Ladder
Ladder: secrets and espionage laws, in North America
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
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
All ladders · Secrets and espionage laws: by country and year · The United States chapter