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Ellsberg, Snowden, Assange & the Espionage Act of 1917

  • Writer: Jeff Kellick
    Jeff Kellick
  • Jun 30
  • 2 min read

They Used a 1917 Spy Law on the Men Who Told the Truth


In April, the Secretary of Defense told the Senate the American people supported the war in Iran. He was wrong — not arguably, but as a matter of arithmetic. By June it was the most unpopular war in U.S. history: negative 32% net support, below Vietnam's worst reading, and never once positive on a single day. And if American history teaches anything, it is that the story we are told during a war and the story that later turns out to be true are frequently not the same story. Remember the Maine. Remember the Gulf of Tonkin. Remember the weapons that were not there.


So who tells us what we were not supposed to know? On Saturday we met that figure in his oldest form — the Hebrew prophet who walks up to the king with no army and says "thou art the man." This episode meets him in ours: Daniel Ellsberg, Edward Snowden, Julian Assange — and the single 1917 law turned against all three, not for selling secrets to enemies, but for telling Americans what their own government was doing. Underneath runs the deeper argument of the series: the Constitution is the machine the Founders built against Polybius's cycle of decay. But there is no machine against Ibn Khaldun's — the rotting of a comfortable people's vigilance. Against that, there is only the truth-teller.


This is Episode 3B of "Self-Evident: The Road to 1776," the Tuesday contemporary-application companion to Saturday's "Athens, Jerusalem, and the House of Wisdom."


The question underneath all of it: did this leave Americans more free, or more governed?


⏱️ CHAPTERS

[00:00] Prologue: The Cost of Telling the Truth

[06:07] Introduction: Covenant, Consent, and the Critique of Power

[06:34] Setting the Standard: The Hebrew Inheritance

[07:30] The Prophetic Tradition & Samuel's Warning

[08:20] The First Structural Warning: Polybius and the Cycle of Decay

[09:15] The Second Structural Warning: Ibn Khaldun and the Rotting of Vigilance

[10:04] The Limits of the Machine: What the Founders Knew

[12:25] Three Wars, Three Official Stories, Three Later Reckonings

[15:30] The Decisive Fact: The Danger of the Unaccountable Office

[20:30] A Different Kind of Case: The Julian Assange Controversy

[24:44] Does American Government Still Operate by Consent?

[26:30] Applying the Liberty Test to the Punishment of the Truth-Teller

[28:46] Transparency as the Answer to Obfuscation

[30:24] The Choice: A Republic, If You Can Keep It

[33:35] Preview of Episode 4 & Outro


📚 Companion:


Key anchors: the USS Maine, Gulf of Tonkin, and Iraq WMD pretexts; the Espionage Act of 1917; the Pentagon Papers (1971); United States v. Moalin (9th Cir. 2020), which ruled the NSA bulk-metadata program unlawful; the 2024 Assange plea. Framework spine: Polybius's anacyclosis and Ibn Khaldun's asabiyyah: https://consequentialactions.com


🎙️ Self-Evident: The Road to 1776 — Episode 3B: "Covenant, Consent, and the Critique of Power"


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Consequential Actions is a libertarian, non-interventionist analysis of American constitutional and foreign policy. New episodes weekly.



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