Fred Kaplan notes a chilling new strategy by the government to stop whistleblowers. The story goes back to the case of Lawrence Franklin, a former Pentagon official who was giving government secrets to AIPAC, a pro-Israel lobby. Franklin was justly convicted for his acts of espionage. Now, though, the two men to whom he was giving the information are being charged, not with espionage, but with receipt of information to which they were not entitled.

The section of the indictment titled "Ways and Means of the Conspiracy" finds that Rosen and Weissman

would cultivate relations with Franklin and others and would use their contacts within the U.S. government and elsewhere to gather sensitive information, including classified information, relating to national defense, for subsequent unlawful communication, delivery and transmission to persons not entitled to receive it.

Take a close look at those final words. They're charged with giving classified information not to foreign governments or spies but rather "to persons not entitled to receive it."

As Kaplan goes on to point out, this is what investigative journalists do. Woodward and Bernstein were not entitled to receive all of the information they did in re Watergate. The Washington Post was not entitled to receive The Pentagon Papers. And, as Kaplan notes, you, dear reader, were not entitled to receive any of that either - yet once you read the paper, you did.

Now, this really only helps those in power. After all, if the Vice President claims he can declassify information at will, then his leaks will be immune. But anything embarrassing to the government - like, say, that they were leaking the names of covert CIA operatives, or running secret torture houses, or spying on private citizens - well, that would be out of bounds.