The Espionage Act of 1917 was passed during World War I to prosecute spies -- people who gave military secrets to foreign enemies. It was never intended to criminalize whistleblowing. But that is exactly what it has become. Since 2008, every administration -- Obama, Trump, and Biden -- has used the Espionage Act to prosecute government employees who disclosed information to the press about government misconduct. In the entire history of the law prior to 2008, it had been used against leakers only a handful of times. Since then, it has become the primary weapon for punishing those who reveal what the government does in secret. The pattern is consistent: the whistleblower goes to prison. The crime they exposed does not. Reality Winner Reality Winner was a 25-year-old NSA contractor who, in June 2017, leaked a single classified document to The Intercept. The document described Russian efforts to hack into US voting infrastructure ahead of the 2016 election. It was the first concrete evidence confirming that Russian operatives had targeted American election systems. Winner was arrested within hours of The Intercept publishing the document -- the publication had inadvertently exposed her identity by sharing the original document with the government for comment. She was charged under the Espionage Act. In August 2018, Winner was sentenced to 5 years and 3 months in federal prison -- the longest sentence ever imposed for leaking classified information to the media at that time. She served over four years, including extended time in pretrial detention, where she was held in conditions her attorneys described as punitive. The information she revealed -- that a foreign government was actively attacking US election infrastructure -- was in the public interest. No one was prosecuted for failing to protect American elections. Daniel Hale Daniel Hale was an Air Force intelligence analyst who participated in the US drone program from 2009 to 2013. What he witnessed haunted him. In 2014, he provided classified documents to an investigative journalist that exposed the inner workings of the drone assassination program, including the fact that during a five-month period in Afghanistan, nearly 90% of people killed by drone strikes were not the intended targets. Hale was arrested in 2019 and charged under the Espionage Act. In March 2021, he pleaded guilty to one count, facing up to 10 years. In July 2021, he was sentenced to 45 months in federal prison. At his sentencing, Hale told the judge: "I am here because I stole something that was never mine to take -- precious human life. I couldn't keep living in a world in which people pretend that things weren't happening that were." The drone program he exposed continued unchanged. No official was held accountable for the civilian deaths documented in the materials Hale disclosed. John Kiriakou John Kiriakou was a CIA officer who, in a 2007 interview with ABC News, became the first current or former CIA official to confirm that the agency had used waterboarding -- a technique widely recognized as torture -- on detainees. He was not involved in the torture program himself. He simply acknowledged it existed. Kiriakou was charged under the Espionage Act in 2012. He pleaded guilty to one count of disclosing information identifying a covert agent and was sentenced to 30 months in federal prison. He is the only person associated with the CIA torture program who went to prison. Not the people who designed the program. Not the people who carried it out. Not the people who authorized it. The person who told the public it was happening. Thomas Drake Thomas Drake was a senior executive at the NSA who tried to raise concerns internally about the agency's warrantless surveillance program through official channels. When that failed, he communicated with a reporter at the Baltimore Sun. He was indicted in 2010 under the Espionage Act, facing 35 years in prison. The government's case eventually collapsed. All felony charges were dropped. Drake pleaded guilty to a single misdemeanor count of unauthorized use of a government computer. He received no prison time but lost his career, his pension, and his livelihood. The surveillance programs he tried to expose were later revealed by Edward Snowden in 2013 and ruled illegal by a federal appeals court in 2020. Chelsea Manning Chelsea Manning was an Army intelligence analyst who leaked hundreds of thousands of classified documents to WikiLeaks in 2010, including the Collateral Murder video showing a US Apache helicopter attack that killed civilians in Baghdad, and the Cablegate diplomatic cables. Manning was convicted under the Espionage Act and sentenced to 35 years in prison -- the longest sentence for a leak in American history. President Obama commuted her sentence in January 2017 after she had served seven years. The war crimes documented in the materials she disclosed were never prosecuted. The Double Standard The contrast between how whistleblowers are treated and how officials who mishandle classified information are treated is impossible to ignore. David Petraeus, the former CIA Director, provided classified notebooks to his biographer, with whom he was having an affair. The notebooks contained the identities of covert officers, war strategy, and deliberations from National Security Council meetings. Petraeus pleaded guilty to a single misdemeanor charge of mishandling classified information. He received two years of probation and a $100,000 fine. No prison time. Whistleblowers who reveal government crimes to the public face years in federal prison under the Espionage Act. Officials who mishandle classified information for personal reasons receive probation. The Espionage Act, as currently applied, does not distinguish between a spy who sells secrets to a foreign government and a whistleblower who reveals unlawful activity to the American public. The law allows no public interest defense. Defendants cannot argue that the information they disclosed was in the public interest, that it revealed illegal activity, or that it caused no harm to national security. The only question the court considers is whether the defendant disclosed the information. This is not a justice system. It is an accountability avoidance system. They didn't ask if we wanted to know that exposing crimes is punished more severely than committing them. The prison sentences speak for themselves. _- The Department_