The War on Leakers: National Security and American Democracy, from Eugene V. Debs to Edward Snowden

by Lloyd C. Gardner

Overview

Four days before Pearl Harbor, in December 1941, someone leaked American contingency war plans to the Chicago Tribune. The small splash the story made was overwhelmed by the shock waves caused by the Japanese attack on the Pacific fleet anchored in Hawaii—but the ripples never subsided, growing quietly but steadily across the Cold War, Vietnam, the fall of Communism, and into the present.

Ripped from today's headlines, Lloyd C. Gardner's latest book takes a deep dive into the previously unexamined history of national security leakers. The War on Leakers joins the growing debate over surveillance and the national security state, bringing to bear the unique perspective of one our most respected diplomatic historians. Gardner examines how national security leaks have been grappled with over nearly five decades, what the relationship of “leaking” has been to the exercise of American power during and after the Cold War, and the implications of all this for how we should think about the role of leakers and democracy.

Gardner's eye-opening new history asks us to consider why America has invested so much of its resources, technology, and credibility in a system that all but cries out for loyal Americans to leak its secrets.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781620970812
Publisher:	New Press, The
Publication date:	03/01/2016
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	336
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Lloyd C. Gardner is professor emeritus of history at Rutgers University. He is the author or editor of more than a dozen books, including The Long Road to Baghdad, Three Kings, The Road to Tahrir Square, and Killing Machine, and a co-editor (with Marilyn B. Young) of The New American Empire and Iraq and the Lessons of Vietnam, all published by The New Press. He lives in Newtown, Pennsylvania.

Table of Contents

Introduction ix

1 From the Espionage Act to the National Security State 1

2 Where Ellsberg Fits In 28

3 The Great Transformation 65

4 Front Lines-Leakers and the New (Old) Journalism 90

5 Prosecutions and Principles 116

6 A Time of Testing Limits 151

7 A House Divided Against Itself 188

8 Afraid of Our Shadow (Government)? 226

Conclusion: Defending the Republic? 255

Notes 277

Index 305

Editorial Reviews

Praise for The War on Leakers:
“[An] engaging and thoroughly researched investigation.”
—Booklist

“[The War on Leakers is] well-written and tightly-argued. . . A worthwhile contribution to our ongoing national debate about the balance between national security and privacy and about the line between sedition and dissent.”
—Kirkus Reviews

Praise for Killing Machine:
"Gardner's treatment of this brave new mode of presidential war-making is admirably comprehensive."
—Bookforum

"Gardner delivers an engrossing blow-by-blow account of a decade of fierce debates and painful events that offer excruciating parallels with the Vietnam War."
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Praise for Three Kings:
"Gardner's meticulous review and perceptive analysis provides a rich background for understanding what is unfolding today, and is likely to persist."
—Noam Chomsky

From the Publisher

2015-12-07
Who poses the greater threat to the United States: the spymasters and their "enormous power" or the leakers "who occasionally expose them?" Add still another blow to Woodrow Wilson's tottering historical reputation. As a World War I security measure, Wilson proposed the Espionage Act of 1917—he tried vainly to get press censorship into the law—and used it instead to suppress dissent, most notoriously against Eugene Debs, Socialist Party leader, imprisoned for giving anti-war speeches. With the rise of the national security state during and after World War II, succeeding administrations have persisted in using the act not so much to punish foreign agents but rather to go after protestors and leakers, most famously Daniel Ellsberg in 1971 for supplying the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times. Since 9/11, intelligence agencies have accrued even more power and have employed the act and other laws to pursue the likes of Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden, to ensnare journalists—Glenn Greenwald, James Risen, and Michael Hastings, among others—who convey classified information not to the enemy but to the public. Near the end of his well-written, tightly argued discussion of these and other cases, Gardner (Emeritus, History/Rutgers Univ.; Killing Machine: The American Presidency in the Age of Drone Warfare, 2013, etc.) declares that the intelligence community has become "the unacknowledged supreme master of the federal government." By threatening aggressive investigatory journalism, by shielding government malpractice, by violating the separation of powers doctrine, intelligence agencies have done more, he writes, to undermine our democracy than to make us safe. Adding to Gardner's credibility is his willingness to be as harsh on Barack Obama as on George W. Bush and his accommodation of such voices as Sean Wilentz, Michael Kinsley, and George Packer, all of whom have been critical of either the methods or character of the whistleblowers. A worthwhile contribution to our ongoing national debate about the balance between national security and privacy and about the line between sedition and dissent.

Kirkus Reviews