Uhh, well-settled? Do you mean to say you can find a clear rationale and doctrine in Pentagon Papers?

I knew with nine opinions, someone would have to ask that. "Well-settled" is a misleading term to use; I intended it more in the sense that "we haven't seen the issue of 1st A. v. Nat'l Sec. addressed directly since then," rather than in a sense that the precedent would provide clear guidance for a future case.

NYT v. U.S. extended the heavy burden of proof required for prior restraint of previous cases that had dealt only in fairly local harms such as privacy, reputational damage or communal morality, to the much larger harm of threats to national security.

All three dissents spend more time bitching about unseemly haste than they do passing judgment on the case itself, and only Harlan's really stakes out a ground contrary to the opinion's holding. He says that the judiciary should not demand a burden of proof but should be deferential to the decisions of appropriate Executive officers when it comes to foreign affairs -- which essentially nullifies the First Amendment when "the subject matter of the dispute does lie within the proper compass of the President's foreign relations power."

This is complicated slightly by the issue of domestic terrorism, however; suppose that attempts to blow up the DC Metro actually were the fault of McVeigh/ Rudolph types rather than bin Laden. There's no foreign relations power here, so Harlan's dissent would put us in the odd position of having publication of potentially endangering information allowed or prohibited depending on the passport of the attackers. We're in a "war on terrorism," but this is generally recognized not to apply to rightwing whitefolks.

Thus the NYT holding, such as it is, that these cases must be decided based on the degree of the threat, instead of on its source, seems to me far more sensible in its application for the modern era (I can't say "post-9/11" because OK City and Olympic Park both predate) than the Harlan dissent does.