President Woodrow Wilson and his “liberal” Democratic-controlled Congress enacted The Espionage Act of 1917. This law states that any person who is privy to a government secret and discloses it to someone else (such as a reporter) is guilty of a felony. In addition, the person to whom he turns it over (I defy you to write this sentence without a dangling preposition someplace) who intentionally receives the information (such as a reporter) is also guilty of a felony.
Wilson was not happy with this state of affairs, as he wanted even more restrictions. He wrote a senator that “Authority to exercise censorship over the press is absolutely necessary.” As a result, Congress gave him that authority in 1918 when it added the Sedition Act as part of the Espionage Act. The Sedition Act criminalized "disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language" about the United States government, its flag, or its armed forces or that caused others to view the American government or its institutions with contempt." The penalty was 5 to 20 years imprisonment.
Wilson’s Justice Department successfully prosecuted and imprisoned Socialist candidate Eugene Debs under the Sedition Act for making statements opposing Wilson’s WWI policies. It also barred Debs’s newspapers from the mails, jailed a filmmaker who made a movie about the Revolutionary War (because it might have offended our British allies), and sentenced a clergyman to prison for 15 years when he asserted that Jesus was a pacifist. There were close to 2,000 prosecutions in all, including those for offhand comments made by persons nursing drinks at corner taverns.
Common sense finally prevailed. Debs was pardoned in 1921, and by the same year, the Sedition Act was no longer law.
The other provisions of the Espionage Act of 1917, however, are still on the books. These provisions had rarely been invoked (and not even once during World War II) due to the fact that they were and are obviously overbroad. Nonetheless, as of April 1, 2015, the Obama administration has brought eight prosecutions under the Espionage Act of 1917. Prior to 2009, there was a total of three prosecutions from all of the other administrations combined (not including, of course, the previously-described cases under the Sedition Act).
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