Snowden and a muzzled free press (2013)
cnn.com
cnn.com
They did not accuse me of revealing any secrets, classified or otherwise. No secrets, period. My offense, as they saw it, was procedural: I’d deprived the agency of the chance to sort out whether my writings might expose secrets before the damage was done.
[..]
[The Supreme Court] decreed that I be gagged for life – required to submit to agency screeners anything I might write about what I’d learned “as a result of” my government service
[..]
Some journalists decried this penalizing of nonclassified disclosures in the absence of proven harm, and warned of serious damage to the First Amendment.
[..]
The cigarette manufacturer Brown & Williamson learned that a former employee, Jeffrey Wigand, was about to expose what he claimed was a company cover-up of the true hazards of nicotine. Invoking the Snepp ruling and other case law, the firm’s lawyers threatened to sue CBS if it aired a Wigand interview, which they said would violate a nondisclosure agreement he’d signed on the job. CBS buckled and canceled his appearance.
The author of that piece, ex-CIA agent Frank Snepp, also has a very revealing interview about how the CIA would plant stories in the most influential newspapers, to manipulate the American public: