Ladder
Ladder: secrets and espionage laws
Laws that make it a crime to obtain, keep or disclose information a government has classified as secret, such as the Espionage Act, a 1917 United States law against disclosing defence information, or the Official Secrets Acts of the United Kingdom. Governments use them to prosecute journalists or, more often, the officials who gave journalists information.
The number of entries reflects the depth of this record, not the severity of a country's conduct.
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2Pressure
Using state power short of prosecution to change coverage: regulatory threats, licence reviews, funding cuts, lawsuits by officials, official "fake news" or "foreign agent" labels, advertising pressure, tax audits.
Twelve days after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt created the Office of Censorship.
Sustained 28 September 1945 · 2 sources · Full entry
The United States Department of Justice convened a federal grand jury to consider Espionage Act charges against the Chicago Tribune and correspondent Stanley Johnston after the newspaper published details suggesting the Navy had broken Japanese naval codes ahead of the Battle of Midway.
Reversed 1 August 1942 · 2 sources · Full entry
3Punish
Legal or physical action against individual journalists or sources: subpoenas and record seizures, prosecutions, arrests, detention, expulsions, visa denials, assault where a government actor is involved.
Jacob Frohwerk, an associate editor of the German language newspaper the Missouri Staats-Zeitung, was tried and convicted in June 1918 under the Espionage Act of 1917 for publishing articles opposing American participation in the First World War, and was sentenced to ten years in prison on each of…
Upheld by a court 10 March 1919 · 2 sources · Full entry
The United States Supreme Court voted seven to two on June 8, 1925 to uphold the conviction of socialist publisher Benjamin Gitlow, who had been tried and sentenced to prison under New York's 1902 Criminal Anarchy Law for distributing 16,000 copies of the Left Wing Manifesto.
Upheld by a court 8 June 1925 · 2 sources · Full entry
Naval intelligence analyst Samuel Loring Morison was convicted under the Espionage Act after he sent classified satellite photographs to a British defense publication in 1984.
Upheld by a court 1 January 1988 · 2 sources · Full entry
A federal judge jailed New York Times reporter Judith Miller for contempt after she refused to tell a grand jury who told her the identity of CIA officer Valerie Plame, part of a special counsel's investigation into the leak.
Upheld by a court 29 September 2005 · 2 sources · Full entry
The U.S. Army charged intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning under the Espionage Act, a 1917 law against disclosing defense information, after she gave WikiLeaks, a website that publishes leaked documents, a large archive of military and diplomatic files that news organizations later published.
Reversed 17 January 2017 · 1 source · Full entry
Former CIA officer John Kiriakou, who in 2007 was the first CIA officer to publicly describe the agency's waterboarding of a detainee, pleaded guilty to identifying a covert colleague to a journalist and was sentenced under the Espionage Act to 30 months in prison.
Upheld by a court 3 February 2015 · 1 source · Full entry
A 2010 FBI search-warrant affidavit, unsealed in 2013, described Fox News reporter James Rosen as a possible co-conspirator in violating the Espionage Act because he sought classified information from a State Department analyst, and used that theory to obtain his private emails.
Sustained 12 July 2013 · 2 sources · Full entry
A report by the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), a non-profit organization in New York that documents cases of journalists imprisoned or killed worldwide, published on October 10, 2013, found that since 2009 the United States Department of Justice had brought felony charges against six gover…
Unknown · 4 sources · Full entry
For years, federal prosecutors sought New York Times reporter James Risen's testimony identifying a confidential source in a CIA leak case; the Supreme Court declined to hear his appeal, but Attorney General Eric Holder ultimately chose not to force him to testify or name the source.
Reversed 17 October 2014 · 2 sources · Full entry
The United States indicted WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange on 17 counts under the Espionage Act over the 2010 publication of leaked military and diplomatic files, charges press-freedom groups said could expose ordinary national-security journalism to prosecution.
Reversed 25 June 2024 · 2 sources · Full entry
Months after the military removed President Mohamed Morsi, Egyptian security forces arrested Al Jazeera English journalists Peter Greste, Mohamed Fahmy and Baher Mohamed at a Cairo hotel; courts later convicted them of aiding a banned organization, and international pressure led to pardons.
Reversed 23 September 2015 · 3 sources · Full entry
Australian Federal Police spent hours searching the headquarters of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) over its 2017 "Afghan Files" reports on alleged killings by Australian special forces that breached the laws of armed conflict, seizing files under a warrant citing the Crimes Act's ban…
Reversed 15 October 2020 · 2 sources · Full entry
President Emmerson Mnangagwa signed the Patriotic Act, which criminalizes meeting foreign governments or officials with intent to harm Zimbabwe's sovereignty, with penalties up to death for advocating armed intervention and up to ten years for supporting sanctions, weeks before the country's 2023 g…
Sustained 14 July 2023 · 2 sources · Full entry
4Silence
Removing outlets or channels from the public sphere: closures, licence withdrawals, forced sales, blocking and shutdowns, prior restraint, nationalisation.
