Brandon

Friday, February 03, 2006

Did NY Times Violate Law in Revealing NSA Terror Monitoring?

In the March, 2006 issue of Commentary Magazine: "Has the New York Times Violated the Espionage Act?" by Gabriel Schoenfeld.

How much money and how many years were spent investigating the leak of non-covert CIA desk jockey Valerie Plames' name to the press? And with all that investigation, no damage to national security was ever proved.

Yet the same cannot be said of the unlawful release of the news of the NSA terror monitoring program. Will anyone be held accountable? Schoenfeld takes a comprehensive look at the matter. Here's his conclusion:
Commentary: The Justice Department has already initiated a criminal investigation into the leak of the NSA program, focusing on which government employees may have broken the law. But the government is contending with hundreds of national-security leaks, and progress is uncertain at best. The real question that an intrepid prosecutor in the Justice Department should be asking is whether, in the aftermath of September 11, we as a nation can afford to permit the reporters and editors of a great newspaper to become the unelected authority that determines for all of us what is a legitimate secret and what is not. Like the Constitution itself, the First Amendment's protections of freedom of the press are not a suicide pact. The laws governing what the Times has done are perfectly clear; will they be enforced?

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