” by “indirect means.”
The verdict thus means only that military prosecutors did not prove their case. The legal theory stands, and it troubles even usual critics of unauthorized disclosures of government secrets.
Something similar happened in 1971, when President Richard M. Nixon failed to stop the publication of the Pentagon Papers, a secret history of the Vietnam War. The Supreme Court’s ruling allowing The New York Times and The Washington Post to publish the papers is often said to be a high-water mark in the annals of press freedom.
“The American press was freer before it won its battle with the government,” Alexander Bickel, the Yale law professor who represented The New York Times in the case, wrote in his classic 1975 book, “The Morality of Consent.”
“Through the troubles of 1798, through one civil and two world wars and other wars, there had never been an effort by the federal government to censor a newspaper by attempting to impose a prior restraint,” Professor Bickel wrote. “That spell was broken, and in a sense, freedom was thus diminished.”
Worse, from the perspective of the news media, the victory in the Pentagon Papers case was distinctly limited and helped shape the Manning prosecution.
“A majority of the Supreme Court not only left open the possibility of prior restraints in other cases but of criminal sanctions being imposed on the press following publication of the Pentagon Papers themselves,” Floyd Abrams, who also represented The Times in the case, wrote in a new book, “Friend of the Court.”
To date, there have been no prosecutions of journalists in the United States for seeking or publishing classified information. But two lobbyists with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, Steven J. Rosen and Keith Weissman, were charged in 2005 with violating the espionage laws for conduct they said was functionally equivalent to journalism: they had learned government secrets and passed them along to others.
Judge T.S. Ellis of Federal District Court in Alexandria had a larger message. He said the case “exposes the inherent tension between the government transparency so essential to a democratic society and the government’s equally compelling need to protect from disclosure information that could be used by those who wish this nation harm.”
“The rights protected by the First Amendment,” he added, “must at times yield to the need for national security.” WTF
