STATE OF SILENCE

A history of the Espionage Act of 1917, which was designed to protect sensitive government information but has been used to perpetuate a “secrecy regime.”

“The laws and practices of secrecy emerged in a piecemeal, improvised fashion over many decades,” writes Lebovic, author of A Righteous Smokescreen and Free Speech and Unfree News, in this illuminating chronicle. Beginning with World War I, the author proceeds through the various instances when the government tried to enforce the murky law, which had emerged from the earlier Defense Secrets Act (1911), created due to “a panic about Japanese spies.” The first attempt at enforcement of the Espionage Act was the arrest of socialist leader Eugene Debs in 1918 for his “seditious speech.” While Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. at first upheld the constitutionality of the act, he came around to a famous dissent in Abrams v. United States in favor of free speech (“the birth of the modern First Amendment”). Eventually, enforcement of the law turned from censorship to protecting the leak of “classified” information, a flawed tiered system put in place by Harry Truman in 1951. Lebovic delves into the little-known case of John Nickerson, who leaked documents from the Army Ballistic Missile Agency in Huntsville, Alabama, in 1957, leading to charges and embarrassment for the new “military industrial complex.” In 1971, Daniel Ellsberg’s publication of the Pentagon Papers led to the pivotal trial, but the Nixon administration failed to make the conviction, spurring the antiwar movement. Subsequent whistleblowers during the war on terror, including Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, have forced a new reckoning with the Espionage Act and the surveillance state in general. Lebovic concludes his thorough, engaging history with a reflection on various reforms for the law in the modern era.

A vital investigation of a “controversial, confusing law.”