The Obama Administration does a grave disservice to our nation in attempting to force a national affairs reporter to name his sources.

This case involves James Risen, a reporter for the New York Times who had written a book, State of War, detailing a botched C.I.A. operation in Iran. The Justice Department subpoenaed Risen in 2008 to learn the identity of a whistleblower. Now, after six years of legal wrangling, Risen has run out of challenges -- the U. S. Supreme Court has declined to intervene in the case, and Risen faces prison if he continues to decline to testify.

This is bad public policy on the part of the Obama Administration which, despite its denials, has more aggressively prosecuted whistleblowers than any recent administration.

As an investigative reporter virtually all of my career, I can attest that the vast majority of whistleblowers are citizens who want to improve the performance of their government. They generally are outraged to see the public being ripped off by lazy, entrenched bureaucrats who are being protected by a good-old-boy network.

Frustrated in their attempts to effect change within an unresponsive system, they reach out to reporters like me -- and like Risen -- to turn over the rocks and expose the slugs to the light of public scrutiny. They know, as I know, that such public scrutiny can force change even upon those who privately resist it.

Thus, the whistleblower and the investigative journalist are allied with the professed policy of the Obama Administration to improve the performance of the federal government, in this case to reduce the multiple failures of our so-called intelligence community.

But by threatening to send a journalist to prison for refusing to name his sources, the Obama Administration makes the whistleblowers more fearful to come forward, and it makes the journalists more hesitant to expose the failures of the government.

That’s just wrong. A government that resists constructive criticism is a government certain to face worsening problems.