President Barack Obama’s “war on leaks and other efforts to control information are the most aggressive” since President Richard Nixon’s administration, according to the author of a report commissioned by the Committee to Protect Journalists. The report, “The Obama Administration and the Press: Leak investigations and surveillance in post-9/11 America,” was released Thursday.
The report was written by Leonard Downie Jr., who was an editor involved in The Washington Post’s investigation of Watergate, along with reporting by Sara Rafsky.
The committee is usually focused on the state of the media in other countries, and this report is its first comprehensive report on relations between the American executive branch and the media.
Six government employees and two contractors have been prosecuted under the 1917 Espionage Act for allegedly leaking classified information to the press during the Obama administration, while there were only three prosecutions under all other presidents, the report said.
Following Wikileaks' disclosure of classified information, the Obama White House established an Insider Threat Task Force to develop a government-wide program for “’insider threat detection and prevention to improve protection and reduce potential vulnerabilities of classified information from exploitation, compromise or other unauthorized disclosure,’” Downey wrote.
As a result, every federal department and agency was told to set up Insider Threat Programs to prevent government workers from disclosing information without authorization.
Reporters also shared that their Freedom of Information Act requests face “denials, delays, unresponsiveness or demands for exorbitant fees, with cooperation or obstruction varying widely from agency to agency,” Downey said.
During a press conference on the report Thursday morning, Downey said that government employees are increasingly afraid to talk to the press and not just about classified information. Downey also said that Obama’s promise to be the most transparent presidency in American history has meant avoiding the institutional press in favor of a “sophisticated governmental public relations strategy” focused on social-media messaging and creating its own web-site content.
For example, photographers are allowed much less access to the president than in the past, and most photographs of Obama are from the White House institutional photographer, Downey said.
“None of these measures is anything like the government controls, censorship, repression, physical danger, and even death that journalists and their sources face daily in many countries throughout the world—from Asia, the Middle East and Africa to Russia, parts of Europe and Latin American, and including nations that have offered asylum from U.S. prosecution to [leaker Edward] Snowden,” Downie wrote in he report. “But the United States, with its unique constitutional guarantees of free speech and a free press—essential to its tradition of government accountability—is not any other country.”
Jack Goldsmith, a former lawyer for President Bush’s administration told Downey that leakers have to be prepared to face legal consequences, but that leaks ‘“serve a really important role in helping to correct government malfeasance, to encourage government to be careful about what it does in secret and to preserve democratic processes.’”
Lawyer and Legal Journalist
