President Donald Trump has made suppressing speech he doesn’t like a governing priority. From his first days back in office he cast dissent as disloyalty, promising “retribution” against anyone who criticized, investigated, or resisted him. He then translated that promise into action through regulatory proceedings, lawsuits, clearance revocations, and restrictions on press access. There have been some speed bumps along the way—setbacks in court, corporate reversals under pressure—but the effort to limit what the press reports remains steady.
The mechanics of Trump’s campaign to muzzle the media were on display in the brief suspension of Jimmy Kimmel Live! after a Kimmel monologue following the murder of Charlie Kirk prompted the chair of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to suggest that ABC affiliates that continued to air the show risked regulatory sanctions. They were evident in Trump’s $15 billion defamation suit against The New York Times and others for allegedly conspiring to portray him as corrupt, in a complaint so obviously written to advance a political narrative rather than to right a legal wrong that the court immediately threw it out as “decidedly improper and impermissible.” And they were reflected in the new press policy announced by the Department of Defense asking Pentagon reporters to acknowledge that soliciting information not pre-approved for public release is illegal and grounds for revocation of their press passes.
These moves—threatened regulatory action, sprawling lawsuits, credential pledges—are soft instruments. They rely on leverage, intimidation, and the hope that delay or distribution control will shape behavior without forcing a direct constitutional clash. But their very limits point to what remains available. When regulatory pressure stalls or procedural setbacks mount, the administration still holds a statute with sharper teeth for controlling news reports: the Espionage Act of 1917.
The Act’s scope is broad, its penalties severe, and it contains no explicit public-interest defense. It has been used to punish leakers and intermediaries; under some readings, its sanctions could also apply to the press.
What has prevented its application to journalists until now has not been the text of the statute, but the choice of presidents and prosecutors to exercise the type of restraint this administration has shown little interest in. While no administration official has publicly pledged to indict journalists under the Act, the administration’s posture and rhetoric make plain that it understands the statute’s power. In June, when asked directly about the potential use of the Espionage Act against journalists, a White House spokesman stated: “Leaking classified information is a crime, and anyone who threatens American national security in this manner should be held accountable.”
Unlike access rules or civil litigation, the Espionage Act’s reach is criminal, its language capacious, and its chilling effect immediate. It does not require prior restraint for the Act to narrow what the public learns. The law raises the stakes after publication, transforming routine reporting on national security into potential criminal exposure. This is the hard edge that makes every softer measure credible. Behind the latest experiment in credential control lies a law designed for spies, now positioned to be wielded against journalists and possibly others—academics, commentators, even comedians—who speak up on any issue the administration can link to a perceived national security concern.
The Espionage Act’s Dangerous Elasticity
The Espionage Act, codified primarily at 18 U.S.C. § 793, is one of the broadest criminal statutes in the national security field. It criminalizes the obtaining, retention, or communication of “information relating to the national defense,” a phrase that Congress left undefined and the courts have never narrowed with clarity. In Gorin v. United States (1941), the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the law against vagueness challenges, concluding that “national defense” was a “generic concept of broad connotations.” This open-endedness has given prosecutors wide latitude, allowing them to pursue not only traditional espionage cases but also disclosures to the press or even negligent handling of documents.
The Act’s scope is further expanded by the fact that “information relating to the national defense” is not limited to information the government has formally classified. Courts have held that classification is an administrative tool, not a legal element of an Espionage Act offense. This means that unclassified material can be subject to prosecution if the government asserts that it touches on national defense.
Crucially, the statute’s terms do not expressly require the government to prove either that national defense information was disclosed with an intent to harm the United States or even that a disclosure caused any actual harm. In the government’s view, a crime is committed if a person should have “reason to believe” disclosure could be injurious—a standard far more forgiving to prosecutors than the bad faith intent required by most federal criminal statutes. Thus, a journalist acting in good faith and reporting important, newsworthy information could be accused of violating the malleable terms of the law.