Postmaster General Albert Burleson used the wartime Espionage Act to strip the Milwaukee Leader, a socialist daily, of its low-cost second-class mailing rate, cutting off its main channel to readers.
Upheld by a court 7 March 1921 · 2 sources · Full entry
Weeks after the United States entered the First World War, the New York postmaster used the new Espionage Act, a law against interfering with military recruitment, to bar the socialist magazine The Masses from the mail.
Upheld by a court 1 November 1917 · 2 sources · Full entry
After The New York Times began publishing a leaked secret history of the Vietnam War, the Nixon administration obtained a court order stopping further publication, the first such order against a major American newspaper.
Reversed 30 June 1971 · 2 sources · Full entry
In 1990, the Supreme Court of the United States struck down a Florida law that threatened newspaper reporter Michael Smith with criminal prosecution for discussing his own testimony before a state grand jury investigating local officials.
Reversed 21 March 1990 · 2 sources · Full entry
Weeks after Britain entered the First World War, Prime Minister Herbert Asquith told the House of Commons that the Official Press Bureau was the sole channel through which the Admiralty, the War Office and other departments released naval and military information to newspapers.
Sustained 12 November 1914 · 2 sources · Full entry
In 1926, colonial authorities in the Dutch East Indies ended publication of Mawa, a newspaper linked to the Communist Association of the Indies in Soerakarta, through repeated use of Article 153 bis of the colonial Penal Code, which criminalized advocating the overthrow of the government.
Sustained 1 January 1926 · 2 sources · Full entry
5Eliminate
Long imprisonment, killing, disappearance or forced exile of journalists, with state involvement as the sources state it.
A special military tribunal convicted four Nigerian journalists as accessories to a supposed 1995 coup plot after they reported on it, sentencing them to lengthy prison terms with no right of appeal, under the military government of General Sani Abacha.
Reversed 15 June 1998 · 2 sources · Full entry
A North Korean court sentenced Current TV journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee to twenty years of "reform through hard labor" after their arrest for crossing the border from China without authorization, and both were released months later following a visit by former President Bill Clinton.
Note: Two foreign journalists received a twenty-year hard-labor sentence for a border charge, resolved only by a former head of state's personal visit to the country's leader.
Reversed 4 August 2009 · 3 sources · Full entry
A Myanmar court sentenced Reuters reporters Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo to seven years under the colonial-era Official Secrets Act after police handed them classified documents at a dinner shortly before their arrest, while they were investigating the killing of Rohingya Muslim villagers.
Note: Both reporters were pardoned in May 2019 after 511 days in prison.
Reversed 7 May 2019 · 2 sources · Full entry
A Vietnamese court sentenced Pham Doan Trang, founding editor of the independent outlet The Vietnamese, to nine years in prison for distributing anti-state "propaganda" under a national-security provision of the country's penal code.
Note: An independent editor received a nine-year sentence under a national-security speech law for her journalism, not a licensing or credential dispute.
Sustained 14 December 2021 · 2 sources · Full entry
A Russian court sentenced military correspondent Ivan Safronov to 22 years in prison for treason, accusing him of spying for a foreign state, in a case his supporters linked to his 2019 reporting on Russian arms sales to Egypt.
Note: A journalist received a 22-year sentence for treason in a case linked to his own earlier reporting, far longer than any credential, licensing or fine-based restriction.
Ongoing 5 September 2022 · 2 sources · Full entry
Iranian journalists Niloofar Hamedi and Elahe Mohammadi, who broke the story of Mahsa Amini's death in police custody, were sentenced to 13 and 12 years respectively on national-security-linked charges tied to their reporting, and later released on heavy bail.
Note: Two journalists received sentences of 12 and 13 years for reporting a death in state custody, far beyond a license, credential or access restriction.
Ongoing 17 January 2024 · 3 sources · Full entry
A Chinese court sentenced Guangming Daily editor and columnist Dong Yuyu to seven years in prison for espionage after his 2022 arrest while having lunch with a Japanese diplomat, a case his son called purely political.
Note: A veteran editor received a seven-year espionage sentence for meeting a foreign diplomat over lunch, a routine journalistic contact rather than any published disclosure.
Ongoing 1 November 2024 · 3 sources · Full entry
On December 15, 2025, the High Court of Hong Kong, a special administrative region of China with its own courts, convicted Jimmy Lai, founder of the newspaper Apple Daily, on two counts of "conspiracy to commit collusion with foreign forces" under the National Security Law, which China's central go…
Sustained 8 February 2026 · 5 sources · Full entry
All ladders · Secrets and espionage laws: by country and year · The United States chapter