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not. But she was ready for that. Likewise, Snowden said in his first interview, “Some things are worth
dying for.” Now, what would that be? A real analogy that I see to Snowden or Chelsea Manning is not so
much Paul Revere, but Nathan Hale. People of my generation all know his name because of his last
statement on the gallows just before he was hanged by the British: “I regret that I have but one life to give
for my country.” He was a spy for George Washington—the first American spy. He was also the first
American, and the only one before me, to be tried for giving secrets to Americans. I was the second. No
one else had been prosecuted in the intervening two hundred years for giving secrets to Americans.
No one else had been prosecuted before me in 1971 for giving secrets to Americans because it
was regarded that criminalization of doing that was unconstitutional under the First Amendment. The
British have an Official Secrets Act which very clearly I would have broken if I had been British; I would
have been found guilty. It criminalizes any and all release of classified information for whatever purpose,
for whatever motivation, and to whomever. If you do it, you’re guilty. That sort of law was rejected
repeatedly by Congress (though proposed by a number of administrations) as being inconsistent with the
First Amendment’s freedom of the press and freedom of speech. Congress needed that information and
the public needed it, yet the First Amendment in this situation was not outmoded. And the Constitution
held. When I first started talking about this, Congress had never passed an Official Secrets Act. In
November of 2000, it did pass one, but President Clinton vetoed it on constitutional grounds. It violated
the First Amendment, and it was bad for our democracy. In other words, the First Amendment shouldn’t
be changed for such a law.
After me in 1971, there were two other cases under two different presidents. One of them, again,
was dismissed. Mine had been dismissed for government criminality, so it didn’t reach an opinion. The
other was with withdrawn after rulings by the judge that, in effect, found the “plain language” of the
Espionage Act as unconstitutional when applied to that leak case. In the other case, one person was
convicted, Samuel Loring Morison, grandson of Samuel Eliot Morison, the great naval historian. He
remains the only person to date convicted by a jury of violating the Espionage Act by leaking. He didn’t
take the stand in his own defense. He had stolen the document, and he did it for gain; he had wanted to be
hired by the publication Jane’s Defence Weekly.
By the time of my trial, more than half a century had gone by since the 1917 Espionage Act
without any cases for leaking classified information. We’d gone through two world wars, Korea, and most
of the Vietnam War. We had sort of gotten along without prosecuting anyone for leaking, although leaks
occurred every other day. Not enough of them, but a lot of them. And then there were two more cases in
the next thirty-eight years.
Under Obama, there have been seven prosecutions for leaking—more than twice as many as all
previous presidents put together. Obama proclaimed on his first day in office (and during his campaign)
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