"As long as I'm attorney general," Eric Holder promised, "no reporter who is doing his job is going to go to jail." If Sterling's federal prosecutors compel Risen to testify, it's not clear what Holder's promise will be worth.

One of the reasons the district court judge threw out the subpoena against Risen is that the prosecutors already have a strong case against Sterling, and they don't need Risen's confirmation that Sterling was the source. The case against Sterling includes Risen's credit card and bank statements, telephone records and other information allegedly linking the two. Therein lies another profound threat to journalism: the unprecedented level of surveillance of everyone, including journalists. Ironically, it was Risen and his colleague Eric Lichtblau who first exposed the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program, in an article written in 2004 but withheld for over a year, until after the 2004 presidential election, by then-executive editor Bill Keller.