Is the Pentagon Papers Case Relevant in the Age of WikiLeaks

LEAKS BY EDWARD SNOWDEN, THE CONVICTION by a military court of Bradley Manning, and the increased number of prosecutions of alleged leakers by the Barack Obama administration provide good reason to reconsider the significance of the Pentagon Papers case.1 Although that ruling “is often said to be a high-water mark in the annals of press freedom,” Adam Liptak has written that, “like the Manning verdict, the decision represented a shift in the understanding of the First Amendment.”2 Soon after WikiLeaks released the documents obtained by Manning, Daniel Ellsberg told the Washington Post that “the parallels are very strong” between the Pentagon Papers that he gave to the New York Times in 1971 and the secret material released by WikiLeaks. Several months later at a London press conference with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, Ellsberg compared the threats to prosecute Assange with the efforts used against him by the Richard M. Nixon administration.3 James Goodale, general counsel for the New York Times during the Pentagon Papers case, decided that this was the time to publish a memoir about his involvement in the case because “[t]he WikiLeaks matter has made the Pentagon Papers case more relevant than ever before.”4 So many others made similar comparisons that one author dubbed the WikiLeaks documents “The Pentagon Papers of Our Time.”5 Such analogies make the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in New York Times v. United States worth revisiting to see how relevant it remains today. In order to do that, we must first understand what led to the Defense Department's classified study of the Vietnam War

Pentagon · Political science · Intelligence, Security, War Strategy · Law · Misinformation and Its Impacts

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