“Clear and Present Danger”: The Legacy of the 1917 Espionage Act in the United States
Bibliographic record
Abstract
During the Great War the frenzy to control opposition to war resulted in several efforts to limit freedom of speech. State legislation, gubernatorial proclamations, and municipal ordinances had the immediate impact of controlling dissent, but the cessation of the war ended such activities. Congressional passage of the Espionage Act in 1917 changed this dynamic and left behind a long-term legacy. Several cases argued on behalf of defendants imprisoned for opposing the nation’s war effort arrived at the United States Supreme Court for review. Justices for the first time defined the boundaries of the First Amendment by arguing that expressions could pose a “clear and present danger” during a national crisis. This interpretation has led to passage of recent legislation, including the USA PATRIOT Act, and has been used to justify the arrest of individuals who leak sensitive information.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.036 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.011 | 0.018 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".