State of Silence
The Espionage Act and the Rise of America's Secrecy Regime
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
An "essential guide" (Beverly Gage, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of G-Man) to how the Espionage Act gave rise to a vast American security state that keeps citizens in the dark
In State of Silence, political historian Sam Lebovic uncovers the troubling history of the Espionage Act. First passed in 1917, it was initially used to punish critics of World War I. Yet as Americans began to balk at the act’s restrictions on political dissidents and the press, the government turned its focus toward keeping its secrets under wraps. The resulting system for classifying information is absurdly cautious, staggeringly costly, and shrouded in secrecy, preventing ordinary Americans from learning what their country is doing in their name, both at home and abroad.
Shedding new light on the bloated governmental security apparatus that’s weighing our democracy down, State of Silence offers the definitive history of America’s turn toward secrecy—and its staggering human costs.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Lebovic (A Righteous Smokescreen) charts in this probing study the evolving impact of the 1917 Espionage Act and its broad but vague proscription of communicating information related to national defense. Initially, the law was used to quash not just speech about military affairs but political dissent in military matters; it especially targeted left-wing opposition to American participation in WWI and advocacy of labor strikes that would affect wartime production. As free-speech rights were strengthened in later years, Lebovic notes, federal officials instead used the law to classify huge swaths of information and punish government employees who divulged it. The result was absurd overclassification—at one point the amount of peanut butter eaten by soldiers was deemed a vital national secret—and the coverup of such scandals as the CIA's torture of terrorism suspects after 9/11. Lebovic's skeptical, clear-eyed analysis of America's secrecy policies untangles murky legal issues while spotlighting the human drama surrounding them. There are gripping recaps of landmark espionage and free-speech cases, including the prosecution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the publication of the Pentagon Papers, Edward Snowden's whistleblowing about ubiquitous NSA spying on telecommunications, and Donald Trump's spiriting of classified documents to Mar-a-Lago. The result is a riveting account of the rise of the national security state and its ongoing distortion of American politics.
