In 1984, the Reagan administration charged Samuel Loring Morison, an intelligence analyst with the Naval Intelligence Support Center, with violating the Espionage Act for leaking photographs of new Soviet nuclear aircraft carriers to Jane’s Defence Weekly. Morison claimed he was trying to alert the public to a new Soviet threat, but the administration prosecuted him anyway and in December 1985 Morison was convicted and sentenced to two years in jail.

In 1998, the late Senator Patrick Moynihan wrote President Bill Clinton recommending that he grant Morison a pardon. “The Espionage Act has always been used to prosecute spies, those passing information to foreign powers,” Moynihan wrote. “What is remarkable [in this case] is not the crime, but that he is the only one convicted of an activity which has become a routine aspect of government life: leaking information to the press in order to bring pressure to bear on a policy question.” Moynihan warned that the “prosecution of leakers could imperil an entire administration. If ever there were to be widespread action taken, it would significantly hamper the ability of the press to function.” Clinton pardoned Morison on January 20, 2001, his last day in office.

The Obama administration has not heeded Moynihan’s advice. It has engaged in gross overkill in punishing leaks about its own foreign policy and that of the George W. Bush administration. The administration has undertaken twice as many leak prosecutions as all previous presidential administrations combined. It has repeatedly stepped over the limit that separates leakers from the outlets that publish their leaks, investigating Associated Press and Fox News reporters and attempting to force a New York Times reporter to reveal his sources.

They have prosecuted Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden and other leakers on the same grounds used to prosecute spies. As Reagan did with Morison, they have invoked the Espionage Act, which bans the disclosure of classified information “with intent or reason to believe that the information is to be used to the injury of the United States, or to the advantage of any foreign nation." Manning has also been charged under the military code with “aiding or attempting to aid the enemy,” a violation punishable by execution, and he was held for nine months at a Marine prison in conditions that verged on torture.

This perfervid campaign against leaks has occurred in the aftermath of two disastrous and highly unpopular wars and a government surveillance program that overstepped its Constitutional bounds. That doesn’t mean that the leaks were legal, or that the leakers didn’t deserve to be prosecuted, but it does mean that in assessing the charges to bring—and particularly those related to espionage or aiding the enemy—the Obama administration should have taken the context and content of the leaks into account. Instead, it has treated traditional whistleblowers as spies or traitors.