The days before the 2000 election held a moment of drama for advocates of open government in the United States. Two weeks before election day, Congress sent President Clinton the appropriations bill for the CIA and other intelligence agencies – but with a stinger in its tail. The bill contained a new criminal penalty for the unauthorized disclosure of classified information by federal employees. With the country distracted in the run-up to voting day, would Clinton sign the bill?

A last-minute campaign that enlisted the editorial boards of many major newspapers succeeded in persuading Clinton to veto the 2000 law three days before the election. However, proponents of the penalty made another effort a few months later to include it in the intelligence appropriations bill for 2001. The threat of another public campaign eventually persuaded the Senate Intelligence Committee to abandon the proposal – by coincidence, only a few days before the 9/11 attacks.

The campaign against the bill leaned heavily on the claim that there was something profoundly un-American about the new penalty. William Safire of the New York Times said the new crime would be like those “used by so many dictatorships … to stifle dissent and hide misdeeds.” The St. Louis Post-Dispatch, like many other newspapers, equated the law with “Britain's loathsome Official Secrets Act.” The New York Daily News railed against what it called a “Soviet-style secrecy law.“