WASHINGTON — In a ruling with potentially broad implications, a federal judge said Thursday that the Bush administration could use espionage laws to prosecute private citizens who gained access to national defense information.
The decision appears to be the first in which a court has found that citizens other than government employees can be charged for receiving and disclosing secret government information, experts said.
"It's a momentous ruling with radical implications," said Steven Aftergood, who heads the Project on Government Secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists. "A lot of people who are in the business of gathering information, such as reporters and advocates, are now going to have to grapple with the potential threat of prosecution. The dividing line has always been between leakers, who may be prosecuted, and the recipients of the leak, who have never been. Now that dividing line has been erased."
The ruling is a significant victory for the Bush administration, which has been trying to clamp down on media disclosures of anti-terrorism programs since the Sept. 11 attacks.
At the same time, legal experts said, it could chill the ability of a broad segment of the public -- including lobbyists, academics and journalists -- to learn about the inner workings of government and expose misconduct or controversial programs of public interest.
The ruling, by U.S. District Judge T.S. Ellis III in Alexandria, Va., clears the way for the trial of two former officials of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a pro-Israel lobbying organization.
The defendants, Steven J. Rosen and Keith Weissman, were indicted last year by a federal grand jury on charges of conspiring to obtain information about Iran and other Middle East nations from Lawrence A. Franklin, then a Pentagon analyst. Franklin pleaded guilty to passing government secrets and in January was sentenced to more than 12 years in prison.
The Justice Department prosecution of Rosen and Weissman, based on a broadly written but little-used World War I-era espionage law, has been controversial since the charges were brought last August. The Espionage Act of 1917 makes it a crime to disclose or receive any information "relating to the national defense"; it is not limited to classified data.
