For officials in the Trump administration, leaving the government and writing a book has become a reliable and lucrative exit strategy — so much so that it has created a small army of literary agents who specialize in snapping up the next tell-all memoir. For anyone with name recognition in D.C., it has perhaps never been easier to scoop up a sizable advance and make the best-seller list.

But for rank-and-file members of the intelligence community, the process is not so easy. Employees who formerly had access to sensitive information must submit manuscripts for a government “pre-publication review,” intended to ensure that they don’t divulge official secrets.

The result has been a massive system that processes thousands of submissions, in which the rules are broad and vague, and vary from one agency to another. The process can drag on for months or, in some cases, years, and can force authors to choose between deleting text or publishing pages of type blacked out by U.S. government censors.

But the American Civil Liberties Union and Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University are challenging this redaction regime. In a lawsuit filed on Tuesday, the groups allege that pre-publication review amounts to a “far-reaching system of prior restraint,” and that the government’s arbitrary and sometimes confounding censorship decisions are unconstitutional under the First Amendment.

“This far-reaching censorship system simply can’t be squared with the Constitution,” Jameel Jaffer, executive director of the Knight First Amendment Institute, said in a statement. “The government has a legitimate interest in protecting bona fide national security secrets, but this system sweeps too broadly, fails to limit the discretion of government censors, and suppresses political speech that is vital to informing public debate.”

The lawsuit has five plaintiffs, all of whom are former members of the military or intelligence community. They allege that the delays and censorship involved in prepublication review have unfairly damaged their work as academics, authors, and outside experts, and are asking the court to stop the government from enforcing their review agreements.

“To survive First Amendment scrutiny, a requirement of prepublication review would have to, at a minimum, apply only to those entrusted with the most closely held government secrets; apply only to material reasonably likely to contain those secrets; provide clear notice of what must be submitted and what standards will be applied; tightly cabin the discretion of government censors; include strict and definite time limits for completion of review; require censors to explain their decisions; and assure that those decisions are subject to prompt review by the courts,” the complaint reads. “The prepublication review system, in its current form, has none of these features.”