Another distinctive feature of the Espionage Act is its criminalization of “passive conduct.” Section 793(e) makes it unlawful not only to transmit national defense information but also to retain it without authorization or to fail to return it on demand. This provision has become particularly salient in recent years, as seen in the Trump classified records case, where prosecutors argued that mere possession of national defense materials at Mar-a-Lago—absent any proof of dissemination—was a felony. For journalists and commentators who may receive sensitive material from confidential sources, this raises still further risks. The legal exposure does not turn on whether they publish, but on whether the government concludes they unlawfully “retained” the material at any point.
For decades after its enactment, however, the Espionage Act was applied in accordance with the common-sense meaning of espionage—against spies, saboteurs, and those who transmitted military secrets to foreign powers. Through two world wars and more than half a century, prosecutions were largely confined to individuals passing troop movements, ship designs, or defense plans. This changed significantly in 1985 when the Reagan Justice Department convicted Samuel Morison, a civilian analyst at the Naval Intelligence Support Center, under §793 for leaking satellite imagery to the magazine Jane’s Defence Weekly. His conviction—upheld on appeal—was the first successful use of the Act against a government employee for providing information to the press rather than a foreign government. While Morison’s conviction signaled the potential to treat unauthorized disclosures to journalists as Espionage Act violations, that potential lingered, largely unused for two decades.
Amidst heightened security concerns after the September 11 attacks, however, the Justice Department increasingly turned to the Espionage Act to pursue insiders accused of leaking to the press. A trend that began under President George W. Bush accelerated dramatically under President Barack Obama, whose Justice Department filed eight Espionage Act indictments against leakers. Targets included Thomas Drake, indicted for retaining documents about NSA surveillance; Jeffrey Sterling, prosecuted for disclosing details of a CIA program; Chelsea Manning, charged for transmitting defense-related information during the war in Afghanistan; and Edward Snowden, charged for disclosures concerning massive government surveillance of U.S. citizens. In each of these cases, prosecutors aimed at the source who leaked to the press, not at the journalist who published the information, preserving a line between punishing disclosure and punishing publication.
That line blurred in May 2019, when the Trump Justice Department indicted Julian Assange on 17 counts under the Espionage Act, alleging he conspired with Chelsea Manning to obtain and publish defense-related information. The charges marked the first time a publisher was directly accused under the statute. In 2024, Assange pleaded guilty to a single conspiracy count, resolving the case but leaving unresolved the central constitutional question: whether the First Amendment protects journalists who publish truthful national defense information. No court has yet ruled definitively on whether publication of true, newsworthy national defense information can be subjected to criminal penalties.
The Assange case was not an isolated incident of Trump focusing on a publisher through the lens of the Espionage Act. During his first term, the Trump Justice Department secretly obtained the phone and email records of reporters from the Washington Post, New York Times, and CNN as part of leak investigations. The disclosures, which did not become public until 2021, underscored the administration’s willingness to treat the press as part of the investigative landscape. That practice—long criticized as chilling to newsgathering—foreshadowed a more aggressive posture in Trump’s second term.
Administrative Rules as Prosecution Triggers
The Espionage Act has always stood as a formidable weapon that past administrations have applied with caution. Since January, an accumulation of administrative rules has shifted the landscape and expanded the Act’s practical reach. New credential pledges, an expanded focus on “Controlled Unclassified Information,” and broadened prepublication review requirements have not amended the law, but they have multiplied the circumstances in which reporting can be cast as “unauthorized.” The cumulative effect is to transform rules that once served as internal guidance to the Intelligence Community into potential triggers for prosecution—an effect that aligns closely with this administration’s appetite to use every available lever against disfavored speech.
A clear example of this transformation involves Controlled Unclassified Information. The CUI designation was originally meant to rationalize the tangle of labels agencies had improvised for decades to identify “sensitive but unclassified” information. Under earlier administrations, a CUI designation functioned mainly as an internal housekeeping tool. In Trump’s second term, it has acquired a different weight. By conditioning Pentagon access on a reporter’s written acknowledgment that disclosing CUI without permission will harm national security—something clearly untrue in many circumstances—Hegseth is converting an internal marking into a boundary for public reporting. Restraint has given way to opportunism: a label that once guided document handling now operates as a filter on what journalists can report without fear of potential prosecution under the Espionage Act.
