This Is How A Police State Protects “Secrets” - Marcy Wheeler/Salon

[JonLP24]

8. You're talking about an outdated Espionage Act passed during the red scare

designed with the intentions of enforcing it on anti-war socialists. Used it & enforced it against a man distrubiting leaf-lets opposing American intervention during the Russian Civil War. It was an era of troubling free speech precedents.

You remember "yell fire in a theater"? That came from an Espionage Act Supreme Court case which involved a man protesting World War I.

Later in life Oliver Wendell Holmes changed his man thanks to this man

Zechariah Chafee, Jr. (December 7, 1885 – February 8, 1957) was an American professor of law, judicial philosopher and civil rights advocate. Defending freedom of speech, he was described by Senator Joseph McCarthy as "dangerous" to the United States.[1] Legal scholar Richard Primus called Chafee “possibly the most important First Amendment scholar of the first half of the twentieth century.”[2]

Chafee wrote several works about civil liberties, including:

Free Speech (1920)
Free Speech in the United States, 1941 (expanded edition of Freedom of Speech)
Government and Mass Communications, 1947
The Blessings of Liberty, 1956

Freedom of Speech in War Times (1919)

Chafee's first significant work (Freedom of Speech)[6] established modern First Amendment theory. Inspired by the United States' suppression of radical speech and ideas during the First World War, Chafee edited and updated a collection of several of his journal articles.[7] In these individual articles-cum-chapters, he assessed significant World War I cases, including those of Emma Goldman.

He revised and reissued this work in 1941 as Free Speech in the United States, which became a leading treatise on First Amendment law. His scholarship on civil liberties was a major influence on Oliver Wendell Holmes' and Louis Brandeis' post-World War I jurisprudence, which first established the First Amendment as a significant source of civil liberties. Chafee met with Justice Holmes after the Schenck case 249 U.S. 47 (1919), which upheld a conviction of an activist who encouraged draft resistance, and convinced him that free speech needed greater consideration. Shortly thereafter, Holmes joined Brandeis in a dissent in another World War I dissent case;[8] this dissent is recognized as the foundation of modern First Amendment jurisprudence.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zechariah_Chafee

The fact that the law has been dusted off & used like never before is very troubling indeed and actually backs up the OPs claim of a police state. Not less.

Trading with the Enemy Act was also past a long with this & a more troubling version of the Espionage Act which thankfully much of it has been removed. Cuba remains the only country left on Trading With The Enemy Act