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> Also, though I understand there is disagreement about this, I think countries keep secrets for a reason and I consider it naive utopianism to expect everything to be brought into the open.

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.

"I think the Assange/wikileaks indictment is a misstep by the justice department/current administration."

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.

> To me, this begs a question

No it doesn't :-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Begging_the_question

> why was USA so inept in not making use of Wikileaks themselves?

The USA is inept as an organization. In some areas, by design (eg Patent Office, various Courts, Gerrymandering). There are very few areas where it's not completely hypocritical and demonstrates externally rational behavior. "Using wikileaks" would require multiple departments coordinating. That's been impractical for decades.

> Don't get me wrong -- I don't much care for Assange [...]

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.

Is it a garlic clove to ward off American hyperpartisanship?

I think so, yes. I find myself doing it. You can't critique anyone or anything these days without whoever you're talking to automatically assuming you're a diehard fan of the other side.

The far right and the far left are so overrepresented in the media and online discourse that it's necessary to distance yourself or be assumed one of them.

> The far right and the far left are so overrepresented in the media and online discourse

I don't think so, no. Not on mainstream forums. They certainly have a lot of their own special forums, but on Reddit, and Facebook, and HackerNews, I find that most commenters are pretty much who you'd expect - random, middle of the road people.

> it's necessary to distance yourself or be assumed one of them

Have you considered the possibility that you only think these people are overrepresented because you assume anybody without a disclaimer is one of them?

It's more like anyone who doesn't leave a disclaimer (and some of those who do) have angry partisans jump down their throats.

> Why has this blase paragraph become so common?

I like these disclaimers. If someone comes out and states their opinion or bias on a topic, it gives you more context to understand their thought processes and how they came to the conclusion that they came to. It helps you understand the value system that underpins someone's argument.

Ethical arguments can't be made on their own merits, they can only be made in the context of shared value systems. By communicating more about your values, you give someone more insight to understand your ethical argument. If I know where our values differ, I can try to account for those differences. Ripping an ethical argument out of context and putting it in a social vacuum makes it alien and difficult to understand.

I really don't think this is very weird or new, but maybe I'm young. The truth is that without the "garlic clove", it's highly likely the next response is something along those lines, ie. "But assange has done abc so xyz".

I think it's less about partisianship and more about keeping conversation on topic.

An easy way to not let it devolve into a conversation about how he's an ass is to initially concede that he is.

It's not, of course, as you point out. One can't defend the ethics or law on the basis of what's good for a particular political party. One should come to a proper understanding of relevant US law, and US jurisdictional limitations (Assange is an Australian citizen and as Chris Hedges points out in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hyZktgMp4Q "he isn't bound by any law to protect American secrets"), but the hyperpartisanship you speak of is remarkably corporate media driven and not in interest of the American citizenry. Most Americans call themselves independent and did so around the time of the 2016 US election (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2015/01/08/a-... and https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/09/160907114001.h...). I think it's because more people (particularly young people) are coming to realize that a two corporate party division is not addressing their needs as citizens of a wealthy country, and the Democrats and Republicans take remarkably similar sides on the most major issues of the day that get national interests involved (chief among them: war -- the single issue that costs the most money and lives).

You'll find similar unnecessary disclaimers before any serious discussion of Pres. Trump these days (such as "I'm no fan of Trump but...") as if a black-and-white ('for us or against us', remember that?) view is right and proper and must be dismissed before any serious discussion can begin. Even when what they're about to describe is a continuation across US administrations. Majoritarian issues don't get that kind of framing. I rarely hear anyone say anything resembling "I'm no fan of mass surveillance, but...", or "I don't like extrajudicial murder like what the US does with the drone war, but...".

I had a look through the article, but is there any evidence this indictment came from the current administration? Could it not date to pre-2016?

JA's lawyers have long believed the sealed indictment existed, without revealing their reasoning. Likely some off-the-record stuff. I think it's a pretty safe bet that this goes back to Obama.

> I also think it's a bizarre exagerration to argue that an attempted prosecution of Assage would result in "broad new powers to put Trump’s media 'enemies' in jail".

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.

> Convicting a non-resident non-citizen of espionage for sharing someone else's leaks would be a fairly shocking decision

The usual foreign intelligence case officer is a non-citizen, often non-resident, whose main business is soliciting, recieving, and redistributing other people's leaks of sensitive information.

It is, to say the least, not at all unheard of for such people to be convicted of espionage, as they are literally the primary target of espionage laws.

> 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.

“Trump DoJ” is too simple of a model; both the Special Counsel's Office at DoJ and other DoJ offices (notably SDNY) are bringing indictments politically uncomfortable to Trump, stemming from (but not always specific to) the “2016/Russia question”.

I mentioned non-resident with the purpose of excluding domestic spies like Anna Chapman, though perhaps "not active in the US" would have been more appropriate.

As for the DoJ, I agree that I simplified the issue. I'm making the assumption that the indictments we've seen so far are much more tractable for those offices than charging Assange would be, but perhaps I'm wrong about that.

I thought Espionage Act charges hadn't been levied against noncitizens operating wholly outside the United States, who would instead be charged under local espionage laws where they acted, US classified materials or other act-specific laws, or UCMJ spying rules in times of war. All of the cases I'd previously read about were either US citizens or foreigners like Truong and Yatskov who acted directly within US borders. It turns out this isn't true.

I'd never heard of Alfred Zehe, but apparently he was a German citizen who did some analysis for the Soviets in Mexico, and was arrested on Espionage Act charges when he later visited Boston. He filed for dismissal over this exact point - that he was a non-citizen, not in the US, and not directly accessing American sources - but was refused. And in a bizarrely ironic twist, it was Robert Mueller who directed prosecutors to withhold documents from the defense over "national security" that had already been offered to Warsaw Pact governments.

So it looks like not only was I wrong on the history of Espionage Act charges, but there's direct evidence that the current Special Counsel has no hesitation aggressively prosecuting such cases. I appreciate the correction.