This was an interesting argument, so I did some quick research. Apparently, six (6) Espionage Act cases have been filed under Obama. I found and read the indictments for each (they're easy to find, since FAS tracks them). They were:

* Thomas Drake, an NSA employee who favored "ThinThread" instead of the later-adopted "Trailblazer" internet surveillance scheme, who then created a Hushmail account and fed classified documents to a reporter from it.

* Shamai Leibowitz, an FBI contractor/interpreter, who fed the contents of an cable intercepted from the Israeli embassy to a blogger because he felt it implicated Israel in an attack on Iran.

* Stephen Jin-Woo Kim, a career civil servant at State who worked on counterproliferation and North Korea and fed classified documents about North Korea to Fox News, and then lied to the FBI about having any contact with journalists.

* Bradley Manning

* Jeffrey Sterling, who was fired from the CIA, lodged a series of employment law disputes with the CIA, attempted to write a memoir about his time at CIA, and then fed classified details about Iranian counterproliferation to a reporter which put a human intelligence resource at risk.

* John Kiriakou, a CIA counterterrorism official who worked in Pakistan, who outed two covert operatives to a reporter (they had allegedly been involved in the Bush-era interrogation program).

Of this list, Kiriakou and Drake are sympathetic to me, but every single case here seems like a valid prosecution; when you take a role that requires you to handle the most sensitive data the government handles, you cannot share it with the press expecting not to end up arguing your side of the story in a court of law. You certainly can't out covert operatives, or feed foreign intercepts you translate to bloggers!

How do you feel about general whistleblowers like Peter Van Buren[1] and Gregory Hicks[2]? Neither have been prosecuted, but it's hard to deny they have been persecuted for their positions.

[1] http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/01/obama-whistleblo...

[2] http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-3460_162-57582929/official-we-kn...

I'm not clear on how Hicks claims to have been persecuted. Van Buren was fired after writing a tell-all book (which got him demoted to a work-from-home position) and maintaining a blog that linked to Wikileaks documents. I'm ambivalent about the prospect of being fired from a job for detracting from your government employer. On the one hand, you'd lose that same job at any private company where you did the same; on the other hand, in the public sector, detracting from your employer can be a public service. I guess I'd have to think about it on a case-by-case basis.

...But not Karl Rove

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plame_affair#Karl_Rove

Karl Rove was not a federal government employee when Obama assumed office.

Don't you mean Richard Armitage? Read your link.

We have a problem here and it is not any particular politician or political party but the assumption of almost unlimited power by our entire political leadership. They appear to believe they can do whatever they can get away with - just do it in secret or buried in an incomprehensible law or regulation. And in the rare instance our nepotistic press tries to hold them to account they simply deny and delay and deny and delay until it goes away.

Is there anything that can reign them in? Or should I say convince them to reign themselves in. I don't think so.

Sorry for the rant.

Advice for press: Get trained in spycraft (throw away cell phones, false names, strong file and email encryption, Tor...). but most of all don't become too cozy with our leadership.

"but most of all don't become too cozy with our leadership."

News has become a celebrity sport, and it's too late for "too cozy".

https://www.google.com/search?q=washington+correspondents+di...

Speaking of cozy, a lot of right-wing websites are noticing that the President of CBS news is brother to one of the Obama administration's national security advisors: http://dailycaller.com/2013/05/11/top-obama-officials-brothe...

Didn't know that but last year one of the morning NPR hosts had to take a vacation for the duration of the election because her husband was running a big part of one of the campaigns. It's like a king's court - everyone fawning over the power.

Have you ever thought of the fact that perhaps people behaved themselves because they were more afraid of Bush than Obama? It's easy to say, under "Obama's Administration" as if they called Obama for permission and he stamped approved on it. That's akin to blaming the President of a company for something an intern did. Sure, in the overall picture, the President is responsible for everything that happens underneath him, but without the detail of who did what, why, who gave who permission, etc, let's not rush to judgement.

No, I don't think this has anything to do with that kind of rationale. But to be fair, some of these leak prosecutions started with investigations that began under the Bush administration:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/20/us/politics/accidental-pat...

But to your point: it doesn't matter if Obama personally investigated the cases himself or if a witchhunt is led by a middle manager. He is the top executive, what he says or implies trickles down the chain of command. If he passed along the word that these prosecutions weren't worth the time and effort, then the immense work that goes behind building these cases would, quite likely, dissipate.

"Maybe my memory's failing me, but I can't think of a similarly-sized press surveillance operation by the Bush Administration."

Read up on Mark Klein's whistleblower case. It wasn't just press surveillance - it was the origin of surveillance of everybody.

http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/04/70619

Maybe Alberto Gonzalez never bothered to send the letter. The scary thing is, how would we ever know that the government is respecting the security of our privacy, if they have to power to ignore it?