Daniel Ellsberg of Pentagon Papers fame, in recent interviews, is underscoring the Obama’s administration’s aggressive assault on those accused of leaking official information.

It’s a point the media have been slow to recognize.

Here’s an exchange during an interview with The Economist:

DiA: Do you think the government is actively working against Wikileaks?

Mr Ellsberg: I’m sure they are, in the sense of trying to discover the sources of truth-telling from within. This administration has shown more eagerness to prosecute leaks than any other administration in our history. As a matter of fact, Barack Obama has now, with the prosecution of Bradley Manning, indicted as many people for whistleblowing or leaks as all previous presidents put together. Did you realise that?

DiA: I did not.

Mr Ellsberg: Well it’s a small number. It’s three. It’s that small because we don’t have an official secrets act the way that the British and most countries do. And therefore we’ve only had three such prosecutions in the past. I was the first, with Tony Russo, under Richard Nixon. And two other presidents each brought one case. Obama has now prosecuted three people. Two of whom are being prosecuted for acts carried out under George Bush and for which Bush chose not to prosecute—Thomas Drake, who is under indictment, and Shamai Leibowitz, who pleaded guilty (a mistake in my mind). So Obama’s famous position of not looking backward seems to apply only to crimes like torture or illegal warrantless surveillance. He’s given absolute amnesty to the officials of the Bush administration. But in the case of Thomas Drake, who told a reporter about a billion-and-half-dollar waste at the NSA, and in the case of Shamai Leibowitz, who says he exposed acts to a blogger that he regarded as illegal, Obama was willing to look backward and prosecute. With Manning he has shown more eagerness to do that. I think we can assume that those who don’t use Wikileaks’s technology to get the information out can be assured of prosecution. I have to assume that if I had now put out the Pentagon Papers as I did, using that now outmoded technology of Xerox, Obama would prosecute me to the full extent of the law.

Ellsberg goes on to say that the “dirty tricks” used against him by the Nixon administration–including warrantless wiretapping and burglary–have now been legalized in our new national security policies.

Actions that contributed to the impeachment of Nixon are now apparently accepted by the majority.

It’s very interesting to see this point made in context of the subsequent entry in The Economist’s “Democracy in America” blog.

This entry discusses the process of climate change, and the issue of “shifting baselines.” The point is that as time passes, we get used to the “natural” levels of things, even if these are severely degraded (as in fish populations) or dramatically increased (such as government surveillance and intrusion). The recent past becomes a new baseline that ignores what things were like in the not too distant past. We have no history, so no good sense of our own predicament.

Pairing Ellsberg’s interview with the climate change discussion may have been an accident of blogging, but it turns out to be a most appropriate one.

You can also listen to a brief interview with Ellsberg in the current Counterspin, a radio program by the media group FAIR.