CUI’s reach makes the shift more than symbolic. The program now spans over 100 categories of information across federal agencies, covering everything from infrastructure schematics to immigration data. Each designation is bureaucratic, not statutory, yet when tied to credential conditions or nondisclosure rules it can function as a speech restriction with real consequences. For journalists, the sprawl means that a wide range of ordinary reporting—from base security lapses to procurement disputes—can be recast as involving protected information. For prosecutors, it supplies a ready-made bridge: what begins as a violation of agency handling rules can, if politically useful, be reframed as “national defense information” within the meaning of the Espionage Act.
Prepublication review offers a parallel mechanism of control distinct from Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s press-access regime. Under Intelligence Community Directive 711, current and former intelligence personnel must submit for review any work touching on their service before its public release—even if the author judges the work to contain no classified content. The directive’s broad language, open to interpretation, means that many borderline pieces will still be subject to review. Critics have argued that the directive functions as a soft prior restraint, chilling speech through uncertainty.
What elevates the significance of ICD 711 today is its discretionary reach. The Director of National Intelligence’s role in defining “covered intelligence” grants flexibility to stretch review obligations—and to apply them unevenly. Because these reviews occur within agencies and outside of public view, the processes lack the procedural rigor and transparency of adjudicated prosecutions. That opacity makes prepublication review more inviting as a tool of influence: delays, redactions, or informal pressure all signal risk to authors. Over time, those constraints shift perceptions of what is “authorized,” potentially reinforcing the logic by which Espionage Act exposure is later claimed.
CUI and prepublication review, in addition to pledges required for press credentials, constitute a layered system that enlarges what can be deemed “unauthorized” and prepare the ground for Espionage Act application. A Pentagon reporter who agrees not to publish CUI, a retired officer constrained by ICD 711, or a journalist who receives material withheld in a prepublication review all face the same structural risk from information outside the classified system that is treated as off-limits. This shift does not rewrite the statute, but it makes its use easier, broadening the funnel through which ordinary reporting or commentary can be recast as grounds for criminal prosecution.
Where the Fight Moves
Legal challenges to access rules and credential pledges are the kind of battles the press knows how to fight. Newsroom lawyers are quick to mobilize when credentials or publication are at stake, and courts have long invalidated prior restraints and conditions that make access contingent on content. But that is not where the greater opportunity for press coercion and intimidation lies. The more consequential pressure point is post-publication, where compulsory process—grand jury subpoenas, search warrants, compelled testimony—can expose sources and reporting chains without triggering any well-settled constitutional constraints. A newsroom can win an injunction against a credential pledge and still lose the larger fight if its records are pulled into a leak investigation.
Attorney General Pam Bondi cleared the way for pulling the press into leak investigations within weeks of taking office. In April, she rescinded the Justice Department’s 2021 newsroom guidelines that barred prosecutors from issuing subpoenas for reporters’ phone and email records in leak investigations. That rollback restored tools long criticized as chilling—grand jury subpoenas, compelled disclosure of communications, secret acquisition of reporters’ records—and signaled that the administration intended to use them. Paired with Trump’s public declarations that journalists who publish classified information “should be in jail,” the change stripped away the guardrails that had kept the Espionage Act’s most aggressive applications in check. The stage was set for a return to high-profile leak prosecutions, not as rare events but as warnings and determinations of loyalty.
There are three main ways the Trump administration could weaponize the Espionage Act to silence the press. The most familiar step would be the prosecution of their sources—those who disclose information without prior approval. The post-9/11 cases against Drake, Sterling, and Manning made clear that prosecutions for disclosure of classified information could succeed—or at least devastate careers—even when evidence of harm was tenuous or charges later collapsed. A second Trump administration has every incentive to press this line harder. By defining “national defense information” broadly and seeking harsher sentences, prosecutors can convert leak cases into loyalty tests: a signal that disclosure by a perceived critic, even inadvertent, may be treated as a felony. The spectacle matters as much as any conviction. The aim is deterrence through ruin—making examples of individuals so that others hesitate before sharing information that casts the administration in an unfavorable light.
