National Security, Leaks and Freedom of the Press The Pentagon Papers Fifty Years On

Written by a group of the nation's leading constitutional scholars, a deeply informed, thoughtful, and often surprising examination of who has First Amendment rights to disclose, to obtain, or to publish classified information relating to the national security of the United States.

One of the most vexing and perennial questions facing any democracy is how to balance the government's legitimate need to conduct its operations-especially those related to protecting the national security-in secret, with the public's right and responsibility to know what its government is doing. There is no easy answer to this issue, and different nations embrace different solutions. In the United States, at the constitutional level, the answer begins exactly half a century ago with the Supreme Court's landmark 1971 decision in the Pentagon Papers case. The final decision, though, left many important questions unresolved. Moreover, the issue of leaks and secrecy has cropped up repeatedly since, most recently in the Edward Snowden and Chelsea Manning cases. In National Security, Leaks and Freedom of the Press , two of America's leading First Amendment scholars, Lee C. Bollinger and Geoffrey R. Stone, have gathered a group of the nation's leading constitutional scholars-including John Brennan, Eric Holder, Cass R. Sunstein, and Michael Morell, among many others-to delve into important dimensions of the current system, to explain how we should think about them, and to offer as many solutions as possible.

Lee C. Bollinger became Columbia University's 19th president in 2002 and is the longest serving Ivy League president. He is Columbia's first Seth Low Professor of the University, a member of the Law School faculty, and one of the country's foremost First Amendment scholars. Each fall semester, he teaches "Freedom of Speech and Press" to Columbia undergraduate students. His latest book, The Free Speech Century, co-edited with Geoffrey R. Stone, was published in the fall of 2018 by Oxford University Press.

Geoffrey R. Stone is the Edward H. Levi Distinguished Service Professor at the University of Chicago. Mr. Stone earned his J.D. from The University of Chicago Law School in 1971, where he served as Editor-in-Chief of The University of Chicago Law Review. After serving as a law clerk to Justice William J. Brennan, Jr. of the Supreme Court of the United States, Mr. Stone joined the faculty of The University of Chicago Law School in 1973. Mr. Stone has served as Dean of The University of Chicago Law School (1987-1994) and Provost of The University of Chicago (1994-2002).
Mr. Stone is the author or co-author of many books on constitutional law. Among them are Democracy and Equality: The Enduring Constitutional Vision of the Warren Court (2020), The Free Speech Century (2018) co-authored with Columbia University President Lee Bollinger; Sex and the Constitution (2017); Top Secret: When Government Keeps Us In the Dark (2007); and Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime (2004), which received eight national book awards. Mr. Stone is the co-editor of one of the nation's leading constitutional law casebooks, chief editor of a twenty-volume series, Inalienable Rights, which is published by the Oxford University Press, and an editor of the Supreme Court Review.

Opening Statement
Lee C. Bollinger and Geoffrey R. Stone

The Pentagon Papers Framework: Fifty Years Later
Allison Aviki, Jonathan Cedarbaum, Rebecca Lee, Jessica Lutkenhaus, Seth Waxman, and Paul Wolfson

Part One: The National Security Perspective
1. Fighting for Balance
Avril Haines
2. Crafting a New Compact in the Public Interest: Protecting the National Security in an Era of Leaks
Keith B. Alexander and Jamil N. Jaffer
3. Leaks of Classified Information: Lessons Learned from a Lifetime on the Inside
Michael Morell
4. Reform and Renewal: Lessons from Snowden and the 215 Program
Lisa Monaco
5. Government Needs to Get Its Own House in Order
Richard A. Clarke

Part Two: The Journalist Perspective
6. Behind the Scenes with the Snowden Files: "How The Washington Post and National Security Officials Dealt with
Conflicts over Government Secrecy" Behind
Ellen Nakashima
7. Let's Be Practical: A Narrow Post-Publication Leak Law Would Better Protect the Press
Stephen J. Adler and Bruce D. Brown
8. What We Owe Whistleblowers
Jameel Jaffer
9. The Long, (Futile?) Fight for a Federal Shield Law
Judith Miller
10. Covering the Cyberwars: The Press vs the Government in a New Age of Global Conflict
David Sanger

Part Three: The Academic Perspective
11. Outlawing Leaks
David A. Strauss
12. The Growth of Press Freedoms in the United States Since 9/11
Jack Goldsmith
13 Edward Snowden, Donald Trump, and the Paradox of National Security Whistleblowing
Allison Stanger
14. Information is Power: Exploring a Constitutional Right of Access
Mary-Rose Papandrea
15. Who Said What to Whom
Cass R. Sunstein
16. Leaks in the Age of Trump
Louis Michael Seidman

The Report of the Commission
Lee C. Bollinger
John O. Brennan
Kathleen Carroll
Stephen W. Coll
Eric Holder
Ann Marie Lipinski
Geoffrey R. Stone

Closing Statement
Lee C. Bollinger and Geoffrey R. Stone