Even before the subpoena was delivered to his lawyers this past January, some of Risen’s contacts were being subpoenaed to appear before the same grand jury. “The intimidation begins with the document itself,” says one Risen contact, who was subpoenaed and who asked to remain anonymous. “ ‘You are commanded to appear’—that will get your attention. It’s delivered by a couple FBI guys.”

The leak investigations, concern about government scrutiny of them and their contacts, partisan attacks on their ethics and patriotism, and hours huddled with lawyers have taken a toll on reporters. “It is certainly something you worry about every day,” says Lichtblau, who covers the Justice Department for the Times. “It has an effect on how you do the job, an effect on the people you talk to.” In his book Bush’s Law: The Remaking of American Justice, Lichtblau amplifies this point with a story of a very close friend who worked in the government. After Lichtblau’s domestic-spying piece and a subsequent, related piece on the swift banking-transaction network appeared, his friend’s bosses “told him that he would either have to end his friendship with me, or leave the government,” Lichtblau says.

“It’s a witch hunt,” Risen says. “They are trying to shut us down. It’s the most secretive administration in modern history.”

Perhaps nothing is more demoralizing, though, than the sense that journalism’s most groundbreaking investigations did not yield the kind of public accountability, congressional investigations, and reform that past eras have seen—that the system of democratic checks and balances, of which the press is only one part, is broken. Most of the abuses of the last eight years were pursued and exposed not by Congress, but by the press. “I have found that the stories which most anger and haunt journalists are not necessarily the ones with the most violence,” says Bruce Shapiro, the executive director of the Dart Center for Journalism & Trauma. “They are the stories in which we felt our intervention to have accomplished nothing. What’s really striking with the Risen story is precisely that sense of powerlessness: they committed this great act of journalism, and broke a story of a violation of federal law that raises fundamental questions about abuses of power in our society. And then the great institutions of society don’t respond, but instead turn around and say, ‘Fuck you.’ That is a huge invalidation of all the work, and further betrayal of our sense as journalists of what’s right.”

The system did not work, and is still not working. When the stories on black-site prisons and domestic wiretapping broke in late 2005, the Democrats were still a minority in Congress, and Republicans largely protected the administration from scrutiny. But even after the Democrats won majorities in the House and Senate in the 2006 midterm elections, their interest in high-profile investigations of controversial administration behavior on the national-security front remained muted. Part of the explanation, says Dana Priest, who wrote the Post’s CIA-prison story, is that the information in her piece and the Times’s NSA report is “all classified. For an informed member of Congress, if they had a secret briefing and read my story, they are still hamstrung from discussing it, because they had the secret briefing.”

But past instances of journalistic revelation of secret government programs also involved sensitive or classified information—the Pentagon Papers, for instance, or the story in the 1970s about how the federal government was engaged in domestic spying, which led to the Church committee hearings in 1975 and the passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act requiring court warrants for domestic surveillance. So what’s different today? Why is fear of discussing press accounts of classified programs, even among powerful members of Congress, seemingly greater now than in past eras? “What’s different now is that they are still partly worried about looking soft on Al Qaeda,” Priest says. “Al Qaeda got put in such a bogeyman box. And everybody is afraid they could be accused of being soft on terrorism. That is the death knell for people.”

This fear factor has been central to the Bush administration’s post-9/11 strategy on any number of fronts, but arguably none more so than in its efforts at secrecy. All administrations want to keep some information secret, Seymour Hersh, the veteran investigative reporter, tells me. But the Bush-Cheney White House is “more secretive. They are better, smarter; they do much more stuff and hide behind jingoism,” he says. “There’s been an incredible diminution of Congress. The truth of the matter is it is different now. It is different under these guys.” Bureaucrats who in the past would have resisted leak-investigation demands from the administration, Hersh says, are today “more compliant.” Hersh says that back in the 1970s, when he broke the story about the government spying on Americans, a top Justice Department official (Gerald Ford’s attorney general Edward Levi) told those in the White House (including Ford’s chief of staff Dick Cheney) who were seeking to pursue a leak investigation against Hersh, “Are you kidding? Get the hell out of here.” Not any more. And that sense of fear and intimidation has seeped into the DNA of media institutions as well, Hersh says. In the climate that prevailed after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, “newspapers decided they were on the team. And that set off a chain, an attitude, that chilled the First Amendment right away.” It contributed, he suggests, as well to the media’s insufficiently skeptical reporting on the Bush administration’s prewar claims concerning the threat posed by Saddam Hussein.

The chill is still evident. One top national-security reporter, whose reporting led to an internal-leak investigation at a federal agency and therefore requested anonymity, says such investigations can remain open, inhibiting sources and follow-up reporting even if the investigations don’t lead to criminal charges. “You have to be aware of your sources,” the reporter says. “What are you going to do? You have to lay off. They leave them open for a purpose.”