News and Commentary

Trevor Timm -- The Guardian With President Joe Biden now embroiled in his own classified documents controversy, partisan commentators will surely have a field day playing the tired old game of “no, you endangered national security.” Instead, I’d like to focus on the real issues: the overly broad and often-abused Espionage Act and the massive, draconian secrecy system that does far more harm than good in the United States.

Richard Spence -- The Dissenter -- January 5, 2023 Ministers and security officials in Australia, Sweden, and the United Kingdom have coordinated with the United States to develop new espionage laws.

By Eoin Higgins -- Salon In 2022, Pride month — June — gave way to an explosion of invective against LGBTQ rights, helped along by allies in right-wing media, particularly Fox News. But there's also rising anti-trans sentiment in the liberal-left sphere, and it's being driven by some elements of what might be called the "post-left," onetime champions of progressive outlooks who have now tilted to the right. Former Intercept writer (and Salon columnist) Glenn Greenwald is one of those leading the charge, turning his audience on to fringe elements of a growing hate movement.

By Marjorie Cohn, Truthout Attorneys and journalists whom the CIA spied on when they visited WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London have filed a lawsuit against the CIA, its former director Mike Pompeo, UC Global and its director, David Morales, in U.S. District Court.

By Micah Lee -- The Intercept The Trump administration used the controversial law to target media outlets and sources who provided important information to the public.

Opinion by Jameel Jaffer -- Politico Reforms to the law are long overdue, but they have nothing to do with the Mar-a-Lago search.

Once an independent muckraker, Greenwald has moved sharply rightward — but even so, this was embarrassing By Eoin Higgins - Salon.com -- October 7, 2022

Opinion by Jesselyn Radack, Kathleen McClellan - Salon -- October 20, 2022 Donald Trump has an indisputably delusional view of what it takes to declassify national security secrets, recently claiming that he, as president, could have declassified documents just "by thinking about it." As much as Trump's latest self-serving crazy makes for good late-night comedy fodder, it also reminds us how much absurdity the U.S. government has created in national security litigation. As attorneys for whistleblowers and media sources, our cases have been the breeding ground for abuse of the broken classification system.Beneath the public laugh-fest over Trump's outlandish claims of telepathic declassification powers lies the implication that somewhere, somehow, there is a clear, fair process for doing so.

Opinion by William Neuheisel - Responsible Statecraft -- October 18, 2022 The Agency’s carelessness in protecting its own agents reveals the cynicism of the US government’s treatment of whistleblowers. Reuters recently published new reporting on the story of one of the worst U.S. intelligence failures in decades. From approximately 2010 to 2013, dozens of CIA informants in China, Iran, and elsewhere were rounded up and executed, jailed, or flipped to double agents. In Iran and China, almost the entirety of the CIA’s network in two of its top-priority countries are reported to have been exposed.

By Branko Marcetic -- Jacobin.com -- November 09, 2022 The Department of Homeland Security is helping to coordinate tech company censorship efforts according to recent reporting. The line between tech firms and the national security state is only getting blurrier.