The government must not prosecute its critics while looking the other way when it comes to leakers who are friendly to the bureaucratic aims of various agencies.Īs it stands, the Espionage Act makes NO distinction between a civic-minded whistleblower who releases something that should never have been classified and which reveals illegal government activities, and a spy who sells genuinely damaging documents to a foreign government for cash.The government must prove that it was actually justified in withholding the leaked information from the public it serves, at a cost to our democracy, by classifying it.Leaks of information that reveals government fraud, corruption, or illegal activities must not be prosecuted at all.Leakers must be permitted to argue that the benefit of leaks to the public and our democracy outweigh any alleged security harms.Leakers should not be punished more severely than the wrongdoers they expose.But as the actions of people like Reality Winner are evaluated in court, that process must, as my colleague Ben Wizner has argued, respect principles such as: Nobody is saying that leakers should never face consequences for their actions.
Whistleblowers are an important check and balance in our democracy. At the same time, in a context where the out-of-control national security state has abused its secrecy powers in profoundly undemocratic ways, individual leakers throughout our history have provided valuable services to our democracy, including but by no means limited to Daniel Ellsberg and his release of the Pentagon Papers, which revealed profound government lying to the public about the Vietnam War. Many people worry about a world where any twentysomething serving in government feels they can unilaterally declassify the nation’s secrets without consequences. As my colleagues Dror Ladin and Esha Bhandari have detailed, that is how a whistleblower like Chelsea Manning ended up with a 35-year prison sentence (later commuted by President Obama, but still imprisoned for 7 years). Perhaps worse, it doesn’t allow leakers to defend their leaks by trying to demonstrate in court that they served the public interest. As the ACLU argued in an amicus brief in the Chelsea Manning appeal, and has argued with reference to Edward Snowden, this act is unconstitutionally vague because it allows the government to prosecute leakers and whistleblowers that it dislikes, while leaving untouched the many leakers within the security state who release classified materials to advance those agencies’ bureaucratic aims. The Espionage Act is a fundamentally unfair and unconstitutional law.
Espionage act ww1 trial#
The precise facts surrounding her actions, and their consequences (if any), would come out in a fair trial-but unfortunately, she won’t have a fair trial because she’s being prosecuted under the 1917 Espionage Act. presidential election that was published by The Intercept.
Reality Winner, a 25-year-old employee of a contractor that does work for the NSA, was arrested in June and charged with transmitting classified information, widely suspected to be an intelligence document about Russian interference in the 2016 U.S.
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