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.
Pressure
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.
| Date | Country | Head of government | What was done | Outcome | Sources |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| December 19, 1941 | Focal case United States (RSF 2026 rank: 64th of 180) | Franklin D. Roosevelt | Twelve days after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, President Franklin Roosevelt created the Office of Censorship. Full entry | Sustained (September 28, 1945) | 2 |
Punish
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.
| Date | Country | Head of government | What was done | Outcome | Sources |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| July 6, 2005 | Focal case United States (RSF 2026 rank: 64th of 180) | George W. Bush | 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. Full entry | Upheld by a court (September 29, 2005) | 2 |
| July 5, 2010 | Focal case United States (RSF 2026 rank: 64th of 180) | Barack Obama | 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. Full entry | Reversed (January 17, 2017) | 1 |
| January 25, 2013 | Focal case United States (RSF 2026 rank: 64th of 180) | Barack Obama | 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. Full entry | Upheld by a court (February 3, 2015) | 1 |
| May 20, 2013 | Focal case United States (RSF 2026 rank: 64th of 180) | Barack Obama | 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. Full entry | Sustained (July 12, 2013) | 2 |
| October 10, 2013 | Focal case United States (RSF 2026 rank: 64th of 180) | Barack Obama | 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… Full entry | Unknown | 4 |
| October 17, 2014 | Focal case United States (RSF 2026 rank: 64th of 180) | Barack Obama | 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. Full entry | Reversed (October 17, 2014) | 2 |
| May 23, 2019 | Focal case United States (RSF 2026 rank: 64th of 180) | Donald Trump | 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. Full entry | Reversed (June 25, 2024) | 2 |
| December 29, 2013 | Egypt (RSF 2026 rank: 169th of 180) | Adly Mansour | 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. Full entry | Reversed (September 23, 2015) | 3 |
| June 5, 2019 | Australia (RSF 2026 rank: 33rd of 180) | Scott Morrison | 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… Full entry | Reversed (October 15, 2020) | 2 |
| July 14, 2023 | Zimbabwe (RSF 2026 rank: 124th of 180) | Emmerson Mnangagwa | 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… Full entry | Sustained (July 14, 2023) | 2 |
Silence
Removing outlets or channels from the public sphere: closures, licence withdrawals, forced sales, blocking and shutdowns, prior restraint, nationalisation.
| Date | Country | Head of government | What was done | Outcome | Sources |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1917 | Focal case United States (RSF 2026 rank: 64th of 180) | Woodrow Wilson | 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. Full entry | Upheld by a court (March 7, 1921) | 2 |
| July 1917 | Focal case United States (RSF 2026 rank: 64th of 180) | Woodrow Wilson | 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. Full entry | Upheld by a court (November 1, 1917) | 2 |
| June 15, 1971 | Focal case United States (RSF 2026 rank: 64th of 180) | Richard Nixon | 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. Full entry | Reversed (June 30, 1971) | 2 |
Eliminate
Long imprisonment, killing, disappearance or forced exile of journalists, with state involvement as the sources state it.
| Date | Country | Head of government | What was done | Outcome | Sources |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| July 1995 | Nigeria (RSF 2026 rank: 112th of 180) | Sani Abacha | 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. Full entry | Reversed (June 15, 1998) | 2 |
| September 3, 2018 | Myanmar (RSF 2026 rank: 166th of 180) | Aung San Suu Kyi | 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. Full entry | Reversed (May 7, 2019) | 2 |
| December 15, 2025 | Hong Kong (RSF 2026 rank: 140th of 180) | John Lee | 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… Full entry | Sustained (February 8, 2026) | 5 |
All ladders · Secrets and espionage laws: by country and year · The United States chapter