Why Leakers Should Be Punished Re "Protect, Don't Prosecute, Patriotic Leakers" (Op-Ed, nytimes.com, June 13): The House and the Senate are right to investigate the recent national security leaks about drone attacks, cyberwarfare and the use of a double agent in Yemen to thwart terrorist attacks on us. And the Justice Department is doing its duty when it is considering possible criminal violations by those who leaked secrets that will make it very difficult for us to defend ourselves in these ways in the future. Bruce Ackerman condemns the investigations and the threat of prosecutions. I disagree with him at every turn in his argument. The leakers may or may not have had high-minded motives, but the commission of a serious felony is not excused by the existence of such motives. Mr. Ackerman thinks - maybe the leakers did, too - that some of President Obama's actions violated the Constitution. We would have left the rule of law far behind if any individual could take it upon himself to break the law in defense of his personal view of what the Constitution demands. The civil rights activists, who indeed violated only unconstitutional laws, were prepared to accept legal punishment for their acts of civil disobedience in Gandhi-like fashion. That these acts of civil disobedience find their ultimate outlet in press reports, which may be protected by the First Amendment, does not give the criminal act of the initial disclosure that protection. Mr. Ackerman writes: "Congress has never passed a general statute making unauthorized leaks a crime. Instead, the Justice Department is relying on relatively narrow provisions of the Espionage Act of 1917, which punishes leakers only if they "knowingly and willfully" pass on information that hurts the country or helps a foreign power "to the detriment of the United States." " But that is a strength, not a weakness, of the investigation: Only if the government can meet this very high burden of proof, rather than just some technical violation of some overzealous bureaucrat's misuse of the "classified" stamp, has a crime been committed. Mr. Ackerman thinks a constitutional violation is lurking in the targeted killing of Anwar al-Awlaki and his son, who were American citizens. He says the president and his staff served as "the Awlakis" prosecutor, judge and jury." But Anwar al-Awlaki was a self-professed adherent of Al Qaeda, and the congressional Authorization for Use of Military Force authorized defensive action against him exactly as if he were an enemy soldier conducting hostilities against the United States. Mr. Ackerman wants more discussion before such operations, and he wants it before a cyberattack on Iran's nuclear weapons program (which Iran says doesn't exist). But of course such discussions would mean that the action could not succeed. Surely there is a point where we either trust those we elect or we give up entirely on robust self-defense. The writer, solicitor general of the United States in the Reagan administration, teaches constitutional law at Harvard Law School.