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Named for Daniel Ellsberg, Tlaib Proposal Would Protect Whistleblowers and Journalists
"With whistleblowers, journalists, and civil liberties under significant attack and government decision-making shrouded in increasing secrecy, reining in the abuses of the Espionage Act could not be more urgent.”
Mar 12, 2026
Warning that the Espionage Act has been used to "persecute and criminalize" dissenters, journalists, and whistleblowers numerous times since it was passed into law, US Rep. Rashida Tlaib on Thursday introduced the Daniel Ellsberg Press Freedom and Whistleblower Protection Act to "rein in" the 109-year-old law.
The proposal is named for the military analyst-turned-activist who disclosed decades of deception by the US government regarding Vietnam when he leaked the Pentagon Papers to the press in 1971—an act that led the government to charge Ellsberg with espionage, conspiracy, and other crimes before the case was thrown out over the Nixon administration's misconduct.
In the cases of Ellsberg, former National Security Agency contractor Edward Snowden, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, and other journalists and whistleblowers, "Espionage Act prosecutions have been used to silence dissent and undermine government transparency and are a clear violation of the First Amendment and the fundamental right to due process," said Tlaib (D-Mich.).
“Alerting the public to government wrongdoing is not a crime,” said the congresswoman. “The Espionage Act has been abused by administrations of both parties to target whistleblowers and journalists for sharing critically important information with the public. With whistleblowers, journalists, and civil liberties under significant attack and government decision-making shrouded in increasing secrecy, reining in the abuses of the Espionage Act could not be more urgent.”
Tlaib noted that in addition to past administrations using the Espionage Act to prosecute media sources and whistleblowers who alerted the public about mass surveillance, torture, drone assassinations, and war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, the FBI raided the home of a Washington Post reporter in January in connection to the prosecution of a government whistleblower.
The proposed legislation would limit the scope of the Espionage Act to foreign agents and government employees who have a legal duty to protect classified information—prohibiting the use of the law to prosecute publishers, journalists, or members of the public.
It would also increase due process standards and safeguards for whistleblowers who disclose government wrongdoing, war crimes, or abuses of power to the public. The legislation would create and affirmative public interest defense and require the government to prove that a whistleblower acted with the specific intent of harming the US or aiding a foreign power.
Under the Daniel Ellsberg Press Freedom and Whistleblower Protection Act, said Jenna Leventoff, senior policy counsel for the ACLU, "the government could no longer abuse [the Espionage Act] to silence those sharing information that is beneficial to the public."
“For too long the Espionage Act has been used to persecute and silence whistleblowers, journalists and publishers,” said Leventoff. “But journalism is not a crime—it is a First Amendment protected activity that protects our democracy by allowing the public to hold our nation’s leaders to account."
The Espionage Act was originally passed to crack down on those who spread information that could interfere with the war effort during World War I, and "from its inception," said Chip Gibbons, policy director at Defending Rights and Dissent, "the law has been used to stifle public debate and has become the go to weapon against whistleblowers and now journalists."
"Public servants who witness egregious crimes like torture, mass surveillance of Americans, or the killing of civilians, and seek to alert the American people about them are whistleblowers," said Gibbons. "Yet, using the Espionage Act the government prosecutes them as though they were spies. And with the government going further and prosecuting a journalist under the Espionage Act, the threat not just to press freedom, but to our very democracy, posed by this antiquated law is growing. Rep. Tlaib’s bill is desperately needed as it is well past time to bring the Espionage Act in line with the First Amendment.”
Tlaib noted that before his death in 2023, Ellsberg expressed public support for the reforms the congresswoman had proposed, when she introduced them as an amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act.
“For half a century, starting with my own prosecution, no whistleblower charged with violating the Espionage Act of 1917 has had, or could have, a fair trial," said Ellsberg in 2022. "These long-overdue amendments would remedy that injustice, protect the First Amendment freedom of the press, and encourage vitally needed truth-telling.”
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As US Attacks Iran, Daniel Ellsberg Speaks to Us Once More
“There is a time when silence is a lie, when silence is complicity, and when silence betrays our troops, our country, and ourselves. We owe it to our troops, as well as to other potential victims of this war, to speak the truth."
Mar 02, 2026
When Daniel Ellsberg died in 2023, the world lost a unique voice of sanity. Five decades earlier, as a “national security” insider, he had released the top-secret Pentagon Papers to expose the official lies behind the ongoing Vietnam War. From then on, he never stopped writing, speaking and protesting for peace, while explaining how the madness of nuclear weapons could destroy us all.
Now, Ellsberg’s voice is back via a compelling new book. “Truth and Consequence,” being published this week, provides readers with his innermost thoughts, scrawled and typed over a 50-year period. The result is access to intimate candor and visionary wisdom from a truly great whistleblower.
“My father is dead now,” Michael Ellsberg writes in the book’s introduction, but “I for one care a great deal that he consented to allow us to compile this eclectic corpus of his important thoughts and musings.” Michael worked with his father’s longtime assistant Jan R. Thomas to sift through and curate the huge quantity of private writing.
