The Drake Affair

[Valin]

Weekly Standard Blog:

Gabriel Schoenfeld
6/12/10

“Obama Takes a Hard Line Against Leaks to Press” is the headline in the New York Times this morning. The piece by Scott Shane reprises the case of Thomas Drake, who has been charged under the Espionage Act of 1917 for passing secrets from the National Security Agency to the Baltimore Sun.

Shane sees the Drake affair as “the latest evidence that the Obama administration is proving more aggressive than the Bush administration in seeking to punish unauthorized leaks,” and I think he’s right. This may well be a case of a Nixon going to China, a president using his position on one end of the political spectrum to accomplish something ideologically unexpected.

President Obama is not the first president to feel his hands have been tied by unauthorized disclosures of classified information. And the leaks he has contended with thus far have not been nearly as damaging to national security as those suffered by his predecessor, George W. Bush. But there is nonetheless an emerging consensus, bringing together the executive branch and Congress, that the ability of our intelligence services to keep secrets has collapsed. Hence the wave of prosecutions launched by the Obama administration and detailed by Shane.......Snip)



For more see Necessary Secrets: National Security, the Media, and the Rule of Law.
Gabriel Schoenfeld