Why You Should Care About the Julian Assange Case

The article obliquely addresses this concern:

> Ronald Reagan’s executive secretary for the National Security Council, Rodney McDaniel, estimated that 90 percent of what was classified didn’t need to be. The head of the 9/11 commission put the number at 75 percent.

> This created a huge amount of tension between so-called “real secrets” — things that really should never be made public, like military positions and the designs of mass-destruction weapons — and things that are merely extremely embarrassing to people in power and should come out. The bombing of civilian targets in Iraq was one example. The mistreatment of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay was another.

While I'm sure that advocates of naively utopian absolute transparency do exist, a much stronger position is that perfectly legitimate reasons of security have been abused to protect bad actors in power. It's a lot easier to argue against leakers and for the necessity of classified information when the system for designating state secrets doesn't conspicuously lack integrity. Rather than "no secrets ever", the argument posits the necessity of leakers in an environment where the majority of secret info should not be secret.

That is how power is gained, by taking risks. Maybe this will fail in court, maybe it won't. If it won't, the government will get more power.

"how can Assange be indicted but not the NYT?"

To demonstrate power, you don't need to be fair. In fact, not being fair is much more scary.

"I do think that Russia has made use of wikileaks"

To me, this begs a question, why was USA so inept in not making use of Wikileaks themselves? If it is an "independent" organization up for grabs.

Perhaps to get more power, you need a good enemy, too. That's why.

Why has this blase paragraph become so common? Want to defend Trump's actions on X as consistent with a past president? Include a paragraph on how you don't like him. Want to attack academia for being too much of an echo chamber ("grievance studies")? Make sure to have two paragraph digression on how you're a liberal, not one of those icky conservatives.

Why is it necessary to explain that defending an ethical norm in the case of a certain individual does not imply endorsement for all of that individual's actions? Can't we consider ethical arguments on their own merits, without regard to the underlying ideology of the speaker? Is it a garlic clove to ward off American hyperpartisanship?

It's my perception that such garlic cloves have become ubiquitous, where only a decade ago they were much rarer.

I think this depends almost entirely on what Assange is prosecuted for.

It's true that prosecutions of reporters began (after a post-Nixon lull) under Bush, and largely don't rely on anything that an Assange trial would determine. But there are at least two things Assange could be tried for which would seriously erode protections for reporters.

The article points out that the NYT has published classified information - that's basically the problem. Those publications aren't actually guaranteed to be legal. The Pentagon Papers case rejected a prior restraint argument for barring publication, but left open both the possibility of other prior restraint suits and the possibility of simple charges for mishandling classified information. A court case against Assange could be used to set either of those precedents, settling a currently-ambiguous question about press freedoms in the US under a Supreme Court that might well walk back the NYT v US interpretation. (And Assange can be indicted while the NYT isn't because that's discretionary - the DoJ is free to charge whoever they think is most likely to get them a convenient court ruling, however hypocritical that may be.)

Less likely but more even more frightening, some Congressmen have previously talked about charging Assange under the Espionage Act. In fact, a few people have specifically talked about having him subpoenaed without charge so that he could be extradited easily, then invoking Espionage Act once the capital punishment provision wouldn't cause complications. Convicting a non-resident non-citizen of espionage for sharing someone else's leaks would be a fairly shocking decision, but if it happened it would extend legal risk to reporters worldwide.

Edit: I was wrong about the lack of precedent here. A noncitizen has already been successfully charged for acts taken outside the United States which did not involve direct access to US resources: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Zehe

I haven't seriously followed what charges could be brought over the 2016/Russia question, since it seems relatively unlikely that a Trump DoJ would bring a case there. A subpoena over 2016 could potentially have come out of Congress, but that's not likely to lead to a criminal charge at present.

Personally, I'm waiting until all the cards are revealed before I solidify my opinion on this.

If Assange is tried by a Trump DoJ, it almost certainly won't be tied to the 2016 election. Rather, it would be for any of Wikileaks' earlier actions - projects like Cablegate or Collateral Murder. Congressmen have already called for Espionage Act charges over those releases, so it's not a hard outcome to imagine. That would open up a range of alarming questions about handling of classified information, where current practice favors openness and disclosure but the legal situation isn't entirely clear.

Narrowly interpreted, transmitting or even linking to classified materials violates secrecy laws even after those materials leave classified control or become publicly accessible. New York Times Co. v. United States set a precedent in which journalists are not prosecuted for handling or publishing leaked materials. Alongside Branzburg v. Hayes and Lovell v. City of Griffin, which extend press rights to citizens generally, it creates a general presumption that only the actual exfiltration of classified material is prosecuted. But NYT v. US was decided narrowly on prior restraint, and no strict protection for publishing already-leaked classified materials exists.

Convicting someone for publishing classified materials which someone else leaked to them would effectively destroy this protection. Convicting a non-resident non-citizen on Espionage Act charges would create a bizarre situation in which interference with United States military actions by any party anywhere in the world would ostensibly be a capital crime in the US.

Those are the concerns at hand. No matter how guilty someone might be of a specific charge, it's still a serious problem if they're convicted of something unrelated which should never have been a crime.

We don't live in a black and white world. Assange is undoubtedly a remarkable individual but he has a lot to learn and being the pariah whistleblower type is not good for him to learn some of the finer lessons, e.g. in diplomacy.

Assange controls when leaks are leaked, he makes sure Wikipedia is not as transparent as it needs to be, he has sought to monetize war and misery by the deals he has done. Compare and contrast with John Young at Cryptome.

Assange was in control of timing the 2016 email thing, there is no evidence beyond waffle said in Washington that the 'Reds' were behind the hack that got those emails.

Suggesting otherwise is to not fully appreciate how the Russians view the US and its politics. In the Kremlin they do not care who gets in to the White House because they know that whomever is there the policy towards Russia will be the same. If they do engage constructively with the US for a more peaceful world with free trade then they know that they can't do so with a 'puppet' regime elected by their meddling. It is not how it works.

So why do so many people think otherwise? Fascism. Hard to bandy that word around but it is true. Unless the left offer a party with policies that are appealing to people there is no option apart from fascism when regular capitalism fails. Right now we are in a period of badly failing capitalism, nobody has had wage increases for a long time, stocks only go up because of share buy back scams, the 2008 crash was a can kicked down the road by QE and the signs are all there. 1930's Germany was the same, they didn't vote for someone advertising themselves as a fascist, they voted for the Trump of their time.

So where did the emails come from? If it was not the Russians then it is time to look at the time stamp meta data, which I have not done myself but I believe it points to places outside of the Russian time zones. The same people wanting Brexit and the breakup of the EU are meddling, manipulating everyone to this lovely and actually fascist era of politics we are waking up to.

> The prosecutor wrote that the charges and arrest warrant “would need to remain sealed until Assange is arrested in connection with the charges in the criminal complaint and can therefore no longer evade or avoid arrest and extradition in this matter.”

> At another point in the document, the prosecutor wrote that “due to the sophistication of the defendant and the publicity surrounding the case, no other procedure is likely to keep confidential the fact that Assange has been charged.”

meaning that they kept the charges closed and tried to hide their existence AND content until they have arrested him. So all of that is very much on purpose.

[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/accidental-filing-indic...

[0] https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-is-optimistic-it-will-prose...

[1] https://theintercept.com/2018/11/16/as-the-obama-doj-conclud...