The book’s subtitle—offering reflections on “catastrophe, civil resistance, and hope”—could hardly be more timely.
Now, the barbaric war on Iran is enabled by remaining silent and just following orders.
At the center of “Truth and Consequence” are the tensions between conscience and deference to authority.
“Don’t delegate conscience,” Daniel Ellsberg wrote.
“Most people conform and accept,” he noted. “A minority protest, withdraw. A tiny minority resist, take risks.”
“The temptation is strong to obey powerful men passively and unquestioningly,” Ellsberg observed in 1971, the year he turned himself in for giving the Pentagon Papers to the press and faced the prospect of spending the rest of his life in prison.
He instantly became a pariah among colleagues who’d been his friends at the RAND Corporation, a think tank serving the US war machine. He’d been working there as a strategic analyst before and after a stint at the Defense Department.
“After I released the papers,” he vividly remembered, “some people were afraid to write to me . . . to shake hands with me . . . to receive a phone call from me.” Three years later, his takeaway was: “Accept the risks of freedom and commitment, instead of the risks of obedience and conformity.”
Ellsberg came to see grim downsides of society’s upper crust. He had graduated from Harvard and went on to get his PhD there. But in 1976 he wrote: “The function of an education at an elite university is to learn inattention and passivity, to learn to disconnect your daily work from the moral values of your family upbringing—sharing, love, trust, mutual dependence—and be part of maintaining a system of inequality, privilege, unnecessary suffering, war, and risk of extinction.”
The next year he wrote: “I have fallen out of love with the State and its Establishment, and I have regained a hopeful affection in the democratic ideal, process, and people who are untouched by power—those outside the base of the existing pyramid of obstruction, power, and privilege.”
And: “Most human-caused destruction, suffering, death, and enslavement (i.e., ‘evil’) is performed by men, at the direction of men. These are typically ‘normal,’ competent, personally agreeable and compassionate men who perform their acts in obedience to lawful orders—or, less often, in obedience to unlawful orders.”
1982: “Massacre is made doable by a chain of command that continually invokes habit, obedience, and career, as well as by leaders’ geographical and bureaucratic distance from the killing.”
Ellsberg had extensive firsthand experience in helping to fine-tune preparations for inflicting radioactive Armageddon, especially during the Kennedy presidency. Later, it was a role that haunted him.
“In this era of the potentially imminent extinction of most of life on Earth, there is now a moral dimension to every aspect of how one spends one’s life,” he wrote in 1977. “The foundation of all morality is that we must now live with awareness of the mortality of our species and the vulnerability of the Earth and all life.”
1985: “The future is not some place we are going to. The future is what we are creating every day. If we continue to prepare and plan for thermonuclear war, that is what we are going to get.”
By the time Ellsberg suddenly found himself vilified and beloved for releasing the Pentagon Papers in 1971, he was a devotee of civil disobedience. “Use of a radical, novel, powerful, and possibly illegal tactic of nonviolence,” he wrote that year, “is a form of useful work that is perfectly suited to illustrate the evil being combated.”
And he added: “I have never before shrunk from violence—from imagining it, planning it, preparing for it. I have wanted, and I have gained, the respect of violent men. Now I want the respect of gentle women, gentle men, and children.”
1984: “Nonviolent resistance has a special power to raise the question ‘What can I do to change this situation?’ I have felt that power in my own life.”
1985: “One way of calling attention to a danger or an illegal practice is to take an action of obstruction, or symbolic obstruction, that will lead to your being in court. Once there, in the context of your defense you can raise issues of illegality, criminality, constitutionality, and danger.”
1986: “Nonviolent civil disobedience does not eliminate moral dilemmas, costs, consequences, and lesser evils. However, it does inspire a search for new ways of behaving, seeing, feeling, and being.”
1990: “Ask yourself, ‘Where is the environment where I can be showing moral courage now? My work? My family? My community?’ Find the strength and the moral courage to do what is right, without knowing what the effects may be.”
Ellsberg’s activism took him to jail many more times after he summed up his protest activities this way in 2006: “I have been arrested in non-violent civil disobedience actions close to 70 times, probably 50 focused on nuclear weapons: e.g. at the Rocky Flats Nuclear Weapons Production facility, the Nevada Test Site, Livermore Nuclear Weapons Design Facility, and the vicinity of ground zero at both the Nevada Test Site and the Vandenberg Missile Test Site. Other arrests have been for protests against U.S. interventions.”
Thirty-five years ago, at the time of the Gulf War, Daniel Ellsberg wrote in his journal: “There is a time when silence is a lie, when silence is complicity, and when silence betrays our troops, our country, and ourselves. We owe it to our troops, as well as to other potential victims of this war, to speak the truth about ourselves: what we believe, what we reject, and what we want.”
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Dissent Is Patriotic: Daniel Ellsberg's Legacy Demands Action
Few will find themselves in Ellsberg’s position, but all of us bear responsibility for doing whatever is in our power to confront injustice in all of its forms, at home and abroad.