The second step would turn the focus directly to the press. In Branzburg v. Hayes (1972), the Supreme Court held that journalists do not have a First Amendment privilege to refuse a grand jury subpoena. Although lower courts have widely recognized a qualified privilege in civil cases, no court has extended that protection to reject a subpoena in a leak investigation framed as a national security concern. This approach, too, has practical consequences. Judith Miller of the New York Times spent 85 days in jail rather than testify before a grand jury investigating the Valerie Plame leak. James Risen, also of the Times, fought a subpoena for years before prosecutors relented, but only after immense personal and financial cost. Motions to quash, contempt proceedings, and grand jury appearances consume vast resources. Legal uncertainty breeds caution in newsrooms; editors must weigh whether running a sensitive story is worth the cost of potential litigation. With DOJ’s prohibition on reporters’ subpoenas rescinded, a Trump administration could again jail reporters for contempt if they refused to disclose their sources, confident that Branzburg shields them from successful appeal.
The third and most radical option—once considered unthinkable—would be direct prosecution of reporters or editors for publishing stories relating to national defense. The theory advanced in the Assange indictment provided a template the Trump Justice Department could adopt against domestic journalists. The only reported decision addressing this theory came from a district court judge in United States v. Rosen (2006), the so-called “AIPAC case.” Two lobbyists were indicted under the Espionage Act for receiving information during meetings at the Pentagon that they transmitted to Israel. Though charges were eventually dropped, the court held that non-government actors could, in principle, be prosecuted for possessing or communicating national defense information that came into their possession. That ruling, coupled with Assange’s guilty plea, gives Trump’s lawyers ample running room to seek indictments against journalists under the Act. The spectacle of jailed journalists or newsrooms forced into court battles over potential criminal punishment could achieve the desired deterrent effect without producing a single guilty verdict.
The impact of these strategies would not be to eliminate leaks, but to recalibrate the risk calculation. By raising the legal and financial stakes for both insiders and reporters, Trump could constrict the flow of politically damaging stories. The Espionage Act’s elasticity allows prosecutors to treat ridicule or dissent as a threat to the national defense, turning political grievances into national security prosecutions.
For Trump, the success of this strategy would not be measured in convictions but in silence. What matters now is not only how far Trump is willing to go, but whether the courts would stand in the way.
Judicial Deference—and Its Limits
The framers of the U.S. Constitution saw a free press as the “bulwark of liberty” that had to be protected to restrain government’s “natural tendency toward tyranny and despotism.” They saw the ability of the press to “bare the secrets of government and inform the people” as essential to the success of the new republican form of government they were creating. For much of American history, the Supreme Court has echoed that view, citing the First Amendment as vital to sustaining open society and functioning democracy. New York Times v. Sullivan (1964) protected even mistaken criticism of public officials. The Pentagon Papers case (New York Times v. United States, 1971) imposed an almost insurmountable barrier to prior restraint. Richmond Newspapers v. Virginia (1980) barred the removal of the press from criminal trials. These decisions created a sense of constitutional shelter for the press. But none directly defined when subpoenas to reporters amount to an unconstitutional interference with newsgathering and none has answered whether the press can be punished after publishing accurate information when national security is invoked. These gaps matter now.
The judiciary’s past deference in Espionage Act prosecutions suggests that Trump might find receptive courts. New York Times v. United States is often cited as proof of judicial resistance to presidential overreach, even in the face of national security claims. But that ruling was limited to prior restraint, which the Court found unavailable because the Espionage Act had not granted the president any express authority to stop publication of national defense information. The Act does allow criminal prosecutions, and since 9/11, courts have shown great reluctance to second guess a presidential assertion about the needs of national security in other contexts. Cases such as Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project (2010) have reinforced a pattern of judicial deference to executive claims when national security is invoked. Trump’s lawyers could build on that lineage, framing steps against the press as essential to protecting national security secrets and daring courts to second-guess.
