y books, was convicted of this crime in Austria, in 2005, and served 13 months of a 3 year prison sentence.
Since such laws would obviously violate the First Amendment, they do not exist in the US. More generally, expressions of opinion are not subject to legal sanctions in the US, where hurt feelings are not considered adequate legal grounds for restricting speech.
In the UK, under The Official Secrets Act, a government employee who discloses material that has been ruled as secret, for any reason, by the government, is subject to criminal penalties [TalkTalk]. Furthermore, a journalist who reports on such material is also subject to prosecution. Arguments that the material in question has already been published, or that the release and/or publication is in the public interest are not acceptable defenses.
There are similar laws in almost every country--except the US, where the First Amendment protects journalists, or others, who publish material of this type. However, there have been times when this was not the case. The 1917 Espionage Act was used on a large scale to prosecute people for such acts as making speeches calling for the US to end its participation in the ongoing war (WW I), or arguing that the draft was unconstitutional [Wikipedia-Esp]. Socialist Party leader and presidential candidate Eugene Debs, was sentenced to 10 years imprisonment for a speech condemning the war.
These events prompted the formation, in 1917, of the Civil Liberties Bureau, which, in 1920, was renamed The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). As a result of lawsuits brought by the ACLU, Supreme Court decisions, starting in the 1920's, greatly strengthened First Amendment protection for journalists and news media. The Pentagon Papers case made it clear that simply classifying a document as secret is not enough to justify outlawing its publication [Wikipedia-Pent].
However, in recent years, the Obama Administration has been making heavy use of the Espionage Act to prosecute government employees who reveal "secrets" embarrassing to the government [Carr]. Furthermore, they have started going after individuals, or organizations such as WikiLeaks, who publish material provided by government whistle-blowers. There are strong indications, tho no solid proof, that the Justice Department has obtained a sealed indictment of WikiLeaks' Julian Assange for violating the Espionage Act.
Another area in which statements have been censored, or sometimes even criminalized, despite being unrelated to any action, is obscenity. Justification for such restrictive laws is similar to that for hate laws; profanity offends people.
The 1873 federal Comstock laws [Wikipedia-Com] banned the mailing of textual, pictorial, and any other material deemed to be obscene. The maximum penalty was 5 years imprisonment at hard labor. Twenty four states passed similar legislation.
A principal target of these laws was the birth control movement. The shipment of contraceptive devices of all types, as well as written material pertaining to birth control, and sex education in general, was thereby outlawed. The mailing of certain anatomy textbooks to medical students was barred.
Over a period of a century, the scope of these laws was whittled down by Supreme Court decisions based on the First Amendment, with the ACLU playing a leading role. Altho the federal law has not actually been repealed, it has largely been nullified, as have the various state laws.
A fundamental problem with such laws is that of defining what constitutes obscenity. The nearest to a legal definition is the Miller test, developed in the 1973 Supreme Court case Miller v. California. A work is to be considered legally obscene if all 3 of the following conditions are satisfied:
Obviously this is a very fuzzy definition, even apart from the fact that it explicitly refers to "applicable state law", meaning that the definition varies from state-to-state, as well as over time. The effect of obscenity laws and regulations on the exercise of civil liberties has diminished, as a result of various court decisions, to mor