The Pentagon announced this week the formation of a new joint task force with the Department of Justice specifically designed to identify and prosecute the sources of press leaks. The task force will have access to both military and civilian investigative resources. Its mandate is to pursue people inside the government who provide information to journalists without authorization.

The announcement arrived in the same news cycle as the report that US Customs and Border Protection agents seized the electronic devices of journalist Max Blumenthal when he returned from a reporting trip to Iran — where he had covered the funeral of Ayatollah Khamenei. Blumenthal, who runs the Grayzone, described the seizure as an act of intimidation. Agents also interrogated him. The government has not commented on the specific circumstances of the seizure.

These two events are related. They describe a coordinated approach to the flow of information between the government and the public: limit what government employees can tell journalists, and examine what journalists bring back from reporting in countries the administration considers adversarial. The practical effect, if sustained, is a narrowing of the information available to American citizens about what their government is doing and what is happening in places their government is engaged.

The legal framework for the leak task force draws on the Espionage Act, which has been used to prosecute government officials who provided classified information to journalists at a rate that has increased with each administration since 2009. The current administration has indicated it intends to be aggressive in this area. The distinction between a leak that endangers national security and a leak that embarrasses an administration has never been fully resolved in American law, and the task force will be making that distinction in practice without any mechanism for public review of its decisions.

The First Amendment protects the publication of information. It does not protect the source who provides it, which is the legal gap through which every leak prosecution runs. Journalists can publish; their sources can be prosecuted. The effect on the practical flow of information is significant — sources who face prosecution stop talking, which means journalists stop learning what is actually happening inside the institutions they cover. A Pentagon-DOJ task force whose explicit purpose is to find those sources is an institutional statement about what the government believes the press is for and what it believes the press should not be allowed to do.

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