State of Silence

October 15, 2023
People are accustomed, nowadays, to living in a world where a government zealously protects its secrets and just as zealously punishes those who reveal those secrets. However, as Lebovic writes in State of Silence, as far as the United States was concerned, the modern fixation on secret keeping didn't spring up overnight. Considering the nation's early tendency towards isolationism, its policies on state secrets were relatively casual. That all changed in the years leading up to WWI, as the U.S. became more involved with world affairs, and intergovernmental espionage became an increasing concern. Lebovic follows the history of the founding and growth of the myriad agencies formed to protect states secrets and the increasingly broad laws enacted to empower those agencies, starting with the Espionage Act in the 1920s, through the paranoia of the Cold War era, to the Patriot Act in the 2000s. Lebovic is a conscientious historian who has clearly researched his subject in minute detail. Ardent students of the history of espionage will find much of interest in the detailed chronicle.

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Starred review from October 23, 2023
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.

Starred review from November 1, 2023
A history of the Espionage Act of 1917, which was designed to protect sensitive government information but has been used to perpetuate a "secrecy regime." "The laws and practices of secrecy emerged in a piecemeal, improvised fashion over many decades," writes Lebovic, author of A Righteous Smokescreen and Free Speech and Unfree News, in this illuminating chronicle. Beginning with World War I, the author proceeds through the various instances when the government tried to enforce the murky law, which had emerged from the earlier Defense Secrets Act (1911), created due to "a panic about Japanese spies." The first attempt at enforcement of the Espionage Act was the arrest of socialist leader Eugene Debs in 1918 for his "seditious speech." While Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. at first upheld the constitutionality of the act, he came around to a famous dissent in Abrams v. United States in favor of free speech ("the birth of the modern First Amendment"). Eventually, enforcement of the law turned from censorship to protecting the leak of "classified" information, a flawed tiered system put in place by Harry Truman in 1951. Lebovic delves into the little-known case of John Nickerson, who leaked documents from the Army Ballistic Missile Agency in Huntsville, Alabama, in 1957, leading to charges and embarrassment for the new "military industrial complex." In 1971, Daniel Ellsberg's publication of the Pentagon Papers led to the pivotal trial, but the Nixon administration failed to make the conviction, spurring the antiwar movement. Subsequent whistleblowers during the war on terror, including Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, have forced a new reckoning with the Espionage Act and the surveillance state in general. Lebovic concludes his thorough, engaging history with a reflection on various reforms for the law in the modern era. A vital investigation of a "controversial, confusing law."

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