Trump officials are increasingly pressing the term “national security” into service far beyond traditional espionage: it is invoked to justify protest suppression, immigration enforcement, and press control. Courts in Chicago and Los Angeles have already pushed back, barring force against journalists absent probable cause and limiting crowd controls in protest zones. At the same time, administrative actions—such as ICE raids using paramilitary tactics and executive orders branding domestic opponents as terrorist actors—signal that the security frame is being leveraged domestically.
The Supreme Court has yet to define the contours of the Justice Department’s ability to compel journalists to give up their confidential sources. The only time the Court has squarely addressed the issue, in Branzburg v. Hayes, it refused to excuse journalists from testifying before grand juries about information they learned inside Black Panthers’ headquarters and observing the manufacture of illegal drugs. Justice Lewis Powell’s narrow concurrence in the 5 to 4 decision left room for case-by-case protections, but the majority’s holding was clear: there is no categorical First Amendment privilege to shield sources in good faith criminal investigations. Lower courts have sometimes recognized a qualified privilege in civil matters, but in leak cases, especially under the Espionage Act, Branzburg still governs. That precedent makes it difficult to argue that reporters are legally entitled to protect sources when subpoenaed, no matter how essential those relationships are to uncovering government wrongdoing.
Because the courts offered little protection, until now the main safeguard of reporters’ ability to obtain information confidentially came from inside the Justice Department itself. Since the 1970s, Department regulations recognized the need for reporters to be able to gather the news without government interference and required prosecutors to exhaust all other avenues before subpoenaing a reporter. Prosecutors were also required to obtain the personal approval of the attorney general before issuing a subpoena to a reporter. For 50 years, those rules remained in force, growing only stricter over time. In 2015, following public outcry over the Obama DOJ’s secret seizure of Associated Press phone logs and email from a Fox News reporter, Attorney General Eric Holder reaffirmed and strengthened the protections. Merrick Garland went further still in 2021, barring all subpoenas of journalists seeking information they learned while engaged in news-gathering. That “bright line” was erased in May by Bondi, who objected that leaks to the press “undermine President Trump’s policies” and branded them “treason.”
Without strict DOJ guardrails, subpoenas are available as a political weapon. The Fourth Circuit’s treatment of James Risen made clear that no First Amendment privilege prevents compelling a journalist to testify in a criminal trial. Judges can order reporters to disclose sources or go to jail, as Judith Miller did in 2005. Trump’s DOJ can now pursue the same strategy, presenting judges with a choice between enforcing subpoenas or inviting accusations of being “soft” on leaks.
The extent to which the First Amendment limits an Espionage Act prosecution of a publisher provided with national security information has yet to be tested, but judicial resistance to such a prosecution is far from certain. The district court in Rosen acknowledged First Amendment concerns with applying the law to lobbyists who became recipients of classified information but still ruled that they could be prosecuted if they acted with a “bad faith” intent to harm the United States. That case collapsed before appeal, leaving no clear precedent. For the press, a First Amendment defense thus remains more theoretical than precedential. Judges may express unease at criminalizing the publication of newsworthy information, but they have repeatedly upheld the statute’s broad sweep against leaks.
A fundamental problem is the impulse of many judges to defer to the president as soon as a claim of national security is raised. In the Pentagon Papers case, six justices refused to issue a prior restraint on publication of the classified Pentagon report, but several wrote that prosecutions after publication might be viable. In Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) litigation, Congress specifically instructed courts to review “de novo” agency claims that information was “properly classified,” and could therefore be kept secret on national security grounds. But after 9/11, courts routinely deferred to agency affidavits invoking the “mosaic theory”—that even trivial fragments of information, if combined, could reveal secrets. Judges extend a “presumption of good faith” to executive declarations, and they require only a “logical” and “plausible” explanation of a national security reason for secrecy. In that climate, it is hard to see courts preventing an Espionage Act prosecution of a reporter framed as vital to protecting national security.
