State of Silence: The Espionage Act and the Rise of America’s Secrecy Regime

Historian Lebovic (A Righteous Smokescreen) charts in this probing study the evolving impact of the 1917 Espionage Act and its broad but vague proscription of communicating information related to national defense. Initially, the law was used to quash not just speech about military affairs but political dissent in military matters; it especially targeted left-wing opposition to American participation in WWI and advocacy of labor strikes that would affect wartime production. As free-speech rights were strengthened in later years, Lebovic notes, federal officials instead used the law to classify huge swaths of information and punish government employees who divulged it. The result was absurd overclassification—at one point the amount of peanut butter eaten by soldiers was deemed a vital national secret—and the coverup of such scandals as the CIA’s torture of terrorism suspects after 9/11. Lebovic’s skeptical, clear-eyed analysis of America’s secrecy policies untangles murky legal issues while spotlighting the human drama surrounding them. There are gripping recaps of landmark espionage and free-speech cases, including the prosecution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the publication of the Pentagon Papers, Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing about ubiquitous NSA spying on telecommunications, and Donald Trump’s spiriting of classified documents to Mar-a-Lago. The result is a riveting account of the rise of the national security state and its ongoing distortion of American politics. (Nov.)