Jun 18, 2025
Two years ago this week, Daniel Ellsberg died at the age of 92. In the popular imagination, his legacy is often reduced to a singular act of conscience and courage: the 1971 release of the Pentagon Papers, a classified government study that exposed the systematic deceit and misconduct of successive U.S. administrations in prosecuting the war in Vietnam.
Ellsberg had spent over a decade inside the national security apparatus, directly contributing to the planning and execution of that war. But over time, he came to regard the intervention as a criminal, imperial war of aggression. Reflecting on the U.S. role in Southeast Asia, he concluded: “We were not on the wrong side; we were the wrong side.” He described the bombing campaigns in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos—which involved dropping more than three and a half times the tonnage of explosives used by the United States in all of World War II—as “totally useless, unnecessary from any point of view, and thus unjustifiable homicide, murder.”
For telling the truth about a war that killed millions of Vietnamese and conscripted a generation of Americans in service of empire and the preservation of official credibility, Ellsberg was charged under the Espionage Act and faced up to 115 years in prison. Asked why he had risked everything, he replied simply: “Wouldn’t you go to prison to help end this war?” And of his transformation: “Killing is not something I’m going to do bureaucratically ever again.”
Radical activism is Ellsberg’s true legacy. But it is meaningless if it remains only a matter of remembrance. To honor him requires that we carry his actions forward.
His defiance helped redefine patriotism itself. “Dissent is patriotic,” he insisted. “And to be loyal to this country does not compel us to be disloyal to [humanity].” His example paved the way for a lineage of whistleblowers including Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, and Edward Snowden.
But to limit his legacy to the Pentagon Papers is to flatten it into a story of individual heroism, severed from the mass movements that made it possible, and that remain vital today. Few will find themselves in Ellsberg’s position, but all of us bear responsibility for doing whatever is in our power to confront injustice in all of its forms, at home and abroad.
Ellsberg understood this. He often credited the antiwar movement with awakening his conscience, and pointed in particular to the courage of draft resisters willing to face prison. Their example, he said, was decisive in his own decision to leak the Papers. “Courage is contagious,” he reflected. What he did was only possible because others had already taken greater risks.
He also believed that it was mass resistance that averted the war’s most catastrophic escalations. A turning point came on October 15, 1969, a coordinated day of nationwide civil disobedience. As many as two million people walked out to protest the unjust war, followed by another massive demonstration the following month.
At the time, the Nixon administration was preparing to intensify the conflict. Henry Kissinger, in private discussions, called for delivering “a savage blow” to North Vietnam, potentially involving nuclear weapons. But the scale of public opposition forced a retreat.
“The American people,” Ellsberg later recalled, “did not in fact, I think, buy onto the notion that it was all right to kill Vietnamese to an unlimited degree, and they stopped the bombing.” Nixon, he concluded, “did not lose the war. The American people ended the war. They took his victory away from him.”
Ellsberg’s story did not end in 1971. He never returned to government or academia. Instead, he spent the rest of his life as a public educator and dissident, arrested as many as 90 times for acts of civil disobedience, most often targeting U.S. nuclear weapons policy.
At RAND in the 1950s and ’60s, Ellsberg helped draft nuclear war plans, including first-strike scenarios that projected the deaths of 600 million people, what he called “a hundred Holocausts.” In the decades that followed, he made it his mission to dismantle The Doomsday Machine.
In 1978, he was arrested at the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant alongside his son, Robert. “Not without arrests,” he declared. “Not anymore, invisibly… not without public question, controversy, challenge. Not, anymore, with the presumed consent of all American citizens.” The day before, while riding in handcuffs next to his father, Robert had looked out at the tracks and said, “You know, there should have been some Germans on the tracks at Auschwitz.”
Four years later, Ellsberg was arrested again, alongside 1,300 others, at the gates of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which he described as “the Auschwitz of our time!” The analogy was provocative but warranted. As he explained, a nuclear strike which they were making possible there would amount to “as deliberate and engineered annihilation of non-combatants as Hitler’s Holocaust in the gas chambers… it would be bringing the gas, the death, the radioactivity to the people, instead of herding them to it.”
This radical activism is Ellsberg’s true legacy. But it is meaningless if it remains only a matter of remembrance. To honor him requires that we carry his actions forward. Reflecting on the public’s acquiescence to the “insanity” of nuclear policy and U.S. militarism, Ellsberg warned: “We all live in Guyana. And I say it’s mutiny time.”
His words remain a call to collective defiance.
Today, that defiance is as urgent as ever. It means standing for principle over careerism, a contrast to figures like Matt Miller. It means continuing to disrupt the flow of weapons to Israel, as workers have done in France and beyond. It means joining marches and freedom flotillas to break the siege of Gaza. It means rejecting war for what it is: organized mass slaughter. And it means defending our communities against the violent overreach of an authoritarian regime.
There is little doubt that this is what Daniel Ellsberg would be doing were he alive today. To honor his legacy, we must do the same—today and every day.
Note: Quotes are drawn from the Daniel Ellsberg Papers at the Robert S. Cox Special Collections and University Archives Research Center at the University of Massachusetts Amherst
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