In the March issue of Commentary Gabriel Schoenfeld examines whether the New York Times violated the Espionage Act with their disclosure of the NSA wiretapping program. At the beginning of Schoenfeld’s lengthy essay, he writes:

The President, for his part, has not only stood firm, insisting on both the legality and the absolute necessity of his actions, but has condemned the disclosure of the NSA surveillance program as a “shameful act.” In doing so, he has implicitly raised a question that the Times and the President’s foes have conspicuously sought to ignore—namely, what is, and what should be, the relationship of news-gathering media to government secrets in the life-and-death area of national security. Under the protections provided by the First Amendment of the Constitution, do journalists have the right to publish whatever they can ferret out? Such is certainly today’s working assumption, and it underlies today’s practice. But is it based on an informed reading of the Constitution and the relevant statutes? If the President is right, does the December 16 story in the Times constitute not just a shameful act, but a crime?

This adds another twist to the NSA wiretapping story, and it is not exactly along the lines that opponents of President Bush were hoping for in mid-December when the Times story broke.