The Conversation - The Espionage Act, explained

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You may think the Espionage Act is about spying. You’d only be partly right.

Although the act specifies that spying for a foreign government will earn you a lifetime behind bars, such spy cases are rare, write national security legal experts Thomas Durkin and Joseph Ferguson. More typically, the act has been used in cases involving the “unauthorized gathering, possessing or transmitting of certain sensitive government information.”

That’s why you’ve likely been hearing a lot about the act recently. FBI investigators cited a portion of the Espionage Act in their search warrant for sensitive government documents believed to be in former President Donald Trump’s estate, Mar-a-Lago. Liberals and the anti-Trump wing of the GOP got excited that Trump might be prosecuted for espionage, while the former president’s defenders attacked the raid as the kind of abuse you’d find in a banana republic police state.

That constituted a role reversal of sorts; in the past, liberals have largely been critical of the Espionage Act, while conservatives have championed it.

All this confusion led us to ask Durkin and Ferguson to set out the facts about what’s really in the Espionage Act, what it protects and how it’s been used.

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Naomi Schalit

Senior Editor, Politics + Society

Former President Donald Trump, at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Aug. 6, 2022, in Dallas. Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images

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The Conversation - The Espionage Act, explained

You don’t have to be a spy to violate the Espionage Act – and other crucial facts about the law Trump may have broken

Environment + Energy

The next US energy boom could be wind power in the Gulf of Mexico

Politics + Society

GOP ‘message laundering’ turns violent, extremist reactions to search of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago into acceptable political talking points

Kenya declares William Ruto as its new president in an election drama that’s far from over

Education

1 in 10 teachers say they’ve been attacked by students

Arts + Culture

How Stoicism influenced music from the French Renaissance to Pink Floyd

Excelling as a musician takes practice and requires opportunities – not just lucky genes

Science + Technology

From watering via ice cubes to spritzing with hydrogen peroxide – 4 misguided plant health trends on social media

From our international editions

How Salman Rushdie has been a scapegoat for complex historical differences

Polio vaccine boosters offered to London children – an expert explains what’s going on

Even a ‘limited’ nuclear war would starve millions of people, new study reveals

Today's graphic

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