Biden claimed this was different from a journalist receiving leaked material.
In 2005, it indicted two lobbyists for a pro-Israel group who had been accused of receiving leaked information from a Pentagon official and conveying it to others.
A new law on state secrets that could send journalists to prison for receiving leaked information will presumably dampen investigative appetites.
As news of the arrest of Green emerged, Johnson told Stephenson he found it "hard to believe" that anti-terrorism police had been asked to "target an elected representative of parliament for no greater crime than allegedly receiving leaked documents".
Obama, of course, has had his issues with the press, especially when his Administration has gone after reporters who received leaked information, and has prosecuted some of their sources.
Last week a group of journalists received leaked copies of a draft report drawn up by senior members of the England Cricket Board, the Board of Control for Cricket in India and Cricket Australia mapping out a radical restructuring of international cricket.
The talks continued after three Kurdish activists were murdered in Paris in January, and more recently after the Turkish news media received leaked minutes of a jailhouse meeting with Mr. Ocalan in which he promised to keep fighting if Kurds did not win constitutional rights.
Boris Johnson, the maverick Conservative who is mayor of London, said after Mr. Green's arrest that it was "hard to believe on the day when terrorists have gone on the rampage in India antiterror police in Britain have apparently targeted an elected member of Parliament for no greater crime than receiving leaked documents".
Barry Sheerman, chair of the children, schools and families committee, was today urgently seeking approval to set up the meeting after receiving leaked documents suggesting that Ofsted had at least twice marked Haringey down following the outcry over Baby Peter's death.
"I acted on my belief that the NSA's mass surveillance programs would not withstand a constitutional challenge, and that the American public deserved a chance to see these issues determined by open courts," he said in comments released through Glenn Greenwald, the former Guardian journalist who received leaked documents from Snowden.
