Traditional journalists may abandon WikiLeaks’ Assange at their own peril
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
It seems that the federal government is trying to prosecute Assange for obtaining classified information from a source, a practice that is common among investigative journalists. (The details, I suppose, are in exactly how he obtained that information from the source). This seems to me to be clearly protected under the 1st Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
A democracy that prosecutes civillians who obtain secret information from sources for the purpose of disseminating said information to the public will likely not remain a democracy for long.
Would simply receiving classified information from Chelsea Manning count? (Probably not, I would guess.)
What about receiving classified information and then remarking "Wow, this is great stuff! I'm going to pass this information on to prominent news organizations through my website called Wikileaks. You don't have more that you could send me, do you?" Would this count as conspiracy if his remark lead to Manning obtaining more information in an illegal manner? It seems that something along these lines may have happened.
It seems to me that Assange should only be prosecuted if he broke into DoD computers himself. It doesn't appear that such an event occurred. I believe that discourse between a journalist and a source (or any two civillians, for that matter) is protected by the 1st Amendment. Thus, encouraging Manning to hack government computers, or even describing to her how to hack government computers[1], should both be protected by the 1st Amendment.
[1] Perhaps this opinion is controversial. Allow me to lay out an example:
Source: "I've sent you all the info I have! Everything else is password-protected." Reporter: "The password isn't 'password123', is it?" Source: "Hey, that worked! Let me send you some more stuff to help with your expose."
In this case, or even if the reporter suggested something more technically advanced like "Hey, look up sql injection on Wikipedia," I believe that the reporter's speech is protected by the 1st Amendment. (The source's activities are almost certainly illegal, but that doesn't answer the question of whether they should be prosecuted for them).
So for doing source research.
"[Reporters Without Borders] is also still troubled by the arrest of journalists during #Blacklivesmatter protests in Baltimore and Minneapolis."
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2016/04/20/475017281...
Sure, in the same sense that the same description could apply to torturing someone with relevant knowledge.
Freedom of the press is the right to publish, not an exemption from all criminal law so long as the object of the crime is acquisition of material for publication.
This actually seems like great news for journalists. The fact that this is the only charge implies that prosecutors have decided that wikileaks’ core activity of publishing classified information obtained by others was actually legal.
The fact that assisting someone to break into a DoD computer turns out to be illegal probably shouldn’t surprise anyone. If someone asked for your help breaking into a DoD computer would you say “oh sure, that sounds like a perfectly legal thing that can’t possibly get me into trouble”?
No, they are prosecuting him for conspiring with Manning to gain access to classified material to which Manning did not have lawful access.
Conspiracy to commit a crime involves two or more people agreeing to a common purpose, which purpose involves a crime, and at least one of those people taking at least one overt act to advance toward acheiving the criminal purpose. (Note they the overt act can be by any member of the conspiracy, and all of them.can be charged.)
what people like assange, snowden, and manning, did, along with organizations like wikileaks, is take the muffled humor everyone joked about knowing their governments were up to no good and put it out in the open. sadly we need people and organizations like this because no matter how much we claim to be free we truly never are.
are there better ways to do what has been done? probably, but it is no less likely that better ways will simply be portrayed as needed to get the same legal outcome.
seeing that they are so narrow in their prosecution they are probably hoping to make it swift but I suspect as the weeks roll by there will be many more people standing behind assange. not necessarily for him but what his actions represented and accomplished.
I have seen cases where the government did that first hand, and it's definitely a problem when it happens. But this is not one of those cases. There is not a fine line between a journalist receiving confidential material from a leaker, and someone trying to help someone else illegally expropriate confidential material from government computers. It's in fact a bright line, one that is absolutely necessary.
It is critical that, when real journalists invoke their privilege of publication, they be free from any accusation of engaged in illegal conduct to expropriate that material in the first place. Journalists have carefully avoided dabbling in illegal conduct themselves to protect their credibility and the leeway they receive from the law. Assange is the one who jeopardizes that privilege. Because the next time a journalist publishes stolen information, the government can hold up Assange as an example of why the journalist should be investigated to see if they had a hand in illegal activity.
