In March 2006, shortly after New York Times reporters Eric Lichtblau and James Risen published their expose on the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program, Schoenfeld published an essay in Commentary magazine ("Has the New York Times Violated the Espionage Act?") calling for the prosecution of the two reporters. That essay and his subsequent experiences participating in public forums debating issues of leaking and government secrecy have developed into this book, which builds a case for privileging government secrecy based on national security justifications over First Amendment "absolutism." Schoenfeld positions his discussion as a corrective to such works as Geoffrey Stone's Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime: From the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism, which he argues builds its case largely by omission. Those omissions, incidents of publishing national security secrets that caused or posed great harm to US national security, form the core of his work as, following a brief discussion of the views the founding fathers' views on government secrecy, he points to such incidents as the disclosure of the vulnerability of Japanese diplomatic codes in the run-up to Pearl Harbor, the disclosures that could have revealed the existence of the US nuclear weapons program during World War II, and the exposure of undercover CIA agents by ex-CIA officer Philip Agee, among others, as evidence that national security secrecy should often trump First Amendment concerns.. Annotation ©2010 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)
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