The Espionage Act, explained

+ Pink Floyd and the Stoics US Edition - Today's top story: You don't have to be a spy to violate the Espionage Act – and other crucial facts about the law Trump may have broken [View in browser]( US Edition | 16 August 2022 [The Conversation]( You may think the Espionage Act is about spying. You’d only be partly right. Although the act specifies that spying for a foreign government will earn you a lifetime behind bars, such spy cases are rare, write national security legal experts Thomas Durkin and Joseph Ferguson. More typically, the act has been used in cases involving the “unauthorized gathering, possessing or transmitting of certain sensitive government information.” That’s why you’ve likely been hearing a lot about the act recently. FBI investigators cited a portion of the Espionage Act in their search warrant for sensitive government documents believed to be in former President Donald Trump’s estate, Mar-a-Lago. Liberals and the anti-Trump wing of the GOP got excited that Trump might be prosecuted for espionage, while the former president’s defenders attacked the raid as the kind of abuse you’d find in a banana republic police state. That constituted a role reversal of sorts; in the past, liberals have largely been critical of the Espionage Act, while conservatives have championed it. All this confusion led us to ask Durkin and Ferguson to set out the facts about [what’s really in the Espionage Act](, what it protects and how it’s been used. Also today: - [“Message laundering” makes violent rhetoric acceptable]( - [10% of teachers say a student has attacked them]( - [4 social media plant tips you definitely shouldn’t follow]( Naomi Schalit Senior Editor, Politics + Society Former President Donald Trump, at the Conservative Political Action Conference, Aug. 6, 2022, in Dallas. Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images [You don’t have to be a spy to violate the Espionage Act – and other crucial facts about the law Trump may have broken]( Joseph Ferguson, Loyola University Chicago; Thomas A. Durkin, Loyola University Chicago Two national security law experts explain how the Espionage Act isn’t only about international intrigue, and share other important points about the law that was invoked in a search of Trump’s estate. Environment + Energy - [The next US energy boom could be wind power in the Gulf of Mexico]( Michael E. Webber, University of Texas at Austin; Hugh Daigle, University of Texas at Austin The US is a latecomer to offshore wind development, but President Biden has set big goals for expanding it. The Gulf of Mexico has good conditions and a large offshore energy industry. 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