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ENFORCEMENT OF THE ACT A year after the Act's passage, after serving nearly 3 years. 1 Publications which the Wilson Administration determined were guilty of violating the Act "were subject to being deprived of mailing privilege, a blow to most periodicals," according to Sidney Kobre's book ''Development of American Journalism''. A section of the Act allowed the Postmaster General to declare all letters, circulars, newspapers, pamphlets, and other materials that violated the Act to be unmailable. As a result, about 75 newspapers either lost their mailing privileges or were pressured to print nothing more about World War I between June 1917 and May 1918. Among the publications which were censored as a result of the Act were two Socialist Party daily newspapers '' New York Call '' and '' Milwaukee Leader ''. The editor of the latter, Victor Berger , was sentenced to 20 years imprisonment after being convicted on a charge of conspiracy to violate the Act. This was later appealed on a technicality. Other publications banned from the mails were the Industrial Workers Of The World (IWW) journal ''Solidarity'', '' American Socialist '', bohemian radical magazine '' The Masses '', German-American or German-language newspapers, pacifist publications, and Irish nationalist publications (such as Jeremiah O'Leary's ''Bull''). THE ACT IN THE COURTS The laws were ruled to be compliant with the United States Constitution in the United States Supreme Court case '' Schenck V. United States '', 249 U.S. 47 ( 1919 ). Schenck, an anti-war Socialist, had been convicted of violating the Act, after he published a pamphlet urging resistance to the World War I draft. Although Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes joined the Court majority in upholding Schenck's conviction in 1919, he also introduced the theory that punishment in such cases can only be limited to political expression which constitutes a " Clear And Present Danger " to the government action at issue. Later court decisions have cast serious doubt upon the constitutionality of the Espionage Act, including Brandenburg V. Ohio (which changed the "clear and present danger" test derived from Schenck to the " Imminent Lawless Action " test), New York Times Co. V. United States , and United States V. The Progressive, Inc. , although none of these decisions directly overruled it. CHANGES TO THE ACT The law was later extended by the Sedition Act Of 1918 , which made it illegal to speak out against the government. During and after World War I, the Espionage Act and the Sedition Act were used in some prosecutions that would be considered constitutionally unacceptable in today's United States, even in the political climate after the September 11, 2001 Attacks on New York's World Trade Center . While many of the laws were Repealed in 1921, major portions of the Espionage Act remain part of United States law (18 USC 793, 794). The libel decision of '' New York Times Company V. Sullivan '' (1964), by granting enhanced protection to criticism of public figures, including government officials, largely eliminated what remained of the crime of Sedition in the United States. {Link without Title} The United States Congress has enacted other laws to protect specific types of information including:
Note that all of the aforementioned acts either are related to very personal and private data (such as health records) or, when related to records of government activities, they prohibit unlawful disclosure of a secret by someone lawfully privy to the secret in question; unlike the Espionage Act, they do not prohibit disclosure by someone who merely obtained the secret (i.e. whom the secret was leaked to) from someone lawfully privy to it. REFERENCES SEE ALSO
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