U.S. Espionage Act of 1917 is Outdated and Needs to Be Fixed: Current Law Can Convict People Without Judges Ever Seeing the Materials

In the last three years, five people have been charged with violations of the 1917 Espionage Act, including one fellow who disclosed that the FBI and the NSA were spying on the Israeli Embassy in Washington.

But at the time that he was convicted, no one knew that; not even the judge assigned to the case.  The man who was convicted was a former FBI Hebrew translator who came to be in possession of top secret material in the form of wiretaps from the Israeli Embassy.  Entire conversations between Embassy officials, their top supporters in this country, and Embassy  conversations with members of Congress were captured electronically, as were emails, faxes and other digital mediums. 

The Obama Administration buried what had happened deep so that it would never come to light, as spying on an ally isn’t a very nice thing to do.

The translator, who was afraid that Israel was going to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, passed the information on to a blogger, who held onto the information for a while, then broke the story in the last few days. 

The government uses the Espionage Act to discipline federal employees who violate government secrecy.   I don’t have a real issue with that point, as the government does need to keep some stuff classified and expects its employees to be secret-keepers and to keep the trust. 

But once someone is charged, like the translator mentioned above who WAS correctly charged with breaking the law, if the government sees fit to bring the case to court, the judge should have an idea of what sort of materials were disclosed.   To blindly allow a conviction without seeing the materials reeks of star chamber justice, which is illegal under U.S. law.

The next time the government brings a case, the judge should tell the government to give him/her more information, or face the possibility of the judge throwing the case straight out of court.

Once the material is given away or sold, the cat’s out of the bag anyways.  Assuring the judge and the jury that a crime by others isn’t being covered up under a veil of secrecy isn’t as big a deal as the original loss of the data or material.