Israeli reporter Anat Kamm has been compared to Daniel Ellsberg, the source famous (or infamous) for leaking the military documents later known as the Pentagon Papers, which exposed the Nixon administration's misconduct in handling the Vietnam War.

Kamm is not being hailed by everyone in Israel as a hero of the Fourth Estate, however, nor has the news media in the U.S. done a good job of covering her story.

Kamm--a former reporter for Walla!, an Internet site devoted to popular culture--is accused of making digital copies of more than 2,000 classified military documents during her national service as a clerk in the office of a top Israeli general and then giving some of the sensitive information to another Israeli reporter.

The 23-year-old was detained in December and secretly put under house arrest. Israeli officials  allege as many as 700 of the leaked documents were top-secret. Last week Kamm was charged with passing on classified information with the intent of harming state security. If she is found guilty, the maximum sentence for such an offense is life in prison.

Kamm, like Ellsberg, said she was acting in the interest of the public's right to know what its elected officials are doing. The classified information was allegedly passed to Uri Blau, a Ha'aretz journalist, who used the material in a series of reports critical of the Israeli army. One of Blau's stories suggested the Israeli military had been assassinating wanted Palestinian militants in the West Bank, an apparent violation of an Israeli high court ruling. 

Ha'aretz, a liberal daily newspaper, said Blau has been living in London to avoid being arrested himself. Unlike the Ellsberg case, the publication said the military documents on which Blau's stories are based were all approved by the Israeli military censors, as Israeli policy requires, before publication.

What makes the Kamm affair unusual in Israel--and why it has provoked an outcry from free-press advocates--was a judge's decision to ban the news media from reporting details of the case. Ha'aretz and several other news outlets appealed that decision, but a Tel Aviv court lifted the gag order just two weeks ago--days before Kamm's trial began. Don Alfon, editor-in chief of Ha'aretz, told the Jewish Telegraph Agency, a U.S.-based news outlet: "Ha'aretz asked the court to lift the gag order, not just in the public interest but also to allow us to defend ourselves from this absurd allegation." 

Foreign news media and bloggers began to report on the case only belatedly. According to a piece by Judith Miller for the Daily Beast, initial reports of the case first appeared in mid-March on Tikun Olam, a blog by Seattle-based writer Richard Silverstein. By April, other foreign news media outside Israel had picked up the story, including the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, the Guardian, and the Associated Press.

Most legacy media in the U.S.--the Los Angeles Times, the Christian Science Monitor and Time magazine, for example--only started reporting on the case around the time the gag order was lifted in Israel, four months after Kamm's arrest. What would have happened if the gag order had not been lifted? The Israeli media would still be restricted from covering the story. And how long would the American news media have waited to report on Kamm's detention and the silencing of the Israeli press?

Len Ly is an M.A. candidate in journalism at USC Annenberg and a reporter for Neon Tommy.