MIKE PESCA: This is On the Media. I'm Mike Pesca. On Wednesday, reporters who covered Wen Ho Lee, the American scientist falsely accused of spying for China, were fined by a federal judge for not revealing who their sources were. A week earlier, Time magazine reporter Matthew Cooper was ordered to jail for not revealing who leaked the identity of CIA operative Valerie Plame. Cooper is now free, pending appeal. News organizations have decried the tactics of prosecutors who are compelling reporters to give up their sources. We know what the prosecutors and judges think about all this, but what do the leakers think? Daniel Ellsberg is among American journalism's most famous leakers. He brought the Pentagon Papers to the New York Times and 19 other newspapers in 1971. Daniel Ellsberg, welcome to On the Media.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Glad to be here. Thank you.

MIKE PESCA: Do you think any of these reporters should be giving up their source?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: No. If they did, in fact, promise confidentiality, I think they should defend that privilege and take it up to the Supreme Court, if necessary. The, the ruling that, that there is no journalistic privilege, the Branzburg vs. Hayes ruling in 1972, is very questionable, and it deserves to be re-considered.

MIKE PESCA: Do you think there should be a general reporter's shield?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Yes.

MIKE PESCA: How much should the shield depend on the nature of the information that was leaked?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Well, circumstances do differ here. We have, in the case of the leak of Valerie Plame's name, and some other cases I could mention, what I would say are genuinely dangerous, damaging leaks, hurting our national security far beyond any public interest that's served by putting out that information. And those leaks were made, of course, it seems at the very highest level. They also violate laws. There is a law against putting out the identity of an intelligence operative, and I don't oppose that law. The fact is, there is a law, and it is legal at this point for the prosecutor to be subpoenaing these reporters. He certainly is within his legal right, and that warns us, by the way, of what we should expect if we get a broad official secrets act, which we don't have, that criminalizes all leaks. We do have laws that criminalize leaks of intelligence identities or communications intelligence or nuclear weapons data, and I, as somebody who was a source of classified information, and do believe that my leak, my revelation was, was very much in the public interest, I'm not against those narrow laws, which I didn't violate, as it happened. So, in this case, we have the question then of whether the source of the leak should be subject to prosecution and I would say that they should.

MIKE PESCA: And if any of the journalists in the Plame case were, indeed, compelled or if they just felt that they should identify their sources, do you think that that would have a chilling effect on all of leaking and all of journalism, or just reflect poorly upon their ability to get future leaks?

DANIEL ELLSBERG: If they gave in to the legal process here that confronts him with jail -- if they don't reveal -- that certainly would have a chilling effect generally. This is not a simple [LAUGHS] ethical question. I don't say there is a simple rule for this. Here is one aspect of this people, I think, are missing. Reporters who did not give a confidentiality pledge to a particular source are certainly not bound by another reporter's pledge, and if there are reporters, and I'm sure there are, who do know the identity of those sources, the people who violated that good law here in this case, or who can find it out, they should be investigating that -- who endangered our security? And they should print it.

MIKE PESCA: As a leaker, I'm going to assume that if a reporter gave up his source - for instance, if Matthew Cooper gave up his source - you as a leaker would never, ever turn to him.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: No, pardon me. The idea that an absolute promise is essential, where the leak involves saving lives, where the leak involves major issues of life and death and avoiding a war, ending a war -- absolute confidentiality, thus protecting the source, should not be the sole requirement. And it was not for me. As somebody who was prosecuted for a leak, I can say certainly that I expected to be prosecuted, and by the way, I never demanded absolute confidentiality, and of course I didn't get it. I would like to see more such leaks. In fact, I would like to see people right now who believe that there are documents that show lies, people should, at risk to themselves, consider doing what I wish I'd done much earlier, and that is, going to the press with documents and revealing those. And I very much applaud the, the person who did give the Taguba report, without which we would not yet know of the abuses in Abu Ghraib and elsewhere, and there'd be no chance of changing them.

MIKE PESCA: Daniel Ellsberg, thank you very much.

DANIEL ELLSBERG: Thank you.

MIKE PESCA: Daniel Ellsberg is the author of Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.