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in: Democracy

Whistleblowers

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Background[]

  • A debate about press freedom and responsibility is reverberating in legal and political circles.
  • Journalists don’t decide what information is fit to classify; they just decide what to do with information that someone else has classified, and that they have obtained from a leaker, usually somebody with clearance who has determined the information isn’t fit to keep secret — and sometimes with good reason.

Details[]

  • The number of classification decisions on documents went from 8.7 million in 2001 to 14.2 million in 2005, a jump of about 60 percent in three years.

History: Whistleblowing In War[]

US President Roosevelt (WWII) considered banning reporters from future military operations or replacing them with government information officers. Though those plans were never carried out, the administration did publicly pursue charges that newspapers such as the Chicago Tribune) had violated the Espionage Act of 1917 and appointed an outside prosecutor and impanel a grand jury to consider an indictment. Ultimately that case was dropped.

The US Congress amended the Espionage Act in 1950, specifically making it a crime to publish classified information about American or other governments’ “communication intelligence activities” to the detriment of “the safety or interest of the United States.”

In May 2006, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales suggested to ABC News that the Bush administration would consider prosecuting journalists for stories injurious to national security. “It depends on the circumstances,” Gonzales told the Sunday morning host George Stephanopoulos. “There are some statutes on the books which, if you read the language carefully, would seem to indicate that that is a possibility.” Gonzales later tried to qualify his remarks, but the message was clear: We know where you live.

Insights[]

Backlashes from extenasive The New York Times coverage.

National Security Agency was tracking terrorism suspects by secretly listening in on domestic phone calls without benefit of search warrants, the NY Times reported.
    • President Bush called the decision to print details of the program “a shameful act.”
    • Others saw the Times’s decision to publish as a heroic moment for journalism, and redemptive of the paper’s earlier tarnished coverage of WMD in Iraq.
      • NYT reporters, James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, were awarded a Pulitzer Prize, as was Dana Priest of The Washington Post for her piece about secret CIA prisons, also based on classified information.

Some are calling for tighter controls on the press and more aggressive punishment of reporters who publish stories based on leaks of classified information, on the ground that the stories damage national security.

In May 2006, at a rare open hearing of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, chairman Peter Hoekstra said members of the intelligence community had testified that press leaks had ruined billions of dollars in defense programs and done more damage to national security than any foreign espionage. Some journalists, Hoekstra added, “apparently believe they should have the right to determine which national security information is or is not fit to classify.”

Talking[]

Justice Potter Stewart observed in the Pentagon Papers case, “if everything is classified, then nothing is, and the system becomes one to be disregarded by the cynical or the careless, and to be manipulated by those intent on self-protection or self-promotion.”

The recent tussles between the government and journalists over the publication of classified information point to a basic tension at the heart of our constitutional system. On the one hand, the law vests the government with the right to classify information and to punish those who reveal it. On the other, the press receives a steady stream of classified information from government officials in the form of sanctioned and not-so-sanctioned leaks and publishes some of them in the belief that it is information the public should be aware of. This contradictory behavior pits two constitutional principles against one another and has resulted, through most of our history, in a kind of standoff in a zone of “intentional ambiguity,” to use the phrase of Jonathan Turley, a professor at George Washington University Law School. That zone of ambiguity — which has also variously been dubbed an “informed understanding, an untidy compromise,” or a “benign indeterminacy” — has allowed journalists to operate on the premise that so long as they didn’t do anything illegal to actively obtain classified information, they need not fear prosecution for receiving it or publishing it in a reasonably responsible manner consistent with their role under the First Amendment.

Attacks on press activities:

  1. attempts to block publication (prior restraint);
  2. attempts to invade newsgathering (reporters as witnesses); and
  3. attempts to punish postpublication (reporters as defendants in libel or criminal prosecutions).

History[]

  • Grant Street critics have been painted as naysayers' when Tom Murphy was mayor. Murphy attempted to smear his opposition.
  • Swann alleges Rendell camp thwarts would-be donors "Republican gubernatorial hopeful Lynn Swann told the AP that some of his supporters are not contributing to his campaign because people in the Rendell administration or the governor's campaign have indicated it could jeopardize their state contracts or grants.

Examples[]

  • PG coverage from January 25, 2006, on how City Council is more worried about how a report got leaked to the media than interviewing a new police chiefl

Insights[]

  • Pittsburgh has backlash problems.
  • As favors are given, favorites are created. Everyone notices yet everyone can't be a 'favorite.' The majority becomes less desirable.

Attorney Gen.: Reporters Can Be Prosecuted 21 May 2006[]

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said he believes journalists can be prosecuted for publishing classified information, citing an obligation to national security. The nation's top law enforcer also said the government will not hesitate to track telephone calls made by reporters as part of a criminal leak investigation, but officials would not do so routinely and randomly.

Source: Citizens for Legitimate Government reported in May 2006

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Links[]

Media[]

By Rich Lord, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette -- Operations director was accused of meddling in personnel decision

  • http://www.cjr.org/issues/2006/4/mccollam.asp Columbia Journalism Review, May/June 2006] The story of the Tribune’s wartime brush with the Espionage Act has resurfaced recently, with some commentators citing it as evidence that the act can, and in some cases should, be used to prosecute reporters who publish stories based on classified information that officials view as damaging to national security.
  • Media best at keeping businesses in line - MarketWatch - Media coverage may be what holds companies to account, by Thomas Kostigen -- Research shows media coverage, more than policies or shareholder activism, forces companies to behave. 'The media seems to exert pressure on corporate managers and regulators, forcing companies to behave more in the interest of shareholders,' says Luigi Zingales, professor of entrepreneurship and finance at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business.'

Blogs[]

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