“Either these laws were broken or they were not.”

Well, that was my point. Saying that no one was hurt by the Plame affair doesn’t change the fact that someone leaked information (just as with the others).

I, for one, am glad that we have some people in the government willing to blow a whistle if they see something that they truly believe is wrong (perhaps many dangerous empires would have failed had people in the government taken personal responsibility). However, I think that hiding behind anonymous statements and hoping a reporter will protect their sources seems much less useful. If a person believed that the NSA tapping was wrong, then they should come out and say so. In public. With all the evidence. Or, they should keep their mouths shut and their yellow back covered.

When a person blows a whistle, attention is drawn to THEM first, then to what they are trying to present. Anonymous sources seem to soften this situation, so anyone who wants to leak something for political gain (instead of actually protecting the nation) can hide.

Again you seem to be arguing from first principles, which is interesting from a philosophical point of view, but which does not apply to reality.

There are laws about these things, which apply whether or not you personally can be convinced that national security was harmed by any of these actions.

Either these laws were broken or they were not. And that does depend on the precise circumstances of each case.

Either leaking is wrong or not wrong. Either the press has a right to publish information picked up from “classified sources” or it does not. To hold up a multitude of standards seems likely to cloud the issue. I have yet to see any reasonable explaination as to how the publication of the NSA’s secret wiretaps harmed national security. I have yet to see any reasonable explaination of why the publication of “secret prisons” harmed national securty. The same goes for Ms. Plame.

I feel that people should either be ready to stand and say “I believe that *insert issue* is wrong and thus I told the press”… or they should keep their mouth shut. I’m not comfortable with the NSA program, I am not comfortable with the CIA having secret prisons (but I imagine that’s SOP). As for Ms. Plame, I’m still waiting for anyone to provide a good reason for her “outing”.

Is that easy enough to understand?

We must hold as equal the leaker for Ms. Plame and the leaker for the NSA.

That supposes an equivalence in the two cases which does not appear to exist. The NSA program was definitely classified and unquestionably served a useful purpose. Even Fitzgerald is not claiming that Plame was classified, or that her name becoming public harmed anything.

I don’t think the press has a right to play checks and balances with the government.

I do think that the Press should publish information that appears to indicate inappropriate behavior in the government.

I think that people inside the government should be able to provide information to the press about inappropriate government behavior.

I think that they should either have balls enough to stand up and defend their actions, or they should remain completely anonymous (even to the reporter).

Here’s the problem I have with large chunks of the current administrations argument.

1. No one has provided a reasonable explaination as to why the publication of the existence of wiretaps (with or without FISA approval) hurts national security. The terrorists already knew they could be wiretapped without a public warrant, all this information did was tell the American people that FISA wasn’t being used as a check. Agree or disagree, this isn’t gonna help some terrorist in Afganistan.

2. If a reporter gets a ’scoop’ on some Top Secret information… it seems quite likely that other people who are looking for secrets will have already found this information. A smart spy tends to find information at least as well as, if not better than a reporter.

These arguments appear about as intelligent as the ones by some IT companies. For example, Mac OS X was recently hacked in a contest. It was accomplished in less than thirty minutes because of undisclosed vulnerabilities. The attacker knew of the vulnerabilities, because he and people he knew had found them. Apple knew about the vulnerabilities, but didn’t disclose them, in an attempt to maintain ’security by obscurity’. If they had disclosed, the admin of that server could have implemented some additional security… as it was, the attacker was more informed than the admin.

3. Either leaking is ok or its not. We must hold as equal the leaker for Ms. Plame and the leaker for the NSA. Either they all go down, or they all get a pass.

The Constitution defined the role of the press implicitly, not explicitly. What it did explicitly was protect the press from government interference. Unfortunately, the Sedition Act expired before the Supreme Court could affirm its unconstitutionality. However, according to Wikipedia, in the seminal Free Speech case of New York Times v. Sullivan, the Court declared, “Although the Sedition Act was never tested in this Court, the attack upon its validity has carried the day in the court of history.” 376 U.S. 254, 276 (1964).

You seem to believe that the press has a statutory duty to maintain the balance of power, or a special place in the US Constitution. It doesn’t.

I wouldn’t understand your question as written if my life depended on it. Please explain.

Is it really that hard to understand the difference between “statutory duty” and “self-assigned duty”?