It's all about silencing your voice.

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"JEREMY SCAHILL: On June 16th, 1918, the prominent socialist labor leader Eugene Debs delivered a speech in Canton, Ohio. And in that speech, Debs argued against U.S. involvement in World War I, and he praised activists who had been organizing against the military draft or had been convicted of sedition. At the time, Debs was one of the most prominent socialists in the United States, and his speech came on the heels of the Russian revolution and the rise of global socialist and communist movements.

EUGENE DEBS: [read by Mark Ruffalo] The working class who fight all the battles, the working calls who make the supreme sacrifices, the working class who freely shed their blood and furnish their corpses, have never yet had a voice in either declaring war or making peace.

JEREMY SCAHILL: Soon after Debs delivered that speech, he was arrested and charged under a new law in the U.S. that had passed just a year earlier. It was called the Espionage Act. Debs and his lawyers argued that his antiwar speech was protected by the First Amendment to the Constitution. They lost. And Debs was sentenced to 10 years in prison. The case eventually went to the U.S. Supreme Court, where the justices voted unanimously to uphold his conviction. “I believe in free speech, in war as well as in peace,” Debs told the jury during his trial. “If the Espionage Law stands, then the Constitution of the United States is dead.”

Congress eventually amended parts of that act, but the thrust of the law has remained in effect to this day. Anarchist Emma Goldman was also prosecuted under the act. Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were executed after being convicted under the law.

Throughout its history, the Espionage Act has been used as a weapon to attack free speech and dissent. And then came the Pentagon Papers case, where the government charged the whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg under the Espionage Act. He faced more than a hundred years in prison."