Among those charged with offenses under the Act were: Austrian-American socialist congressman and newspaper editor Victor L. Berger; labor leader and five-time Socialist Party of America candidate Eugene V. Debs, anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, former Watch Tower Bible & Tract Society president Joseph Franklin Rutherford (whose conviction was overturned on appeal),[1] communists Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg, Cablegate whistleblower Chelsea Manning, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, Defense Intelligence Agency employee Henry Kyle Frese, and National Security Agency (NSA) contractor whistleblower Edward Snowden.

[11] Officials in the Justice Department who had little enthusiasm for the law nevertheless hoped that even without generating many prosecutions it would help quiet public calls for more government action against those thought to be insufficiently patriotic.

[12] Wilson was denied language in the Act authorizing power to the executive branch for press censorship, but Congress did include a provision to block distribution of print materials through the Post Office.

Seemingly uncontroversial when the Act was passed, this later became a legal stumbling block for the administration of Franklin D. Roosevelt, when he sought to provide military aid to Great Britain before the United States entered World War II.

The day after the Act became law, Burleson sent a secret memo to all postmasters ordering them to keep "close watch on ... matter which is calculated to interfere with the success of ... the government in conducting the war".

[26] Postmasters in Savannah, Georgia, and Tampa, Florida, refused to mail the Jeffersonian, the mouthpiece of Tom Watson, a southern populist, an opponent of the draft, the war, and minority groups.

According to the book Preachers Present Arms by Ray H. Abrams, the passage (from page 247) found to be particularly objectionable reads: "Nowhere in the New Testament is patriotism (a narrowly minded hatred of other peoples) encouraged.

"[30] The officers of the Watchtower Society were charged with attempting to cause insubordination, disloyalty, refusal of duty in the armed forces and obstructing the recruitment and enlistment service of the U.S. while it was at war.

[35] During the Red Scare of 1918–19, in response to the 1919 anarchist bombings aimed at prominent government officials and businessmen, U.S. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, supported by J. Edgar Hoover, then head of the Justice Department's Enemy Aliens Registration Section, prosecuted several hundred foreign-born known and suspected activists in the United States under the Sedition Act of 1918.

[37][39] Later in 1919, in Abrams v. United States, the Supreme Court upheld the conviction of a man who distributed circulars in opposition to American intervention in Russia following the Russian Revolution.

Justices Holmes and Brandeis dissented, the former arguing "nobody can suppose that the surreptitious publishing of a silly leaflet by an unknown man, without more, would present any immediate danger that its opinions would hinder the success of the government arms or have any appreciable tendency to do so".

The likely reason was not that Roosevelt was more tolerant of dissent than Wilson but rather that the lack of continuing opposition after the Pearl Harbor attack presented far fewer potential targets for prosecutions under the law.

Associate Justice Frank Murphy noted in 1944 in Hartzel v. United States: "For the first time during the course of the present war, we are confronted with a prosecution under the Espionage Act of 1917."

[44][45][46] Later, Biddle supported use of the Act to deny mailing permits to both The Militant, which was published by the Socialist Workers Party, and the Boise Valley Herald of Middleton, Idaho, an anti-New Deal and anti-war weekly.

[47] The same year, a June front-page story by Stanley Johnston in the Chicago Tribune, headlined "Navy Had Word of Jap Plan to Strike at Sea", implied that the Americans had broken the Japanese codes before the Battle of Midway.

Before submitting the story, Johnson asked the managing editor, Loy “Pat” Maloney, and Washington Bureau Chief Arthur Sears Henning if the content violated the Code of Wartime Practices.

[48] In 1945, six associates of Amerasia magazine, a journal of Far Eastern affairs, came under suspicion after publishing articles that bore similarity to Office of Strategic Services reports.

Gorin v. United States (1941) was cited in many later espionage cases for its discussion of the charge of "vagueness", an argument made against the terminology used in certain portions of the law, such as what constitutes "national defense" information.

[60] In June 1971, Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony Russo were charged with a felony under the Espionage Act of 1917 because they lacked legal authority to publish classified documents that came to be known as the Pentagon Papers.

[69] One of Zehe's defense attorneys claimed his client was prosecuted as part of "the perpetuation of the 'national-security state' by over-classifying documents that there is no reason to keep secret, other than devotion to the cult of secrecy for its own sake".

Morison told investigators that he sent classified satellite photographs to Jane's because the "public should be aware of what was going on on the other side", meaning that the Soviets' new nuclear-powered aircraft carrier would transform the USSR's military capabilities.

A March 1984 government report had noted that "the unauthorized publication of classified information is a routine daily occurrence in the U.S." but that the applicability of the Espionage Act to such disclosures "is not entirely clear".

In the 1990s, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan deplored the "culture of secrecy" made possible by the Espionage Act, noting the tendency of bureaucracies to enlarge their powers by increasing the scope of what is held "secret".

[89] In 2001, retired Army Reserve Colonel George Trofimoff, the most senior U.S. military officer to be indicted under the Act, was convicted of conducting espionage for the Soviets in the 1970s–1990s.

Out of a total of eleven prosecutions under the Espionage Act against government officials accused of providing classified information to the press, seven have occurred since Obama took office.

A 2015 study by the PEN American Center found that almost all of the non-government representatives they interviewed, including activists, lawyers, journalists, and whistleblowers, "thought the Espionage Act had been used inappropriately in leak cases that have a public interest component".

PEN wrote: "Experts described it as 'too blunt an instrument,' 'aggressive, broad and suppressive,' a 'tool of intimidation,' 'chilling of free speech,' and a 'poor vehicle for prosecuting leakers and whistleblowers.

'"[147] Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg said, "the current state of whistleblowing prosecutions under the Espionage Act makes a truly fair trial wholly unavailable to an American who has exposed classified wrongdoing", and that "legal scholars have strongly argued that the US Supreme Court – which has never yet addressed the constitutionality of applying the Espionage Act to leaks to the American public – should find the use of it overbroad and unconstitutional in the absence of a public interest defense".

[147] Trevor Timm, executive director of the Freedom of the Press Foundation, said, "basically any information the whistleblower or source would want to bring up at trial to show that they are not guilty of violating the Espionage Act the jury would never hear.

[149] In May 2019, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette editorial board published an opinion piece making the case for an amendment to allow a public-interest defense, as "the act has since become a tool of suppression, used to punish whistleblowers who expose governmental wrongdoing and criminality".