DOJ filings in past national security cases were sometimes riddled with errors — as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) documented in the Carter Page surveillance application — but judges still stopped short of imposing sanctions, preferring remedial orders to outright punishment. That pattern of deference leaves room for sloppy pleadings to stand uncorrected, especially in leak cases, where judges risk being blamed for hypothetical damage if they question executive claims. Trump’s lawyers will emphasize that other presidents pursued Espionage Act cases, that Assange pled guilty, and that the statute has been upheld against vagueness attacks. With no binding precedent protecting reporters, the institutional habit for deference could be Trump’s shield.
From Chilling Effect to Systemic Silence
When courts defer, the practical burden falls not on judges but on reporters and their editors. Newsrooms begin calculating which stories are worth the legal fight, often deciding in silence that some are not. The chilling effect appears not in headlines but in the gaps between them: stories quashed before drafts are complete, calls never returned by cautious officials, tips left unpursued because counsel advises against holding classified material, even briefly. What the public sees is less controversy, fewer disclosures, and a narrowing of debate, not because misconduct has disappeared, but because the avenues for revealing it have closed.
The warning issued by Associated Press president Gary Pruitt after AP phone records were seized in 2013 portends the broader risks now at issue: “Some of our longtime trusted sources have become nervous and anxious about talking to us, even on stories that aren’t about national security.” He added that “in one case, a reporter could not get a routine confirmation of a fact from a law enforcement officer.” That dynamic would repeat on a larger scale, with disfavored news outlets denied access to the basic information needed to report what the government is up to.
The impact inside the government is equally concerning. The Pentagon’s new press policy is not an isolated measure; across the federal bureaucracy, lawful channels for disclosure have already eroded. In an August 15 letter House Oversight Democrats objected to Kristi Noem, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, that multiple inspector-general offices had been “hollowed out and stonewalled,” citing post-January purges, staffing losses, and refusals to provide records. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard’s installation in June of a political adviser to a position within the office of the inspector general of the U.S. intelligence community prompted allegations of unlawful interference. Agencies have reinforced the message: the Labor Department warned staff in April that speaking with journalists could trigger criminal charges, while the Small Business Administration that same month opened investigations into “unauthorized communications” with reporters and former colleagues. For federal workers, official avenues for lawful disclosures are compromised or futile.
That leaves only unofficial disclosure—and here the risks are sharper still. Insider-threat programs, polygraphs, and surveillance tools have primed federal employees to treat contact with the press as dangerous. Added to this are new conditions on access and Hegseth’s apparent plans to remove reporters from their dedicated workspaces in the Pentagon to a new location that will likely isolate them further, making it harder to interact even with the spokespeople designated to make information available. These steps all reinforce the message that even unclassified communication can be treated as “unauthorized.”
Espionage Act prosecutions collapse the distinction between whistleblowing and spying. After the Obama-era pursuit of leakers such as Thomas Drake and Jeffrey Sterling, officials learned that even limited disclosures could ruin a career. The 2017 conviction of Reality Winner, a National Security Agency contractor who leaked a classified NSA assessment on Russian election interference, underscored that the statute applied even when the disclosure was meant to inform a vital, on-going public debate. For today’s federal workforce, the consequence is not merely chilled speech but systemic silence: disclosure is criminalized, lawful alternatives are hollow, and the risks outweigh even the strongest sense of public duty.
If historic restraint gives way to political weaponization, the milestones of this campaign will be indictments stretching §793 to its limits, subpoenas that expose reporters’ sources, and contempt orders that send journalists to jail. These will not arrive as a single moment of crisis. They will come piecemeal, one filing or court order at a time. The question that follows is whether, as recent months suggest, the guardrails that would be expected to prevent this subversion have already broken.
Leaks Won’t Stop—They’ll Shift
It is tempting to imagine counterweights if the Espionage Act is turned into a political weapon. Career prosecutors might balk at indicting journalists. Congressional committees could hold hearings or tie appropriations to limits on leak prosecutions. Editors and publishers might band together, as they did during the Pentagon Papers fight, to raise the political cost of criminalizing reporting. The potential value of these checks is real, and these actions would matter. But events since January suggest that many of the guardrails once thought sturdy have bent quickly under pressure. Some institutional resistance remains, but the broader pattern is one of accommodation rather than defiance.