In my opinion, Assange lost his moral high ground after it came out that he was communicating with Trump Jr. and helping the Trump campaign. And that he delayed and timed the DNC and Podesta leaks to cause maximum advantage to Trump, instead of just releasing them when ready. On top of that Wikileaks lied that they did not have contacts with the Trump campaign.
Not to mention that DNC and Podesta were private entities, not government officials and zero illegality was revealed by those leaks. He later was asking Trump Jr to ask Trump to recommend himself as the Aussie ambassador to the US as payment for helping Trump win.
If he exposed corruption or overreach in the Obama admin, or something that Hillary did as SoS, that had the side effect of Trump winning, that's fair game and he would have my support.
In other words, exposing government overreach = good.
Indiscriminately releasing private entities emails with intent to politically influence and gain political clout = bad.
For all of Snowden's fault of releasing too much information and details of NSA thats expected of a foreign focused intelligence agency like NSA after the initial leaks, atleast he never took partisan political sides.
>I have no doubt that many folks who should be protesting Assange's arrest but aren't are acting thus because they dislike him. But I haven't seen anyone actually make that argument explicitly.
I am making that argument explicitly, though I don't claim to speak for everyone. Public opinion and sympathy varies from case to case based on perceptions.
> Also, being a "private entity" is not a litmus test for whether an entity is public and newsworthy
What's newsworthy about leaking someone being on maternity leave? The only newsworthy thing that came out of Podesta's emails was that 4chan and alt right trolls and conspiracy theorists created Pizzagate out of thin air, causing death threats to families and communities.
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/john...
And someone going to Comet Ping Pong and firing shots. Feel free to point me to Podesta's emails being newsworthy.
Not to mention Assange intentionally falsely implying Seth Rich was the real leaker, causing distress to his family.
>news orgs aren't barred from publishing secret/confidential material from corporations or entertainment celebrities
That's why I never thought Gawker held a high moral ground.
What's newsworthy about doxxing almost all women in Turkey?
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/07/why-did-wikileaks-hel...
What's newsworthy about publishing details of agents in secret in places like Afghanistan, apart from endangering their lives at the hands of terrorists? What's newsworthy about publishing social security numbers and passwords unredacted?
Why should press protections apply to someone that tried to crack a NTLM password of a login of the US military? If anyone else did that, they would be prosecuted, why should Assange get special treatment?
Edit: In case you think things like Pizzagate were not aided and abetted by Wikileaks, they helpfully created a wiki for it.
https://our.wikileaks.org/Pizzagate
Basically helping spread nonsensical fringe conspiracy theories to destabilize the US, just like Russia wants. Their goal wasn't to expose anything, it was to inflame the US and support Trump at any cost to divide the nation and weaken it.
There was also Hillary's ironic Wall Street speeches and Donna's debate prep. Not a good look!
not out of thin air. but by several suggestive photos, some with pro-pedophilic comments/captions. If you were a PR firm, one of the few ways you could deflect accusations would be to infiltrate that group and make statements on their behalf that are as bizarre and irrational as possible. Which is funny because that's exactly what happened. All the signal was drowned out by orders-of-magnitude more noise.
Was the british pariliament child abuse ring made up out of thin air too ? Why didn't they just drown that out as fake news from alt conspiracists ?
In my opinion, Donna Brazile lost her moral high ground after it came out, from Assange, via the Podesta leaks, that she was communicating with the Clinton Campaign and helping them prep the debate questions.
Or does "moral high ground" only apply to one side in your book?
> he delayed and timed the DNC and Podesta leaks to cause maximum advantage
Very unjournalistic of him! Real news organizations never play sides, or game the news cycle, or the political cycle.
For example: I'm confident someone just a happened to stumble upon the Access Hollywood tapes in some dusty archive right at the moment they were released, and no thought was given to timing.
> If he exposed corruption or overreach in the Obama admin, or something that Hillary did as SoS, that had the side effect of Trump winning, that's fair game and he would have my support.
Did he ever mention Libya in any of his leaks or interviews? I forget.
Yea, she leaked that the debate held in Flint, Michigan would talk about lead contamination in the drinking water, as if that wasn't super obvious.
