Snowden

Snowden Becomes Eighth Person to Be Charged with Violating the EspionageAct Under Obama

From Kevin Gosztola of FireDogLake:

Snowden is the eighth person to be charged under the Espionage Act under Obama. This is more than all previous presidential administrations combined.

NSA whistleblower Thomas Drake was charged under the law in April 2010 for retaining classified information on secret surveillance programs. The government claimed it was for the purpose of disclosure.

For disclosing classified information on FBI wiretaps to a blogger, FBI translator named Shamai Leibowitz was charged under the Espionage Act.

Pfc. Bradley Manning was charged with multiple violations of the Espionage Act in July 2010 after disclosing US government information to WikiLeaks.

Stephen Kim, a former State Department contractor, was charged in August 2010 for revealing classified information on North Korea to Fox News reporter James Rosen. (Rosen was labeled an “aider, abettor and co-conspirator” in the leak.)

In December 2010, a former CIA officer, Jeffrey Sterling, was charged under the Espionage Act after he communicated with New York Times reporter James Risen about Iran’s nuclear program in the 1990s. (The Obama Justice Department has fought in the courts to have a judge require Risen to testify against Sterling.)
John Kiriakou, a former CIA officer, was charged under the Espionage Act in January 2012 after he shared information related to a rendition operation with reporter Matthew Cole.

A much lesser-known individual, James Hitselberger, a former Navy linguist, was charged with violating the Espionage Act for providing classified documents to the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
The Espionage Act charges were dropped in the cases of Drake, Kiriakou and Leibowitz. Manning has pled guilty to lesser offenses but not the espionage charges. Hitselberger, Kim and Sterling’s cases are all still pending. Kiriakou's serving a 30-month sentence in a prison in Loretto, Pennsylvania, after pleading guilty to violation of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act.

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The Espionage Act is a law from 1917 that was intended to criminalize individuals who engaged in spying, not leakers or whistleblowers. It was not initially used to prosecute government employees who passed on information to a reporter or a media organization. But, under Obama, the Justice Department has exercised wide discretion and interpreted the law as one that can be used to criminalize government employees who blow the whistle on corruption or share information on operations, policies or programs with the press.

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And this is the 3,000 post on this blog.