The Obama Administration is said to have prosecuted more people for leaking classified information than all previous administrations combined. Journalists have noticed. “The Obama Administration is the greatest enemy of press freedom in a generation,” according to James Risen, the New York Times investigative reporter. Risen’s language is unusually strong, but the general theme is familiar among journalists. In a typical comment, Bob Schieffer, a CBS Washington correspondent, is quoted as saying: “Whenever I’m asked what is the most manipulative and secretive administration I’ve covered, I always say it’s the one in office now . . . . This administration exercises more control than George W. Bush’s did, and his before that.”

It seems unlikely that this Administration is just more authoritarian or paranoid than the one before it (which was in turn more so than the one before it, and so on), or that this President and Attorney General harbor a perverse desire to antagonize the New York Times and CBS. The much more plausible explanation is that the world has changed, and government officials have responded by becoming less tolerant of practices they might have lived with before. A decade or two ago, internal discipline—firing or demoting employees who disclosed government secrets—might have been enough of a deterrent to leaks. Today the government thinks it needs the threat of a criminal prosecution. And while the Justice Department’s own guidelines require prosecutors to leave journalists alone whenever possible, the government has directed a few warning shots toward journalists, notably in a case involving Risen; it insisted at one point that Risen testify against a government employee who was being prosecuted for leaking to him. (After prevailing in court on the principle, the government ultimately backed off its pursuit of Risen.) But whether the government is right or wrong, things do appear to have changed. Whatever one thinks of their rhetoric, Risen et al. seem right to say that the government is being more aggressive about protecting its secrets than it has been in the past. 

Amy Gajda’s subject, in The First Amendment Bubble, is not national security and government secrets but personal privacy and ordinary people’s secrets. The laws protecting privacy are, for the most part, enforced not by the government in criminal prosecutions but by individuals in lawsuits for money damages. But Gajda describes a parallel evolution. A generation ago, the courts hearing lawsuits claiming invasions of privacy routinely rejected those claims. In fact those courts often went out of their way to celebrate the press and the role it played in society. But now some people who claim to be exercising their First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and freedom of the press have pushed things too far, Gajda says. They invoke the First Amendment to shield grotesque invasions of people’s privacy and dignity. And there are signs of a backlash. Courts show increasing sympathy for people suing for violations of their privacy and, notably, are increasingly critical of the press in general.

Read more at The New Rambler