The recent history of increasingly un-Constitutional gov't secrecy runs thru the Nixon, Reagan/Bush, Clinton and current administrations. The post-WWII battles by DOJ, DOD and intel groups made non-disclosure prohibitions lifelong, with prison penalties for discussing even topics that may have already been made public.
If you work for DOD you can be jailed for talking about anything, even if it's already appeared in the newspaper. This is what we can eventually expect as civilians as the terror war expands at home. The legal justifications began during the Nixon administration, pivoting on the issue of who owns the government's information. Court decisions in declared that the government owns that, not the citizens, in spite of the number of complaints about the absurd lengths to which "national security" was used to cover criminal activity. Non-judicial executive directives such as the National Security Decison Directive 84 (usually referred to as "NSDD 84") were issued to silence critics referencing even non-classified information (you could go to jail for three years for even talking about Richard Nixon's white house menus).
This Bush administration has gone further -- the CIA is now empowered, directly contrary to the 1947 act that created it, to be involved in domestic political espionage, reporting, of course, to the President. "The gloves are off", even more than was being done in Nixon's time, and is getting more legal cover. Any information that, including that would could reveal hanky-panky by intel groups is considered legally an "asset" of the agencies, which is the legal grounds by which the DOJ in a Nixon-era decision decreed they could legally ban any verbal or written expression by anybody, even a reporter, without violating the First Amendment.
Ex-CIA director Stansfield Turner, for example, had that treatment to his book "Secrecy and Democracy: The CIA in Transition", as did ex-CIA case officer Frank Snepp's "Decent Interval" and many others, due to Wm Casey's determination to keep the lid on Agency actions under Reagan and Bush. The bureau used in the CIA is called the "Publications Review Board", which can classify and jail anybody, without publicly declaring a reason. (Oddly enough, Geo. Bush Senior's writings, even those between 1977-1983 didn't go through the PRB, the only writer allowed to do so.)
References to the above are also documented in books by non-CIA writers such as Angus Mackenzie, David Weir, Jim Hougan |
