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Paula Baker, Sam Lebovic. State of Silence: The Espionage Act and the Rise of America’s Secrecy Regime., The American Historical Review, Volume 130, Issue 1, March 2025, Pages 515–516, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhae617
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Extract
Sam Lebovic has written a timely and important history of the uses and abuses of the Espionage Act. Passed amid the World War I panic about spies and saboteurs, this perhaps deliberately vague law never netted any spies. But with the companion Sedition Act, it produced hundreds of prosecutions for criticism of America’s entry in the war, the draft, and of President Woodrow Wilson.
While the Sedition Act disappeared, the Espionage Act lived on to do damage to individual rights and the transparency necessary for democracy. Lebovic takes us through familiar cases, old and new: the imprisonment of Eugene Debs for an antiwar speech that he carefully crafted to avoid obvious Espionage Act triggers; Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes’s conversion to a defense of free speech; and the first and second Red Scares. Despite a far more robust First Amendment culture and developed law protecting speech and whistleblowers, the War on Terror produced more charges than the previous decades: five between 1917 and 2008, and fourteen through the Barack Obama and Donald Trump administrations. Trump himself has been charged with Espionage Act violations in connection with documents he retained from his time in office. While, as Lebovic acknowledges, the government has a legitimate interest in keeping vital national security documents secret, he argues that the national security state well overshoots that goal. The endless reams of needlessly classified material are the product of a secrecy regime that denies important information to the public, leaks information when it suits, and entraps the unlucky.
