The Espionage Act, used three times against leakers in the ninety years after 1917, became routine after 2009: the Obama administration brought more leak prosecutions than all predecessors combined, and its successors continued the practice. Chelsea Manning was sentenced in 2013 to thirty-five years — the longest leak sentence in American history — for giving WikiLeaks the Iraq and Afghan war logs and the "Collateral Murder" video; she endured pretrial isolation a UN rapporteur called cruel and inhuman before President Obama commuted the sentence in 2017, and was jailed again in 2019–20 for refusing to testify to a grand jury.

The docket that followed reads as a roll of prisoners of conscience: John Kiriakou, the CIA officer who confirmed the torture program, thirty months — while no torturer served a day; Jeffrey Sterling, three and a half years; Reality Winner, sixty-three months for one document on Russian election interference; Daniel Hale, forty-five months for revealing the drone program's civilian toll. Because the Act permits no public-interest defense, none could tell a jury why they acted. The Assange case extended the theory to publication itself before ending in a 2024 plea, leaving the question of whether journalism can be espionage formally unresolved — and the whistleblowers' sentences standing as the era's warning.