Yet history shows leaks do not simply stop in response to government pressure and legal actions. They adapt. Inside newsrooms, encrypted channels—SecureDrop portals, Signal numbers, ProtonMail addresses—have become routine, reflecting how far quiet caution now substitutes for open contact. These systems allow reporters and sources to communicate without detection.
Leakers also migrate. When mainstream outlets appear too dangerous, insiders turn to adversarial platforms, foreign publications, or dedicated leak sites. Suppression may narrow traditional channels, but it does not seal them.
In the years since Snowden, a parallel ecosystem of leak sites has taken shape. These platforms post troves of government and corporate files that traditional outlets either cannot authenticate or choose not to publish. For example, a hacker this past May breached the TeleMessage service used by former Trump national security adviser Mike Waltz and intercepted messages from more than 60 government users — the data was then released via Distributed Denial of Secrets, which describes itself as a “publisher of last resort.” The data included messages and metadata from officials across disaster response, diplomatic missions, customs, and the Secret Service. The point is not mass readership; it is permanence. Once such material is released, it is mirrored, shared, and preserved, beyond the reach of any administration.
Other tools enable secure, anonymous transfer through spaces that operate outside traditional editorial control. SecureDrop software also allows whistleblowers to upload documents safely through the Tor network. The open-source platform GlobaLeaks supports collaborations such as PubLeaks in the Netherlands, where dozens of newsrooms share a common intake system for submissions.
Each of these outlets and technologies exists to make suppression harder. Once information flows into their channels, it cannot be pulled back. And once it is published in Berlin, London, or Reykjavik, American outlets can cover it freely, reporting on what is already public without carrying the liability of being first.
Recent cases underline the point. In 2023, Jack Teixeira, a young Air National Guardsman, posted classified Pentagon documents in a Discord chat group. They circulated for weeks among gamers before surfacing in public channels and being picked up by the press. The government had no way to contain the leak once it spread across social platforms. What began as a handful of slides meant for bragging rights reached a global audience within days.
Technology makes suppression harder still. Social media ensures that even small disclosures can ripple outward at speed, amplified far beyond the original audience. Artificial intelligence tools now accelerate that process, automatically translating documents, generating instant summaries, and circulating them across multiple platforms. But when leakers bypass established outlets, the information often surfaces without context, verification, or restraint. An unintended consequence of aggressive secrecy is that it produces disclosures more sweeping and more damaging than what steady, incremental reporting might have delivered.
Information flowing from alternative leak platforms is also hard to vet. Journalistic analysis reveals how SecureDrop’s anonymity can make verification especially difficult, even in newsrooms equipped to use it. Platforms such as GlobaLeaks and PubLeaks that enable crowd-sourced submission complicate journalistic accountability, since they operate without unified editorial standards. In practice, silencing mainstream journalism does not prevent disclosure—it shifts it into forums where the dangers of privacy violations and genuine national security harm are greater, not less.
That is the paradox of repression. By silencing traditional media, a government pushes leaks into darker, less accountable spaces. Responsible outlets provide context, verification, and editorial judgment. Strip that away, and what remains are indiscriminate dumps or direct transfers to adversary intelligence services. Suppression might succeed in narrowing debate at home, but it magnifies risk abroad. Foreign intelligence services will not hesitate to exploit frustrated insiders. Authoritarian governments already invoke U.S. hostility to the press to justify their own crackdowns. Allies who once saw American democracy as a model now see a cautionary tale.
A campaign against the press can only ensure that what Americans learn about their government arrives later, with less context, and often from places far outside U.S. reach. The danger is not abstract. We will see it unfold in case filings, courtrooms, and press briefings in the months ahead. Each of those is a milestone — a moment when institutions can either absorb the pressure or assert the limits of power. What’s at stake is not only the fate of leakers and journalists, but the ability of citizens to know what their government is doing in their name—an essential prerequisite of democracy itself.
