Defense Secrets Act of 1911

It was based in part on the British Official Secrets Act of 1889[1] and criminalized obtaining or delivering "information respecting the national defense, to which he is not lawfully entitled".

He gave examples from the Panama Canal, the Philippines, and elsewhere, in which sketches or blueprints of military installations had been available to foreign parties, sometimes for money.

[4] At the time, the United States, under general John J. Pershing, and President William Howard Taft, was fighting the Moro Rebellion in the southern Philippines, a fallout from the Spanish–American War of 10 years earlier.

Many later Espionage Act cases, for example Gorin v. United States, involved arguments about the exact meaning of terms like 'national defense'.

For example, Thomas Paine in 1777 published information from the Committee of Secret Correspondence about France's aid to the American revolutionary war effort; he was simply fired.