Well, lookee here. Congress is getting up to mischief in the First Amendment department. This is exactly what Naomi Wolf has been warning about for months if not years. No surprise that Lieberman is one of the guys behind it. From Constitutional scholar Geoffrey Stone in the NYT, an excerpt:
The so-called Shield bill, which was recently introduced in both houses of Congress in response to the WikiLeaks disclosures, would amend the Espionage Act of 1917 to make it a crime for any person knowingly and willfully to disseminate, “in any manner prejudicial to the safety or interest of the United States,” any classified information “concerning the human intelligence activities of the United States.”
Although this proposed law may be constitutional as applied to government employees who unlawfully leak such material to people who are unauthorized to receive it, it would plainly violate the First Amendment to punish anyone who might publish or otherwise circulate the information after it has been leaked.
Stone's complete column, from which the NYT op-ed was taken, is at HuffPo, here.
