The World War I vintage Espionage Act, originally used to imprison socialists for making antiwar speeches, has been used by the administration against whistleblowers with a vengeance unprecedented in history: eight leakers have been charged with Espionage under Obama, compared to three under all previous presidents. The Obama administration has prosecuted not a single CIA torturer, but has imprisoned a CIA officer who talked about torture with a journalist. National Security Agency official Thomas Drake, who was unable to get abuses fixed internally, now has a criminal record for communicating with a reporter years ago about sweeping domestic surveillance. Had McCain or Romney defeated Obama and implemented the exact same policies, treating whistleblowers like Manning and Snowden as foreign espionage agents, one would expect MSNBC hosts to be loudly denouncing the Republican abuses of authority. The two above paragraphs stood out to me. The second one - finally admission, by the left, (because this was on HuffPo)that there is a double standard - OK for RATS but bad for the right to do the same thing. Now for the more important paragraph. It is all about the right of freedom of speech. Obama is a lawyer, and lawyers will do anything to keep certain facts out of the case or stricken from the record. I think that if he "makes examples of people who talk" they less and less will talk, thus letting him get away with more and more. I may be over simplifying, but that is what stood out to me in this article.