Censorship and National Security

Definition: The safety of a nation or government from foreign dangers or domestic subversion, as defined by the government in power

Significance: Protection of national security has historically been a common justification for rigid government censorship

The belief that political institutions should be protected by censorship is an ancient one. Although ancient Athens is often regarded as one of the first societies to value free speech, its government nevertheless condemned philosopher Socrates to death because his teachings were believed to be encouraging a group of antidemocratic aristocrats who wanted to establish tyranny. If this view is correct, the death of one of the most famous teachers in Western civilization resulted from censorship to preserve Athens’ political security.

Most governments throughout history have seen dissenters as threats to be silenced. Organized policies of censorship for national security, however, did not begin until centralized nation-states emerged in early modern Europe, when England’s Queen Elizabeth I began controlling her country’s press through licensing. She believed that anyone who criticized her threatened the security of the state itself. The monarchs who followed Elizabeth prosecuted their critics under laws against seditious libel, believing that the safety of the state depended on the Crown.

The view that criticisms of monarchs or governments pose dangers to nations depends on the theory that political authority comes from the monarch or government. By the eighteenth century, political thinkers such as Thomas Erskine and Chancellor Camden in England, and Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in the United States, had begun to argue that governmental authority in fact comes from the citizens who make up nations. Therefore, they argued, the state cannot limit the rights of citizens to speak freely, even to prevent its own destruction.

National Security in U.S. History

Queen Elizabeth’s censorship was chiefly concerned with protecting the security of the state from troublemakers among her own subjects. Modern authoritarian governments, such as the former Soviet Union, have continued this tradition. In the United States, where people generally recognize the right of citizens to alter or do away with their own political systems, national security censorship has usually been justified by claims of threats from foreign nations.

The first act of legal censorship in the United States, the Sedition Act of 1798, was intended to meet a perceived threat from a foreign power, revolutionary France. Many in the Federalist Party of President John Adams believed that their opponents in the Democratic-Republican Party were pro-French subversives who sought to overthrow the government. The Sedition Act established jail penalties and heavy fines for Americans who criticized the president or members of the government.

Most attempts at censorship for the sake of national security in the United States from the 1798 law until 1945 were undertaken during wartime. During the Civil War, for example, the governments of both sides attempted to control the press. In World War I, the Committee on Public Information headed by George Creel pressured newspapers into publishing only stories approved by the government. In 1940, as the United States was on the verge of entering World War II, Congress passed the Smith Act, which explicitly made it illegal to advocate overthrowing the government by force or to belong to organizations advocating overthrowing the government. The following year, the Office of Censorship was created to prevent the publication of information that might be useful to the enemy.

The National Security State

After World War II a number of developments combined to create the “national security state,” a government constantly concerned with protecting its own security. New technologically advanced weapons, such as nuclear bombs, created a belief that such weapons had to be kept secret from enemies. Moreover, the United States was becoming engaged in an ideological struggle with the communist countries of the Soviet Union and China known as the Cold War. Finally, the U.S. government was much larger than it had been before the war and it had many government agencies responsible for protecting national security that had an impulse to become more active.

The U.S. government produced the atomic bomb through the ultra-secret Manhattan Project during the war. With the end of the war, the government felt that it needed to continue to keep the secret of the bomb. The Atomic Energy Act of 1946 was probably the most far-reaching restriction on publication of knowledge in American history. It prohibited publication of a wide range of information on the manufacture, production, and use of atomic energy. As late as 1979, the U.S. Department of Energy used the 1946 act to hold up publication of an article on the hydrogen bomb by The Progressive magazine, even though the article was based on information already publicly available.

Perceptions of a communist threat led to limitations on the freedoms of speech and publication within the United States. Some American communists were imprisoned under the Smith Act. In 1951 President Harry S. Truman, prompted by the perceived menace of communism, gave all of the agencies of the executive branch the right to classify information as secret. Agencies charged with protecting national security not only collected information, but tried to prevent its spread.

The powers of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) increased greatly during the war, and after the war the FBI became the federal agency primarily charged with fighting suspected subversion within the United States. During the 1960s the FBI collected information on publishers, sources of funds, and staff members of “underground” newspapers opposed to the war in Vietnam. Many of these newspapers were forced out of business when the FBI put pressure on their advertisers.

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and National Security Agency (NSA) are both highly secretive organizations created after the war to collect information. Employees of both organizations are required to sign lifetime agreements not to publish anything without prior permission from the relevant agency. In 1977 the CIA sued Frank W. Snepp III, a former agent, when Snepp published a book about his experiences in Vietnam. In a 1980 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed the CIA’s right to require and enforce the lifetime censorship of Snepp and other agents. In 1983 President Ronald Reagan signed National Security Decision Directive 84, which required a broad range of government employees to sign lifetime security agreements.

Concerns about the increase in secret information collected on American citizens led to the passage of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in 1966, which enabled citizens to obtain government information. However, access to government information narrowed in 1982, when President Reagan issued an executive order allowing agencies to reclassify information in order to avoid releasing it under the FOIA. In 1996 the CIA’s refusal, on the grounds of national security, to release information on its involvement in the Nicaraguan drug trade led to charges of censorship.

In the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks censorship for the purposes of national security was heightened. In 2001, President George W. Bush signed an executive order that restricted access to presidential records; President Barack Obama revoked the executive order in 2009. The 2002 Intelligence Authorization Act prohibited international governments from obtaining sensitive national security documents. The USA Patriot Act of 2001, enacted in response to the September 11 attacks, widened the federal government’s ability to censor in the name of security. In 2013, NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked classified documents that illustrated the breadth of the federal government's gathering and control of information.

Bibliography

Curry, Richard O, ed. Freedom at Risk: Secrecy, Censorship, and Repression in the 1980s. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1988. Print.

Demac, Donna A. Liberty Denied: The Current Rise of Censorship in America. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1990. Print.

Dickson, David. The New Politics of Science. New York: Pantheon, 1984. Print.

Geary, Michael. National Security and Civil Liberty: A Chronological Perspective. Durham: Carolina Academic, 2014. Print.

Richelson, Jeff. The U.S. Intelligence Community. Cambridge: Ballinger, 1985. Print.

Siebert, Fred S. Freedom of the Press in England, 1476-1776: The Rise and Decline of Government Control. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1965. Print.

White, Jonathan Randall. Terrorism and Homeland Security. Belmont: Wadsworth, 2014. Print.