Yes, it was a shitty move, she wasn't on high moral ground in my book in the first place. But why bring up the whataboutism? Lets agree that both Donna and Assange are political agenda driven partisans not deserving of respect? But it was never a secret with Donna, she was always heavily democratic and partisan and it's known to everyone. Meanwhile Assange tries superhard to appear non-partisan, even begging Trump Jr for some leaks so that he could fake being nonpartisan!
>Very unjournalistic of him! Real news organizations never play sides, or game the news cycle, or the political cycle.
So Assange is bad as Fox News or MSNBC now? I thought the hype about Wikileaks was how clean they were.
>For example: I'm confident someone just a happened to stumble upon the Access Hollywood tapes in some dusty archive right at the moment they were released, and no thought was given to timing.
So Wikileaks is the same as shitty media sources and not some saints out to change the world like 75% of ppl on here are saying?
Thanks for making my point.
The news media likes to pretend that there is a special status for news organizations and journalists. This is a common misconception that we need to fight against. The First Amendment is not just for news organization, it is for every US person. Back when the First Amendment was proposed and ratified, anyone could obtain a printing press. The First Amendment makes no distinction for a news organization or other publisher vs an ordinary citizen.
An example of new organizations trying to give themselves special status is Chris Cuomo assertion that if you were not a media organization it would be a crime for you to possess the Wikileaks emails.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/201...
> Is the WikiLeaks founder, who until Thursday had been holed up in the Ecuadoran Embassy in London for years, essentially a publisher — though a notably strange one — who believes in taking radical steps to expose government secrets, and who thus should be afforded the same First Amendment protections given to news organizations?
> Or is he a reckless traitor — and by no means a journalist — who deserves no such consideration and who should be prosecuted without worrying about free-press concerns.
Her rhetorical question allows for Assange, an individual, to be considered a publisher, i.e. a news organization. In the next graf, it's clearer she's framing the conflict as: "Is Assange a journalist and thus are his actions protected by the rights to a free press?". But I agree that the sentence you quoted could have been better stated as:
> and who thus should be afforded the same First Amendment protections given to journalists.
But I assume the reason why she said "news organizations" is because her intended audience are people who work at news organizations, i.e. they should be reading it as:
> and who thus should be afforded the same First Amendment protections given to you.
Now Manning? That was treason, arguably during a time of war. Once upon a time, that was a summary execution. Manning got off easy with the 35 year initial sentence and even easier after Obama commuted the sentence.
35 years was excessive sentencing for Manning’s conviction. Considering the volume and seriousness of conduct a sentence of 5-8 years would have been more appropriate as compared to other related convictions.
Manning may not have been convicted of treason, but it is obvious from the crimes Manning was convicted of, and the circumstances under which the crimes were committed, that treason was committed.
IANAL, but it seems to me that given the conviction they were able to get, prosecution could have easily gotten a treason conviction as well. Seems to me to have been more of a political play. Obama got a "win" in being tough on leakers of classified info, got a tough sentence, and then with a wink of the eye on the way out the door after 2 terms commutes the sentence (yes, not a full pardon).
Like I said, stinks of political interference and nothing to do about the totality of the crime(s) committed.
No, they were rather expensive pieces of equipment. You're better off with a town-cryer example, as anyone could stand on a corner and yell out the news (or their opinions) The town-cryer approach is like today's internet where anyone can throw up a blog. But the modern equivalent of a small printing press from a hundred years is still beyond the reach of most.
Is that the kind of "reams of data and pure info", "hard facts without color" that should be viewed as a "priceless resource for journalists"? Of course not. That's negligent exposure of people's private information, towards absolutely no public interest whatsoever, and causing much public harm.
http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2016/07/why-did-wikileaks-hel...
>“Strongly suggest your dad tweets this link if he mentions us,” WikiLeaks went on, pointing Trump Jr. to the link wlsearch.tk, which it said would help Trump’s followers dig through the trove of stolen documents and find stories. “There’s many great stories the press are missing and we’re sure some of your follows [sic] will find it,” WikiLeaks went on. “Btw we just released Podesta Emails Part 4.”
What a joke.
And propagating nonsense on the website.
https://our.wikileaks.org/Pizzagate
Leading to https://rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/john-pod...
I'm deeply conflicted about WL and Assange. I agree that a WL like org is needed for open democracy. but at the same time these fuckers were clearly working against democracy and in cahoots with the Russians.