“The administration’s war on leaks and other efforts to control information are the most aggressive I’ve seen since the Nixon administration, when I was one of the editors involved in the Washington Post’s investigation of Watergate. The 30 experienced Washington journalists at a variety of news organizations whom I interviewed for this report could not remember any precedent,” wrote Downie in the report that was criticized by Obama officials.

The campaign was so aggressive it even had a name, said the report: “The Insider Threat Program.”

Said the 2013 report, “The Insider Threat Program being implemented throughout the Obama administration to stop leaks—first detailed by the McClatchy newspapers’ Washington bureau in late June—has already ‘created internal surveillance, heightened a degree of paranoia in government and made people conscious of contacts with the public, advocates, and the press,’ said a prominent transparency advocate, Steven Aftergood, director of the Government Secrecy Project at the Federation of American Scientists in Washington.”

Employees at some 16 intelligence agencies faced questions about leaking during lie-detector tests.

“And the new inspector general for the intelligence community, with jurisdiction over all its agencies, would investigate leak cases that had not produced prosecutions by the Justice Department to determine what alternative action should be taken,” added the report.